In programme two Dermot is in Timahoe, Portlaoise with Dolores and Donal O’Connell. Their five children are all grown-up but still live in the area. Dolores loves having them all home regularly for big family get-togethers. However, their children now have partners and there’s five grandchildren so when everyone is back at home it’s totally crammed. The men end up congregating in the living room, the women and children in the kitchen-diner and Dolores gets stuck cooking in a back kitchen cut off from everyone.
Dolores and Donal call in Dermot because they fear that their family are going to start visiting in turns in order to avoid the overcrowding and alleviate the stress. Dermot has to find a way to get them all circulating in the same space and in order to do this he wants to build a new extension onto the existing living room.
Dolores’s 92-year-old uncle Paddy lives in the house too and he has to be taken into consideration also. Recently Paddy has been finding it difficult to get upstairs to his bedroom and the bathroom. So Dermot plans to change the kitchen-diner and back kitchen into a downstairs bedroom and bathroom for Paddy.
It’s a tall order given that Dolores and Donal budget stands at €60,000 and their house is a former jail with extremely thick walls. But Dermot has a plan. One of Dolores’s sons Benny is a builder and Dermot is hoping that if he can persuade Benny to bid for the job he might do his mum and dad a special ‘family’ deal.
Benny does agree to tender and wins the contract however now Dermot finds himself in an unusual position. Normally Dermot is the key decision maker, the designer, the project manager, the negotiator but this time it’s family. Will Dermot’s design be compromised as the build gets underway and the family make decisions that leave Dermot out of the loop?