What would you do?? Commute vs House size

Breaking news, other people have opinions too....

Btw, I didn't want to derail from your previous point on the commute time but the 24,000 mins a year of commuting = ~29 waking (14 hours) days

Why do some people from Dublin take such offence when someone says it’s not for them?

Breaking News, if you’re not a Dub you can take it or leave it, it’s pretty much how a Dub would feel about Limerick really.

Dont get me wrong there are some lovely places in Dublin but there are some absolute dangerous kips as well.

Good areas are all coastal and you will most for the privelage the death zone increases the further west you go. Dublin I’d more about east west than north south.

oh and you can have an amazing lifestyle in other parts of the country for a fraction of the cost of Dublin.

So all the 3-4-5 kid families who grow up in 200sqm houses are deprived?

Over 12 years its highly likely that the OP could upgrade to a bigger house in the same general area, so the kids wont have to worry about learning a new language or anything.

Differing opinions are fine, but nonsense scaremongering about big bad Dublin is ridiculous and deserves to be called out.

This thread wasn’t anything to do with Dublin until the last few posts. The OP has already clarified that neither of their options are in Dublin. The thread has been derailed by a member of the Anywhere But Dublin brigade.

Shorter commute for me as well. Being able to share drop offs and pickups takes a lot of pressure off.

Some days my wife needs to work late at the drop of a hat but its no issue as i can easily do pick up. And the same in reverse.

Ive done the hour commute each way and i thought it was fine. I realised after i switched to a 15 minute cycle what a huge difference it was. I got to have breakfast with the family in the morning, was home in time for dinner, was home when the kids arent exhausted and in a bad mood.

If we are talking about 70sqm versus 200sqm then it might be different but i doubt that is the cse.

This doesn't just come down to big house vs small house.

It's also a short commute to work vs a long commute to work. I've done the long commute and about a year ago I changed jobs and have a much shorter commute. While I was doing the long commute, it didn't seem too bad but in hindsight, I was spending the equivalent of two working days per week commuting to and from work. I wouldn't chose a job that had a long commute unless I had no other choice.

It's being close to family and friends or being far away from them. If you move an hour away from friends and family, you'll see them an awful lot less. In reality you'll pretty much lose touch with some of them.

Grandparents can help with children vs Grandparents who are too far away to help with children. With your job etc., how important is it to have them around to help with the children?

And you have to consider what will happen when your parents are older and might need your help more. My mother is 80, starting to slow up bigtime so I call in to her nearly every day to do stuff for her like bring in coal for the stove etc. What'll you do when it's your parents who need minding?

All that said, you still need space for your family. There's only myself and the wife and two dogs in a four bedroom house that's quite large and I love it. We lived in a one bedroom flat from 2008 to 2009 and it wasn't great. Wasn't room to fart in the place.

I don't envy your choice.

I suppose it wasn’t aimed at you, I lived in Dublin for many years and obviously some of my best friends are from Dublin, but not being from Dublin I never had a major connection with it, still don’t, but there is a certain type of Dubliner that if anyone comes on boards or other platforms, and says they’re thinking of moving out of Dublin, they go apopaleptic, wondering spent anyone could consider such a move, not every Dubliner I must stress.

It’s very odd, to the vast majority of people who moved to Dublin to get jobs, that’s all it is to them nothing morenothin* less a place they went to get a job, and if they could€ have got those jobs in Waterford, Galway, Limerick or Cork they more than likely wouldn’t have gone near Dublin, thanks to remote work a lot of towns and villages that were decimated by people moving to Dublin for work are coming back to life again. This is a good thing, and certainly good for people from Dublin if it frees up accommodation etc.

Just on the commute time. I used to commute form Glenealy to Sandyford a few years ago. That commute was horrendous. You would have to get up and be on the road at the crack of dawn if you didnt want to be in the car over an hour. And as for going home. if you werent on the road before 4pm you might as well wait until 7pm to leave. I dont know what its like now, but I doubt it has gotten any better.

Kids were asleep when I was leaving and asleep when i got home most days. Horrible life. Ive decided I will only work places max of an hour each way for a commute for me from here on in. And thats an hour on a train or something that is the same all the time. Not in a car where it change change by an hour from day to day depending on what is going on on the roads. And remember. The same commute only get longer as time goes on.

On the house size. I always thought a smaller house was fine, until we moved into a big house. You dont realize the difference it makes til you are living in one. But if you never moved into the bigger house, sure you would never notice.

I'd probably go smaller house, more convenient location.

Theres a lot you can do with even a small amount of space, for example having bench seating along the walls with storage in the benches opens up the full room area and great for storing all the kids toys etc., you can get ottomans that double as storage, you can create separate spaces/activity areas in the rooms with the right furniture, in the kids rooms there is a lot of innovative furniture out there to give them a bed plus desk plus seating area to relax in their own space without needing huge real estate.

We have quite a large garden and these months it may as well be a patio, never out there, even the dog refuses to go out these days! It's great in the summer that's the one thing that might sway me to move if forced to down size.

I was renting a 3,000 square foot house for a few years and I can tell you it felt like the kids were on top of me all the time, because they were, that's just kids! I'd say on average we used less than half the space in that house.

Shorter commute every time.

did a long commute when I lived in Paris.. ok it was public transport but I could never figure out why I was always so knackered come Thursday night… one of the thing’s was when working it out… walking to the metro, walking through to platforms and out the far side and to work.. was about 40 - 45 minutes walking all told per day, obviously at a pace. All adds up.

My personal experience...

I had a choice between an apartment in Dublin or a house outside it. I eventually bought a 3-bedroom house in Wexford, and I already regret it only 6 months later. It's not a bad house at all, but I have no connection to the place, and when I do need to go to the office, it's a 90 minute drive or a train. I'll probably sell up after the house is done up nicely, but we'll see.

OP, short commutes and being near your friends and family are worth far more than a bigger house.