On her forthcoming 40th birthday, Abi Dillon will be lazing on a beach on Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific, likely taking a dip in its surrounding turquoise lagoon.
She’ll be on the trip of a lifetime, celebrating a goal she set out to achieve with a small sum of money and a large degree of determination – to be mortgage-free by the age of 40.
“Financial independence, retire early”, often shortened to the acronym FIRE, is a school of thought that is gaining traction online. Dillon had never heard of it, “but it had been my goal all along, not to have any mortgage, a comfortable home and no debt,” she admits.
She hasn’t always demonstrated this degree of prudence, she says. She bought a cottage in Kilfountain, Co Kerry, about two miles outside Dingle, in 2015, but during her time there, she accrued some debts. This, coupled with the fact that the house she lived in there lacked basic creature comforts such as heating, prompted her to review her life.
“I used to be really bad with money,” she says. “I spent a lot of my life not having any money or not earning enough to get a mortgage. In Dingle, the lack of money was such a barrier to what I wanted to do to the place.”
It pushed her to leave, she says, to get more independent financially.
She had purchased that house for €70,000, using a gift of money from her mother and loans, and in 2020 she put it on the market. She had renovated most of it herself, spending about nine months sleeping in a van and using a builder’s porta-loo type toilet on the site and showering in friends’ homes. It sold for €130,000, below the asking price of €147,000 - but still, she had almost doubled her money.
This time round she ideally wanted a home that was insulated, warm and dry, searching all across Munster for it.
She found her next project, a two-storey stone cottage built circa 1910, along the Dunhallow Way, in the village of Ballydaly, Co Cork, between Millstreet and Rathmore. Extending to just 45sq m (484sq ft), a carbon copy of the Dingle property, with a G Ber rating, it was in a rural setting, with the nearest garage and shop about half a mile down the road.
While still searching, “I found four or five properties in the area that I liked”, she recalls, inviting her mum along to offer counsel.
The minute she spotted Larkrise, the name she gave the house, she knew she could do it up. “I had the experience,” she says. This was before the introduction of the vacant home grant, which happened in July 2022.
She put in an offer after the second viewing. The RTE TV series Cheap Irish Houses had filmed it for the show just the day before.
She paid €42,000 for the house just as Covid restrictions came into play, but before people started to depart the cities for country life in their droves, driving up the prices of such rural abodes.
After selling the house in Dingle and squaring off debts, which included credit cards and costs of running a shop in the town, and buying a car – essential in the countryside – she had about €50,000 to remedy the home. That’s a per square metre cost of about €1,111 – well below industry standards.
This time around she wanted new windows and new plumbing – luxuries that were beyond her in Dingle.
“I had to be very careful,” she recalls. “Most of it went on materials. I was doing a lot of the labour myself.”
€50,000 of a budget
The house had been disconnected from the ESB, so she needed a new connection, which she says took about a year to get done. She dealt with the issue by first hiring a generator, eventually buying it, and then selling it again once she had power.
This didn’t faze her at all. “I’m not used to living in 21-degree heated homes. I’ve spent a lot of time in caravans and camper vans, and the Dingle house was freezing. I lived in a mobile home without power for a year. I lived in a camper van without power for nine months.”
It was fine during the daytime, she says, and she tried to limit her electrical consumption for work to these hours. “In winter, it’s dark quite early. I went to bed early. I was tired from hard, physical work.” Occasionally, she watched a movie in bed on her laptop.
She toughed it out.
The house layout gave her three rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs, with the porch opening directly into the living room.
She hired someone to help strip the place out. The stairs handrail was taken out temporarily. There were ground works to create drainage needed outside. She hired sub-contractors for plumbing and electrics.
She sacrificed one of the downstairs rooms to give her a big bathroom, now home to a corner bath, and a separate large shower stall.
The house, which is of stone construction, is insulated to the max but is not airtight, she explains. “I didn’t have the money for a heat pump.”
She chose to get electric heating, something she isn’t 100 per cent sure was the right decision, but the only option within budget available to her in the remote countryside.
“I wanted to be oil and gas free,” she explains. There is also a solid-fuel stove. “If I put the stove on, most of the house is warm.”
“A lot of the design is hand-made and rustic,” she adds. For the mantle and fire surround she used two scaffold boards she bought from a reclamation yard and sanded down.
Dillon carried out all the interior insulation by hammering battens onto stone walls. In parts, including the gables, the insulation has been lined in timber repurposed from ceiling boards upstairs.
She used the lightest Kango she could find to remove the plaster off the same surfaces. She hired a belt sander for the floors upstairs and left the concrete floors at ground level as they were.
The money she had allowed her to invest in new uPVC black frame double-glazed windows and have a roofer replace the slates that were causing leaks. She learned that the roof needed some attention when she was already installed in her new home – watching the relevant episode of Cheap Irish Homes.
The roofer also put skylights into the two bedrooms upstairs. She uses one as a workshop-cum-office and as a guest bedroom when friends come to stay.
Back-breaking work, literally
“I’m self-taught,” she says. “After years of having an interest in DIY, my attitude is, ‘I’ll have a go.’ I’m fairly confident with carpentry in a very rustic way – that’s my style.”
She was also strong and really fit, she says.
This approach to such a project comes with some really big caveats, however. In May 2023, with renovations largely complete, she had an accident. Whilst doing a small job, treating a patch of woodworm in the upstairs floorboards, she slipped down the stairs. Oily woodworm treatment had rubbed off on the soles of the runners she happened to be wearing instead of her usual steel-toe work boots, required under construction industry standards.
Four steps down, her feet slipped out from under her. She fell onto her back and bumped down the stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom.
“I knew something was wrong, but I foolishly ignored my gut instinct. After 20 minutes I was able to move a little and crawled up the stairs to bed. I thought it would be okay in a week or so. I was in agony, [with] shooting pains up my back if I even brushed against something.”
Time passed but it wasn’t healing, so she went to the doctor. After examinations and subsequent tests, she discovered she had a fractured T6 vertebrae, bruised spinal cord, broken back ribs and a bruised coccyx. The physio told her she was lucky not to have ended up in a wheelchair.
Because she hadn’t phoned an ambulance and been treated straight away, her spinal fracture healed incorrectly. She now has mild chronic back pain all the time.
The original staircase is still in situ, its treads are now carpeted, and the handrail is back in place. “It is much safer now,” she says.
It is a cautionary note in the tale, but does not take away from the fact that through grit, hard work and dogged determination, Dillon has managed to do what most of us can’t– and that is own a home unencumbered by debt, before her milestone 40th birthday.
What counsel does she have for anyone thinking of doing a similar project? “Be prepared for curveballs and to really work hard,” she says.
“It was worth it in the end,” she says. “The satisfaction of having a nice house that is mine by 40 is really rewarding. I don’t have any savings, but I don’t have any debt either.”
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