Has your current house made you reconsider any interior wants/needs?

[caddywally]

Not the catchiest title, but have any of you really wanted a house with a certain feature ... until you actually live in a house with that feature and realise it's a pain in the arse?!

For me it's wooden floors - they're cold, I've had more than a few splinters in my feet, and I find carpets so much easier to keep looking clean. It seems no matter how much I clean, my floors always look tatty because of the old wooden floorboards. I wanted "character" before I moved into this house, but now I just want an almost clincal white/grey box that looks neat with minimal effort.

I like our 1970s house. It has decent sized rooms and windows, there's a separate dining room and a downstairs bathroom/upstairs loo.

We've extended it so the silly layout is better (there used to be a long dark corridor leading to the downstairs bathroom) and stuck in underfloor heating for the bathroom and kitchen. And it no longer has the original kitchen or pink bath .

I wouldn't do light grout on the kitchen floor again, and I'd like a utility room that's in the house, not in the garage. Bifold doors are ok, but actually sliding doors would be better. Ours took ages to settle, jammed loads to start with and had to be adjusted on more than one occasion.

Next time I will want all the bedrooms to be at least a foot wider (minimum 7ft wise for a single and 10 for a double) our current bedrooms are really awkward for comfortably fitting and he actual bloody beds and wardrobes etc in.

I'd also like a downstairs loo and kitchen big enough to fit a table. Open plan kitchen dinner would be fine though I think as long as its not all open plan (too cold)

Belfast sink had it in my last house. Lovely to look at, chipped every plate, cup and bowl I owned though!

Have an Edwardian property, love it but big sash windows which are cold & expensive to double glaze. Cold in general & slightly uneven floors/doors etc Like the look of wooden floors but prefer them covered with rugs. 2 things I don’t like but had growing up & were very practical, enclosed porch (pram storage, wellies, security etc) & a bidet (handy with babies & toddlers).

We have wooden floors through most of the house and have no splinters anywhere. Have yours been properly sanded and sealed ?

We love our floors. Our DD has just bought her first flat and the one luxury she splashed out on was getting the wooden floors sanded in the living room and kitchen. Looks fab.

Another one for sash windows. Beautiful but fecking freezing in winter. And we live in a conservation area - we’re planning to replace them but got quotes of £25,000 to do it.

I have a 1970s house- love the size of rooms, the doors between rooms, big windows and have learned to love the huge bath, even if the colour is awful.

I’d never get a towel warmer which runs off the central heating again. It’s big, so warms the room even with towels on it; however, it doesn’t warm up unless the heating is on (obviously!) so in autumn and spring it isn’t warm enough to dry towels naturally but too warm for the heating. There are 6-8 weeks when the towels always feel damp. We have to remember to put them in the airing cupboard. To be fair, this is compounded by DS swimming competitively which doubles the towel usage (at least) in the house.

Should give an honourable mention to my airing cupboard. I use it a lot! My friend who moved into a house without one mourns the loss daily.

Loved the big kitchen when we viewed the house and had visions of parties with everyone gathering around.

That's exactly what happens and it's a total pain in the arse! Having to say "excuse me" five times just to get to my oven is annoying.

Despite the kitchen being 3.5m x 3.5m it's very poorly designed so I have a patch of worktop of around 0.5m to do any food prep.

When we get around to it I'll be knocking through the kitchen in the dining room so I can chuck guests out of the kitchen area and removing the existing useless breakfast bar that only the cat uses which wastes a whole wall of potential valuable storage and worktop space.

I moved this year and really love my new house, after only living in crumbling listed houses I have a relatively new house in a period style, I haven’t got fireplaces which I thought I would miss but I don’t.

I have got ten foot high ceilings and double glazed wooden sash windows. Big rooms but with double glazing and cavity wall insulation which I have never had and the house is warm without labour, worrying about ordering oil and great big bills.

The only thing I would change about this place is the location we moved into town after a lifetime of living rurally and even though we are in a conservation area overlooking a massive green I miss the countryside.

Big garden. Pain in butt.
We have a decent garden for a new build and instead of keeping the builder's ig square of grass, we had it landscaped with beds and shrubs and whatnot. Cost a fortune.
We hate gardening.

I want to spend another fortune and change it to half plain grass and half big patio with one feature shrub.

@CrazyDaisy2018 - yy to all gatherings being around the island! I beg people to sit in the living room but the kitchen is where the fun (and drink!) is!

@ladybird69
That sounds blissful. I have no clue about the practicalities of doing it, but I am picturing a lovely snug space with comfy chair, footstool, cushions. A "good" lamp (don't want to be squinting at books), and some music. With the rain hammering on window. Cosy!

In my house- chair would end up housing a laundry basket of clean socks which need pairing, and 3 days worth of jeans slung over the back. Which would piss me off every time I saw it, yet not enough to stop doing it.

On reflection I need my new house to have tiny, minimalist rooms and a 40ft storage container out the back with everything fecked into it.

I thought i wanted a bigger older house with lots of room, in reality it costs a fortune if i wanted to do it up as it all needs replastering etc so im stuck with the colours and odd textured wall paper until we can afford a whole house re dec.
I would now love my sisters house smaller in size but she can make it look really nice quite easily. Plus less room would make my horder dh be less of a horder

Big Victorian terrace that had dining room and living room knocked through. Great size but useless in reality. Now got a dining room and living room...both get used.

Big windows - light coming into the house. I hate gloomy rooms.

Large white tiles in the kitchen. Impossible to keep clean and streaks when washed. Kids already smashed a couple but was rediculous expensive to do so hubby not keen on letting me replace.

I don’t get those who say they regret their heated towel rail in their bathroom? We have one and our towels are always draped over it. The bathroom is lovely and toasty. Our is quite tall though for the size of the room. I think maybe the people who say their bathrooms are cold maybe don’t have one big enough for the room?

Ours is also dual fuel so is just like a radiator and heats up really quickly that way. But this time of year our central heating has only cranked on once (thermostat set to 19), so if I want the bathroom a bit warmer to dry the towels i’ll Put the electric switch on the towel rail on for a bit. It takes AGES to heat up that way though.

I once stayed in a holiday home that I think Must have only been the electric switch type on a timer rather than connected to the central heating as it was useless. Didn’t seem to be on first thing in the morning when you needed it.

I agree about the open plan. We had an L shaped extension done to our semi and considered it. But in the end we went for a separate kitchen with dining table in overlooking our garden, a long back separate living room also overlooking our garden and kept our little front room as a second living room. Our kids are teens now and this layout is PERFECT. We always have space to do our own thing if we want.

If we had knocked through at the back between the kitchen and back living room we would have lost a wall on one side of which is the radiator for the kitchen, the other side of which is a radiator for the extended part of the living room. That also has a sofa right by it too. We would have lost those positioning options for both those things if we had knocked through.

I find that many photos of houses I see that have been extended as open plan layouts seem to have a lot of wasted space which just become walkways. Or if it was in a kitchen, the lost wall mean no wall-hanging cupboards or shelves (essential things in most kitchens!)

I don’t get housebuilders obsession with en-suite bathrooms. We bought a new boiler earlier this year, and we decided it needed to be big enough to power n additional shower if we ever put one in the loft. Engineer said that most domestic boilers aren’t big enough to power two showers simultaneously and that in most cases there wouldn’t be enough water pressure....

There does seem to be an obsession with them tho, particularly in new builds, even in tiny places which would be better off with extra storage space.

We don't have an airing cupboard, and I really miss having one, as it means we lose three drawers in the bedrooms which are full of sheets and towels. DH is now talking about knocking down walls between the bedrooms to make two of them smaller and put an ensuite and an airing cupboard into the gap. I really can't decide if the upheaval is worth it or not (also I hate change and mess)

We have an open plan room - cooking, eating, sitting and we love it but we also have a utilty room, deliberately bought quiet appliances and have a separate living room for the kids to entertain their friends. The floor in the open plan room is engineered wood and it's a pain to keep, it needs oiled every couple of years and that is such a big job - can't think of another surface I'd be happy with.
Wish I'd got a self cleaning oven and my induction hob is cracked and looking a bit shit from 6 years of cooking, not sure what would be better, I wish we'd put in a chilled water and ice dispenser but I didn't want an American style fridge - still don't but there are other options.
Installed a flecked carpet that I thought would not need hoover so much but instead it just never looks like it has been hoovered.
And I wish I had tanked the bathrooms - even though I don't like the fashion for unglazed shower wet rooms, our showers have all leaked and that has been very frustrating. Also get into a bath before you buy it to make sure it's comfortable.

I got a radiator put into the big cupboard upstairs because people told me I'd miss an airing cupboard, I've never used it as an airing cupboard - I need the storage for other things. There is never enough storage. The pulley maid I had installed in the utility room is amazing and is used all the time.

I always fancied open plan until my last house which was open plan. Bloody hated it! Cooking smells couldn’t be contained at all, no option of shutting the door on the mess until later, and had to pause the tv every time the washer went onto spin as it was too noisy! Wouldn’t go for it again!

I had a fairly open plan house and hated it, DH loved it. When we moved here he wanted to open up a downstairs reception room, I said no way. It would be freezing, really high ceilings and off a huge hallway.

Fascinating thread. We moved into this house planning to knock together the front room plus small/dark/cramped back dining room (not needed since extension gives kitchen diner.

Fortunately we didn't have the money to do straight away, and therefore had time to discover that having two sitting rooms is just fantastic when you have children. Even now life has moved on it's miles better. H is now an ex-H, dd is older and am thinking about the possibilities of renting nice big front room out to a lodger when she heads off to uni.

I'm another one with a big garden (by semi standards) that I don't have time to look after. However on the plus side the garden includes a garage, a massive workshop affair, and a store room as well as a funny little room on the back of the house for washing machine / boiler etc - I don't think I could ever bear to move and give them up!

A year or so back I had my carpets ripped out & wood floors sorted out and I love it, am going to have upstairs done this autumn. But my life is muddy & messy & I have pets, so I'm happy to sacrifice some warmth for a degree of hygene.