It has been over two months since Daniel and Majella O’Donnell’s famous episode of Room to Improve. While the Donegal couple has happily settled into their redesigned Kincasslagh home, there have been more groundbreaking insights revealed about the show.
Quantity Surveyor Lisa O’Brien has this week announced her departure from the property series. The decision to leave was amicable, she said, as she pursues a new career venture. However, the job was not without its stressful moments, and that Daniel O’Donnell budget reveal scene in Bundoran was Lisa’s personal worst.
Lisa was the unlucky person who had to deliver the bad news about Daniel’s expanding budget troubles. Their home upgrade cost sky rocketed from €200,000 to almost €400,000. You can see in the video clip below how Daniel wasn’t best pleased. It was the moment where Daniel demanded some ‘chiselling and hammering’ to get the budget back to a number he liked.
“That was the worst day of my Room to Improve life,” Lisa revealed to the Sunday Independent.
“The week the tenders went out, I thought, ‘I’ll get a nice load of tenders back’, and only three out of eight replied. It was a high-profile build, so a lot of contractors were like, ‘Ooh, I don’t know about that,” she said.
Lisa shared a behind the scenes take on the realistic aspect of the project, and her panic at confronting the Donegal celebrity couple with some dream-shattering figures:
“I was doing a tender analysis when I got my tenders back on the Friday, and I got a call saying that Daniel was going to Canada to tour for a number of months and we had to sit down and present our budget on Sunday. I did an all-nighter to get my analysis done in time.
“We didn’t have much time to go through the budget in the end, and we didn’t get a chance to sit with him and say, ‘It’s OK, we have this under control.’ It was more like ‘wham bam’.
“When we got that reaction, I was sitting there squeezing Dermot’s knee, thinking, ‘Oh s***’. In the end, of course, it all worked out.”
In the end, Daniel and Majella were left with a stunning bright and spacious home with unspoilt views of Donegal’s beautiful landscape. For us viewers, Lisa and Dermot’s budget stress left us with a priceless moment of comedy: