April and the Bear Blog
DIY Interiors

Portobello Part One

This is a blog about my April and the Bear store but it is also about homesinteriors and doing-it-yourself. And so begin the ramblings about my own experience while doing up my home in Portobello, Dublin … be warned it involves head wounds, bruised shins, fire engines and never-ending mountains of dust. Don’t let this deter you though – I want to encourage and help other not-so-handy individuals to throw caution to the wind and pick up that sledge hammer, but to do so with slightly bent knees and a hard hat firmly on your head.

My story of living in a skip started 2 years ago and in reality it’s not just my story, it also involves a man. OH MY. That I happen to live with and love and who has taught me so much about DIY, OH SCANDALOUS! We bought this particular house two years ago – after many years of looking, bidding, dreaming, crossing fingers and getting devastated a lot we found the one. To be honest, I did not think it was the one at first; just glance at the pictures below … see? It was a pine-covered nightmare zone, if it wasn’t covered in pine it was covered in slightly damp 1970’s fabric. But underneath it all, it was a good one.

Location? Portobello  CHECK!

Bedrooms? 3  CHECK!

Garden? 2  CHECK!

Granted you had to wade through brambles to uncover these facts but the bones of the house were solid and we knew that we could transform it into exactly what we wanted. We won the bidding war in July and got the keys on 23rd of December 2011 … yes, it took 6 months of waiting and the sooner you accept that EVERYTHING will take longer than you ever could imagine the better. The last owner had broken the house up into 3 tiny apartments and they were the most bizarrely shaped living spaces I have ever seen and I imagine not very nice to live in. We chose the least horrid one and basically settled in for the long haul. The plan was to live in one of the apartments while we knocked out and rebuilt the other two – slowly transforming it into our forever home. And this is that on-going story…

Part Two will be up on Thursday. 

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