Shay Lally has built a following of almost 70,000 on Instagram, where he shares home-renovation advice and highlights fixer-upper projects across Ireland
Quantity surveyor Shay Lally on property grants, up-and-coming areas and fixer-upper red flags
“My heart was always in the building game. My dad was a contractor, so I grew up on sites. I know it’s cringey, but my earliest memories are of my dad collecting me from school and bringing me to a site they were working on.
I came up with the idea for Houses to Restore in 2007, but there wasn’t really a platform for it. I trained as a quantity surveyor, and the idea came back to me a few times in the intervening years, then during Covid, there were similar accounts on Instagram and I thought, ‘I know I can do a better job’, which sounds terrible, but that’s just the truth.
source