Saturday with Pete the Builder: 'The place I’d love most to be is in the Aran Islands'
Peter Finn aka Pete The Builder is co-presenter of Home Rescue. Catch up on the latest series, Home Rescue: The Big Fix, on the RTÉ Player.
I usually get up at around 7.30am on a Saturday. The first thing I do is have a warm breakfast. Then I make my lunch and head out the door.
I usually work on a Saturday morning. I’ll be gone by 8am. I try to get my day’s work done as early as possible as usually I have a sports event with the kids that I need to attend in the afternoon.
The job can entail a lot of travel — especially if I’m working on Home Rescue.
In terms of my normal work with my company MDS Construction, I will head straight to the job I’m working on and get the lads set up.
We try to get the quieter or more sensitive jobs (such as laying floors) done on a Saturday when there are fewer other tradespeople around.
At the moment we are at the finishing stages of a really nice domestic project along the canal in Naas — Saturday is an ideal day to get the flooring down when there are fewer people around. We’ll grab a bite of lunch around 12 noon.
We’ll aim to finish up work at 1pm at which point I’ll head straight to meet my wife Sharon and kids at some park or other.
I have three beautiful daughters — Meisha, 12, Emma, 10, and Holly, 8.
They play Gaelic football, do gymnastics, and drama so on a Saturday myself and my wife might have to be at two different matches at two different times and two different locations.
Ideally, if they’re close together, myself and my wife will try to attend both matches together but invariably we will have to split up.
If we’ve been in different locations we will all meet up in some cafe afterwards.
We’ll have a coffee and the girls will have hot chocolate and a treat and we’ll have a chat about how it all went.
We’ll get back home and potter around doing bits and pieces around the house. We live in quite a rural location and are really lucky — if we turn right we’re in Wicklow and if we turn left we’re in Kildare — so we spend a lot of time outdoors going for walks and so on.
If we weren’t at home on a Saturday the place I’d love most to be is in the Aran Islands.
I might try to go for a walk or a jog in the afternoon if I have time but normally I train at 6am most days during the week.
We like to have a cheat day on a Saturday. We will usually get a Chinese takeaway from our local in Saggart.
I’m not a vegetarian but we’ll usually order a vegetable curry with fried rice, noodles and spring rolls — sometimes with a chicken satay on the side.
Once they hear my voice on the phone the staff can nearly quote my order to me as it rarely changes week to week!
We like to have a movie night together on a Saturday — we’ll all watch something and cuddle up together — probably a kids movie we’ve seen plenty of times before.
The kids will go to bed between 8.30pm and 9pm and then myself and Sharon will have some time to ourselves.
We’ll watch something on RTÉ, Netflix or Amazon Prime — we recently watched the Yellowstone series and The Terminal List.
We are big movie fans too so we might stick on a movie that’s made it to the streaming services.
We might go for a couple of drinks in the local pub once every three weeks or so but unless we have some kind of event with family or friends on we generally take it easy on a Saturday night because we like to make the most of our day with the kids on a Sunday which is our jam packed family day when we hang out together.
I’ll head to bed around midnight.
During the week I’m in bed a bit earlier as I’m up earlier. I sleep well at night because I squeeze so much in during the day.
I really look forward to my sleep on a Saturday night as I know I’ll get an extra hour or two in bed on Sunday morning.
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