Alan Molloy and his partner Sharon Daly didn’t have to look further than the field next to Alan’s family home in Co Down for a place to build their family home. There was an old farm steading Alan had played in as a child and it was, naturally, close to his heart.
Following successful negotiations with the farmer to buy the old farmhouse with its outbuildings, Alan duly applied for outline planning permission for a replacement dwelling. It doesn’t take much imagination to know how Alan felt, two weeks after lodging the application, when he came down the lane one morning and found the dust settling on a digger which had just finished demolishing the farmhouse! Enquiries revealed that the farmer had sold the stone in the farmhouse to someone else three years previously. Fortunately the planners were reasonable, Alan and Sharon got their permission to build and there was enough stone left in the outbuildings for what they needed in the new house.
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