Each day, Jake Boyd gets to work bright and early on his passion project in southern Co. Mayo.

Oregon native Jake first visited Ireland with his wife in 2007, travelling across the country for two weeks.

During their visit, they packed in as much as possible, and journeyed west to Connemara. Like most visitors to the region, Jake was struck by its beauty, and told his wife that he would come back to visit some day. 

His wife sadly passed away in 2016, and a few years later, he did exactly what he said he would back in 2007 – return to visit the West of Ireland. 

He stayed for a month, getting to know people in the local community, and he has been back many times since.

Jake’s passion project is a major renovation of a 120-year-old stone cottage in Finny, southern County Mayo, nestled in the valley between Lough Mask and Lough na Tooey.

Over the past few years, Jake has been blending “the old ways with the new”, carefully restoring its traditional features while transforming it into an energy efficient home.

And in a region where long-abandoned cottages are dotted across the land, he is also preserving a piece of Irish history – doing so in a tasteful and sustainable way.

The house was derelict, having been vacant for around a dozen years, but Jake knew exactly what he was getting into. That’s because the cottage in Finny isn’t his first renovation project – he previously transformed a wooden house built in the 1920s into a beautiful home for his family back in Oregon.

“It wasn’t bad. It almost looked like you could just paint it and move in, except for the mold. It had always had a good roof on it throughout the whole 120 years,” he says.

Although he’s not yet 67, Jake doesn’t believe that he’ll be around to see the project fully completed.

“My son will be the one finishing it,” he laughs from his sitting room in Oregon, which he has since departed once again to continue work on the cottage. “But I’d like to be able to live there in the next year. That’s what I’m working towards.”

He says that they are now pointing and plastering, and adding insulation, describing it as a ‘lifetime project’.

For Jake, working on the restoration is gratifying, akin to working on an art project of sorts. He says that when you’re working on a cottage, it almost tells you what has to be done. And while such an undertaking can seem overwhelming at first, he explains that it only takes about a half hour before you get into a rhythm.

“Before you know it, time kind of disappears,” he says. “You could work all day and it feels like you’ve been there an hour. You can see at the end of every day, exactly what you did, for better or worse. 

“I won’t say that there’s not a time that I look at it and think, ‘there’s so much work to do, I’m never going to get it done’. And then I’m like, ‘well, it’ll be alright’.”

Jake wants to generate his own electricity, incorporating renewables into his cottage while keeping its traditional aspects intact – “blending the new ways with the old” as he puts it.

His ambition is to have an array of solar panels and then live conservatively, adding that he is not big on mod cons.

“I think it would be money well spent to invest in that,” he says.

Jake also wants to consider selling electricity back to the grid and battery storage, and he plans to get an air to water heat pump for domestic hot water, and possibly wood pellets for domestic heat. 

His overall plan is to keep the cottage as eco-friendly as possible, but removing the wood burner from the main room seemed like a bridge too far. 

“I’ll stick a wood burner in the main room. There’s those old ways again – it just seems wrong not to have one there,” he says.

Despite having no Irish ancestry himself (his wife was of Irish descent), Jake speaks with a real grá for Ireland, its people and culture. What has truly resonated with him are the people in his local community, with many taking a keen interest in his project, and helping out when they can.

“The way people interact there reminds me a lot of where I grew up,” he says. 

“After purchasing the property, my neighbour and I adjusted some of the boundaries between our properties, so I needed to put up some fencing to isolate a drain field and to properly separate two fields.”

“I purchased 50 nice fence posts from a local mill, and hired a neighbour with a digger to help me set the posts.”

“When the time came to set the fencing, two of my new neighbours just showed up for two straight evenings, working from 6pm until 10 pm, after they had already spent the full day farming. They were a great help, we finished the fence in no time, and both refused any type of compensation for their time.”

Politicians from Ireland travelled far and wide promoting Irish culture last month for St. Patrick’s Day, but it is doubtful that any captured the essence of Ireland as accurately as Jake.

“On a cold, wet night, walking into a warm, cosy pub, with good craic going – there’s something special about that,” he says.