Would you swap a front door that opens directly onto O'Connell St for a six-hour round trip commute and a 100-year-old farmhouse?
That's exactly was Leitrim woman Martha Gilheaney did, and for the past few months her social media videos about making the move have been racking up hundreds of thousands of views.
"A lot of people don't believe me", she says of her time spent living on Dublin's iconic thoroughfare, in a striking rented apartment above one of the street's most popular bars.
"I saw it all there because I was there during Covid", she tells me over the phone.
"I loved it there. I felt incredibly lucky to have that apartment because it's also a beautiful apartment because it was a bank originally. I loved the fact that I could walk everywhere. I never had to take public transport.
"Everything was very easy in a way, but also difficult."
Grocery shopping became an exhausting ordeal, hiking her "grannie trolley" of shopping up a winding marble staircase. "It wasn't the safest place", she adds.
Having spent over 20 years away from her hometown in Leitrim - "Longer away than in Leitrim!" she says - Gilheaney, who works as a lecturer in Dublin's CCT College, made a snap decision to relocate last year, a choice that even she has a hard time putting into words.
"It's very hard to explain. I can't explain it to myself."
"I saw the house and I fell in love with the house. And for the first time in my life, I thought maybe I could buy a house because the price was good, and I loved it, and it was close enough to my family.
"But everything was out of order. I was bidding on the house before I knew, how will this work with my job? Because my job's in Dublin, and I can't find that job in Leitrim. I was bidding on this house, and I didn't have a driver's licence or a car, and you couldn't get to this house without a car. And I didn't look at any other house. I didn't compare prices. I didn't shop around. So the house drove the process."
But, she adds: "Everything worked out really easily, actually. So if you believe in that thing, it was almost like it was meant to be."
Gilheaney is firmly in the renovation stage of her house move, bringing her 100-year-old farmhouse and 5.2 acres of land into the 21st century with a much-needed revamp, but the early days of her journey sound like a baptism by fire into the homeowning world.
"I didn't even know any of these terms. None of this had been on my radar at all", Gilheaney says. "So I had to Google what's a mortgage broker? What do they do? Do you have to pay them?"
In her first conversation with a broker, she was told she'd never get a mortgage, as she didn't have a full time work contract. "I was upset, obviously, for a few hours. And then I thought there's a way around this."
She says it was thanks to the Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant that she has been able to bring her vision of living in an old farmhouse to life. The grant, which awards up to €50,000, was topped up by €20,000 as the house was deemed derelict.
Now fully moved out of Dublin - a hugely emotional moment that she compared to the end of Sex and the City - and living with her mum while renovations continue, Gilheaney has been keeping for 14,000 followers (and rapidly climbing) updated on the process, which has cut right to the heart of a familiar debate: city vs country.
Nowhere is this more fervent than when conversation turns to her six-hour round-trip commute to work, three days a week - something Gilheaney says she actually adores.
From her perspective, Gilheaney is "seeing an awful lot of this movement and desire towards that more peaceful, connected to nature type of life", she says.
"A few years ago, everyone was talking about the hustle culture and the coffee culture and the mad work grind. And now I'm seeing things like cute little images of hedgehogs in their burrows drinking tea with tea cosies. And they're like, this is the life I want."
She explains that, like many people who live outside the cities, moving away from home at 18 was "just a given" for her.
"You move away from your family and you move into awful accommodation and you spend years in awful accommodation, living with all sorts of random people. But now, because I'm from there, I get to go back there and I have connections there and I have roots there. So I feel like I've got the best of everything at the different stages in a way."
As for Gilheaney's design vision for inside the house? She says it will be all things "vintage and antique".
"I'm going to be looking for a lot of nice old second-hand furniture. It's already started. I spent so much time now on done deal and adverts and all that thing. But I wanted to be also bright and I wanted to be cosy and I want to have lots of nice colour and things like that. No minimalism from me."
