About

Our Story

Welcome to our blog regarding all things home renovation. First let me introduce ourselves. My name is Eve & with the help of my husband Martin, baby Matthew & Theo the cockapoo, we are one year into our home renovation in the countryside of Thurles, Co. Tipperary. Like many people currently in the midst of the Irish housing crisis, we have spent many years searching for our forever home. We began our search at the end of 2019, and like many people in their late 20s, we weren’t prepared the carnage Covid would leave in its stead when it came to being a first time buyer.

We were originally hellbent on building our dream home. Martin is an Architectural Technologist by trade & I have always adored all things design. We approached every landowner within a 10 miles radius with little to no success. A year in, we decided it might be time to look at properties and find a project we could sink our teeth into and hopefully flex some of our skills & ideas. We spent many, many nights scrolling through daft.ie to find ‘the one’, only to realise very quickly that some properties could go up in the evening & have outlandish bids on them by morning without anyone even viewing it. With a wedding to pay for & a desire to never have a mortgage that meant we couldn’t afford a holiday or not be able to replace a broken dishwasher without emptying a meagre savings account, we decided on a max price we were willing to pay for a property & the amount we would spend to make it our own.

After we had all but given up, enter April 2023. 4 months pregnant & panicking over the cramped rental property we had, a home we had had our eye since Christmas dropped its price tag. We bit the bullet & went for a viewing. There was definitely some things that scared me – large cracking in the walls, no bathroom to speak of & a lot of yellow walls. But with Martin’s knowledge we decided it was worth investigating. Martin believed it was settlement cracking, but got a structural engineer to confirm this for us. We put an offer in & the following morning it was excepted. We couldn’t believe it!

From there, I divided into the spiral that is paint samples, fabric swatches, ‘wouldn’t that be a fab bedspread’ & Martin took on the more important jobs of filling the cracks, building us a bathroom, relocating the well pump house amongst many others. We managed to get the keys at the beginning of August 2023, move in mid September & by the end of September our little man was born.

It has been a rollercoaster of a year between a full renovation project & becoming parents for the first time. If you’d like to see more of my ideas & designs and hear more on Martin’s practical projects, you can follow us on Instagram or read our weekly blog here at studiomoore.ie for more in depth details. So many of our rooms are half way done, but with a lot more to be done we’d love you to follow along with us!