Building a home in the west of ireland

[An Gaeilgoir]

The secret to planning in Mayo is twofold... get an architect to submit your plans to the council, it will be worth the money. Then send in plans for a two/three bed very basic bungalow with velus windows in the roof. When you get planning on this...then submit change of house type, put in any size house you want,although it will have to be based on your original design. With the velux windows the precedence is set for your upstairs... the velux windows are never to scale on drawings so you can put in whetever size you want when you get round to building the house. This is a bit time consuming i know but it definitely workss (allegedly)

[ludermor]

http://www.mayococo.ie/en/Planning/SearchPlanning/

Mannix
have a look on the link above for all the planning applications for mayo for the last 8 years, it should give you a good idea of what you can get away with in different parts of the county. You can also search by 'agents' ( the people who apply for planning on behalf of people) and see who has the most success in your area . What part of the country are you planning on building?
There has been an unbelievable downturn in costs the last 6-12 months so there is unreal value to be had ( some polish lads laying blocks for 60c at the minute!)
Be wary of paying for everything in cash as revenue can audit you and they have started spotchecks in rural areas so it might be safer to pay some of bigger supplier cheques etc for a bit of traceback.

[the Deel Rover]

underfloor heating,

was the underfloor heating expensive An Gaeilgoir ?

[Gaoth Dobhair Abu]

underfloor heating,

was the underfloor heating expensive An Gaeilgoir ?

I've been told by a friend that got underfloor heating in, that it's bloody expensive to run, and the heat takes ages to build up!

[Hound]

underfloor heating,

was the underfloor heating expensive An Gaeilgoir ?

I've been told by a friend that got underfloor heating in, that it's bloody expensive to run, and the heat takes ages to build up!

No doubt that underfloor heating is expensive to run. If you'd have the heating on all day anyway, then underfloor is probably more efficient than rads. However if there's nobody home during working hours then rads are far more efficient.

I built a nice 3000 sqft house in Dublin, for more than double the cost lads have been talking about here!

[GaillimhIarthair]

Built a 3000 sqft house in Galway (near Oranmore) for 285K two years ago.  That was very much during the height of the building boom so I have no doubt 50K could easily be knocked off that right now. 

[An Gaeilgoir]

underfloor heating,

was the underfloor heating expensive An Gaeilgoir ?

I just put the underfloor in on the ground floor. I got the whole system put in for 3k. The secret of the underfloor is to ensure that each room is on its own circuit and has its own stat fitted. If the house is well insulated under floor heating is no more expensive to run than ordinary heating. Plenty of insulation under the floor screed is a great help as well. I find the underfloor excellent and hace carpets,timber and tiles covering the floors and it works perfectly. The beauty of it is that each room's heat can be set individually as per it's use. Once the concrete floor is warmed up the underfloor uses very little heating to keep it ticking over. I would also recommend leaving some pipework outside the house incase you wanted to change the system over to geo-thermal in the future. At the moment the geo-thermal is very expensive to run as the heat exchanger needed uses some amount of electricity. I am using the oil at the moment.