Any regular followers of my Twitter stream will see a multitude of schoolrun photos, photos from our regular walk; in fact stacks of photos of the gorgeous landscape we live within (apologies if they bore you btw). And it got me thinking of the number of other sites we looked at before we bought our own piece of Ireland and self-designed/built our own house.

The answer is quite a lot. It then got me thinking about the house that got built on these ‘other’ sites. Some of them quick visits, some of them we had picnics on with our kids (when very small) and some of them we very nearly bought; in fact one of them we shook hands on and solicitors were in place to exchange contracts. You have to remember that our search for a nice site went back many years (probably 10+ in total), in fact our oldest who is now 16 would be able to spot a ‘Site for Sale’ sign at a great distance, from a moving car.

So, the photos below are the houses that got built on the sites we didn’t buy, if you are the owner of them and are offended that your house is included here, let me know and I’ll remove it. The purpose of this post isn’t to denigrate the houses but simply to show a period of houses that would have been built during the Celtic Tiger days. In fact, any derogatory comment will not be shown.

By the way, I didn’t design any of the houses shown below (except obviously our own at the end), so if any of the architects are offended in any way then the same goes as above. I’m not going to give any locations and the images are simply shown ‘as is’ with no captions; suffice to say that all those shown below are in Mayo and are all reasonably close to where we ended up. These are only a small percentage of those that we saw and our site visits ranged from Blacksod Bay on one side (Belmullet) to Dromore West on the other (County Sligo).

A lot has changed a lot in the period of us buying our site and building our house;residency rules are tougher and I doubt if we’d even be able to build our house now. There are ways around this with replacement houses and extending existing dwellings and if you are on the lookout to build a new house and would like to discuss this further then please CONTACT ME.

I’d also like to quote Frank Lloyd Wright on the recipe for a modern house:

“First pick a good site.
Pick one at the most difficult site-
Pick a site no one wants-
but pick one that has character:
Trees, individuality,
A fault of some kind in the realtor mind”

If I drive by any more (and there was a lot more), I will photograph and add them!…