DIY: SOS review: Adam's house gets turned into a home again
Baz Ashmawy with Adam, Brian and Mar Drummond on DIY SOS in Cork. Picture: Julien Behal Photography.
Making a home wheelchair-accessible is tricky by any stretch. But when this home is on one of Cork city’s northside hills – accessed by steep steps to the front and a sharp decline to the back – the challenges seem insurmountable.
This is the daunting task facing the team as the new season of DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland kicks off on RTÉ. The story of the almost impossible rebuild runs alongside the story of a devastating, profoundly life-changing accident and the heroic young man at the centre of this accident.
Adam Drummond, a 23-year-old former Irish International basketball player, fell from a height in May 2021 – there’s a one percent chance he’ll walk again. Through tears, Adam’s mum Mar recalls the first thing her son said when he saw her after the accident that severed his spine: “How am I going to get home Mammy? I won’t be able to get in home.”
As presenter Baz Ashmawy says: “It’s as human as the need for food… the need to have a place you can call home.” For Adam (the family has been living in a friend’s ground-floor apartment since the accident), that home is on Cork’s Redemption Road.
“Where there’s a will, there are warriors,” Ashmawy says. These warriors are the 1,100 volunteers who come on board during the nine-day rebuild to do what Adam’s mum is hoping for – make home easy for her son because “everything else is going to be harder”.
Among the volunteers are Jimmy, whose daughter grew up with Adam – and Liam whose youngest boys play basketball (“Adam was very helpful to them from when they were small”). Close family friend of the Drummonds, Brendan Duarte heads up the local build team.
The rebuild means installing two lifts – and a two-storey extension, digging under the house to do so. The warriors literally dig deep for the young man who, since the accident, has found depths within himself. Adam thinks about the accident multiple times daily.
“I can’t accept what the rest of my life is going to be but I’m getting on with it. The past year has been a year of grieving… but I’m getting there,” he says.
On the one-year anniversary of the accident, the Drummonds return – to a fully smart home with a getaway garden den for Adam (Diarmuid Gavin created “a little forest using birch trees, a retreat in the woods”). Stunned by the transformation, Adam says: “This is going to allow me be the new version of myself… [it’s] going to help me find that person”.
For the Drummonds, home has always meant more than mere bricks-and-mortar. Now it represents new hope, emerging from the ashes of an accident.
