Home Rescue dream team help widow who lost husband and son to cancer

THE last decade has been a difficult one for Monica Brady, after losing both her husband Dick and her son Richie to cancer.

Since the late 1980s, Monica, a long time employee of the Savoy cinema on O’Connell Street, has lived in a three-bed semi at Swords in north Dublin – where she and Dick raised their three children.

The property features in the next episode of Home Rescue: The Big Fix on RTÉ2 on Thursday, April 25, at 9.35pm.

Since she lost her husband a decade ago, Monica hasn’t slept in her own bedroom, instead bedding down on the sofa every night, and over the years, the house has become hopelessly cluttered with charity shop bargains and legacy furniture.

Despite the efforts of daughter Michelle and granddaughter Gemma, who have tried helping her in the past, self-confessed ‘shopaholic’ Monica’s growing collection of clothes and bric-a-brac has taken over every room.

Famed for her coddle, Monica loves to cook for the family but – with no space to sit in the chaotic kitchen – she has to send them all off with takeaway containers.

Determined to restore Monica’s home as an ‘open house’ for the whole family, designer Dee Cole-man envisages a u-shaped, ‘diner-style’ kitchen and a total makeover for the currently unused inaccessible bedroom upstairs.

With one supporting wall to remove, a structural steel beam to install, a brand-new kitchen to fit and the tricky job of reusing wardrobes and building a bespoke window seat around a radiator – time is on no-one’s side!

As, Dee, Peter Finn, and the build crew tackle the seemingly endless challenge of stripping multiple layers of tenacious wallpaper, the painters, carpenters and carpet fitters are forced to wait – none of which bodes well for the grand opening of ‘Monica’s Diner’!