Who are we?
Who are we? Well, sometimes we are not sure ourselves but for those of you who don’t already know us. We are Steve and Diane Brooke. (Ecogeek & Fizzywitch)
We originate from Wakefield and Leeds respectively. We sold up in Leeds and moved to Ireland in 2005.
We met in 2000 via the internet! We got engaged on Halloween that year and married on Halloween in Northern Ireland in 2006. We do tend to like Halloween!
We live in NE County Galway. We love animals and try to provide a loving happy home for all our creatures.
How we got here
The House.
Well, ARGHHHHHHH!
To put it in terms for you the reader to understand have you ever seen the sort of horror film where there is a house on its own which you know you should never go into?
The type of house that children run past screaming?
Well that’s the type of house we bought!
It was bleak, cold, damp, dirty; filled with bugs, no proper heating, draughty, leaky windows and they were just the good points!
But before we even managed to get the keys to house we had a really traumatic move!
Unfortunately our love of the laid back attitude of the Irish did not extend to the laid back attitude of our solicitor.
On the ferry on the way over we still did not know that the solicitor had messed up and did not have everything signed like he had previously told us. Far from it, the contracts had not been exchanged and the old woman who lived in the house was still there!
We ended up arriving at our destination with our truck full of furniture, a car full of cleaning stuff, kettle, cat and dog and nowhere to go.
The rain lashed down and it was 5 p.m. I just could not believe things could go this wrong.
We phoned out auctioneer who had sorted us out with the house and after a few minutes one of his hired help showed us to some stables that the auctioneer owned and we deposited our whole life that had been packed into boxes into 2 stables.
There were no locks and the place was in the middle of nowhere, but we had no choice, in it all went.
We were then shown to a B&B where we stayed for 5 nights and then onto a rented house for a couple of weeks. We slept on a leaky airbed, did our clothes washing in a sink and basically had a nightmarish 3 weeks of stress from the solicitor messing up. We eventually managed to sort things out and the strange old woman moved out of the house and we moved in.
Day one,
Steve went to the shop for cleaning supplies and bug sprays and I sat on an upturned plastic bucket in the empty house and cried, wondering what the hell we had been thinking of?
I then saw the biggest earwig I have ever seen run across the floor in the kitchen. I found a cup to cover it with until Steve returned but it wouldn’t fit beneath it. I eventually found something large enough and left it there for an inspection from the hubby!
Thoughts crossed my mind that it may have been genetically modified in some way or maybe it had consumed the old woman but eventually put it down to it probably lived on all the feckin’ woodlice in the house!
Bit by bit we moved every piece of furniture and every box we had from the stables to our house in a Citroen Berlingo!
Our money rapidly ran out as we spent so much on repairs, electrics, flooring etc.
We had planned to continue to make our money selling antiquarian books online as we had done as a hobby in the U.K. but we had no idea about the Irish telephone company’s slow, slow response to new customers needs and they had no intention of rushing to fit us with a phone line.
After about 6 weeks the phone line was in but it was a good six months before it worked properly.
With often having no phone line and the chance of broadband less likely than us winning the lotto when we never buy a ticket we gave up on the book sales.
Steve had started up as a computer technician and gradually built up a client base.
It took a good two and a half years before our finances improved enough for us just to be able to get by!
In March 2007 we decided enough was enough, we could not keep up to the 1 acre of grass around the house never mind the 7 behind it! We put the house on the market so we could sell and buy a new house on half an acre.
Needless to say the nosey holiday makers drifted in and out through the summer.
We spent numerous days scrubbing the house from top to bottom for the prospective buyers only to discover they were here on holiday and just browsing! Whatever happened to potential buyers being screened!
We finally had an English woman come over to see our house and she put in an offer we were happy with so we accepted. We heard nothing for a week, the auctioneer was frantically trying to get hold of here by every means possible to see where her 10% deposit was? He finally found out a week later that she had, in that short space of time, come back over to Ireland and bought something else instead!
Gee, thanks!
The auctioneer wasn’t keen to pass on the news so he made his wife ring us. Much to their amazement our response was “oh well, if it’s not meant to be”.
So that is the start of yet a new episode in our lives, things changed once again from there.
The animals came in two’s and three’s…….
Miraculously finances became a little easier and we had a donated ride on lawn mower so we went to work on the grass!
Trees were chopped down, grass cut, weeds, nettles and brambles strimmed, fences erected and gates fitted.
The woman we were helping out at the local cat sanctuary gave us her chickens and a couple of arks as she had to re-home them due to the amount of work she had taken on with the cats, so we were sorted for free eggs.
Then we visited the local ISPCA and took a couple of ponies that had been mistreated but had recovered, yippee, we will have useable fields too!
Then we found out about some Billy goats needing homes so they were housed in the cottage end room that Steve had made into a stable. They had the cottage garden all to themselves. We originally thought that they would keep down the brambles, nettles and such. Well, we still have plenty of them but our apple tree, clematis and other fruit trees are well pruned back thanks to the boys!!
We did start off with 3 Billy’s but one was so malnourished and full of lice when we got him that he died despite our constant hand rearing, he was just too weak to survive.
Next came The turkey, the ISPCA asked us to take him and we obliged.
“He was a pet” we were told. Like feck he was!
He had had a fractured leg and he was starting to recover, so into the shed he went with his own little garden next to the chickens.
Once he started being able to get around he gained more confidence, so much so he now chases us around the garden trying to peck us!
Then came the rooster to cheer up the lonely hens. Well he certainly did that! They are now so busy trying to attract Rudi's attention that they have almost forgotten about laying eggs!!
Then the ducks came along, for no other reason than we fancied having a few big eggs for a change. We thought that selling some eggs would help pay for the feed for the chickens. Obviously with Rudy about there was no chance of surplus eggs now! and so far, we haven't had a single egg from the ducks although they have managed to trash the lettuce and cauliflower that we'd planted!!
This is the house now by the way :o)
Photos
