TRAVEL TALES:Serendipity involved in restoring Irish cottage

In the summer of 2002, my wife and I decided to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary with a 30-day trip to Ireland. My wife selected for this visit not the usual bed-and-breakfasts, which one finds everywhere in Ireland, but instead, three charming self-catering houses in rural areas in County Clare and County Tipperary.

The first thing I noticed about this part of Ireland was that it resembled the rural area of western Pennsylvania where I had grown up. The second thing was that the people we met in the small towns were warm, friendly and gracious, and during the days that we spent in each location, it was not difficult to feel welcome.

One of our favorite pastimes — and one which gave us plenty of opportunity to see the countryside — was searching out run-down, old derelict Irish cottages. We would visit a local real estate broker and leave with several pages of photos and the addresses of old houses in various states of distress — some described only as a “house-shaped mound.”

With just a few days left of our stay in Ireland, and certainly with no intention of buying property there, we came across an old cottage in a lovely valley in Northern County Tipperary, near the small village of Portroe, not far from the Shannon River and Lough Derg.

What we found there was a steel-roofed shell of a stone cottage on a half-acre of very muddy and littered ground, completely overgrown with brambles, nettles and thistles. We immediately fell in love with the place.

We made an offer to the seller, it was accepted, and three days later we were back in California, rather amazed at what we had just done.

I was retired, and my wife is a professor at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa. We planned to return to Ireland in May 2003 to begin restoring the property we had so unexpectedly acquired in the summer of 2002.

I must admit I was wondering whether upon our return we might find that we had less enthusiasm for the project than we had originally felt.

Our tentative plans upon our return included the purchase of an inexpensive used automobile and an inexpensive mobile home, which would be placed on the lot as a place to live while the work on the cottage proceeded over subsequent summers.

We arranged to stay in the same self-catering cottage that we had stayed in the previous summer for the time it would take until the mobile home was delivered.

But first we needed to prepare the site for the “caravan,” as the Irish call small mobile homes. That was when we experienced our first frustration with getting work done as promised. It is true that work promised is always done, but it is also true that the work is never done when promised. The mobile arrived soon enough but it was several weeks before the fellow with the bulldozer showed up to prepare the site, thus requiring an extended stay at our rental cottage.

That’s when we experienced the first of many serendipities that made our “Irish cottage project” a pleasant experience.

We had been told that it might take several years for water to be brought to our area from the village. Our neighbors had water wells, and even in Ireland with all its rain, drilling for water was not always a sure thing. We might drill and fail to hit water, and drilling for water was not inexpensive.

So you can imagine our delight when just a few days after the mobile home arrived at our property we saw water pipes being laid along our road and past our driveway.

Within a week we had available water and were told that except for a modest “hook-up” fee, there would be no charge for water as long it was not used for agricultural purposes.

Fortunately, there was still electricity connected to the cottage, and with the small, 10-foot-by-25-foot mobile home finally in place, I was able to connect the water, power and eventually propane gas.

We spent our first summer cleaning and clearing the property. More than that, though, we discovered that we did indeed have a real love for the place, and that first working summer in Ireland was the happiest summer we had ever known.

Returning in May 2004 — this time planning to stay for 12 weeks — the very first thing I bought was a do-it-yourself guide to everything you could possibly need to know about refurbishing a property in Ireland. With book in hand, I began to create a real home within the stone and steel shell of our 200-year-old Irish cottage.

Working on a modest budget and doing all the work myself, by the summer of 2005 we were able to move out of the mobile home and into the cottage.

Much work remains to be done. There are more stone walls to build and landscaping to be completed.

One of those serendipities that I mentioned earlier was that when we bought the property in 2002, there was parity between the dollar and the Euro.

Add to that a rapidly rising property market in Ireland — where even rural properties such as this one have become more expensive to buy — the fact is that we probably could not have afforded to buy property in Ireland after 2002.

If you would be interested in viewing any of the several short videos that I made showing some of the work of the past four summers on our Irish cottage, search for “popartusa” on YouTube.

BOB LEONARD lives in Costa Mesa.

TRAVEL TALES runs on Thursdays. Have you, or has someone you know, gone on an interesting vacation? Tell us about your adventures in about 400 words, accompanied by a couple of photos that do not have the Daily Pilot in them, and send it all to Travel Tales, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626; by e-mail to dailypilot@latimes.com; or by fax to (714) 966-4679.