Do you ever look at rooms in your home and wonder about who designed them?

[DuckWillow]

My kitchen.....my bloody kitchen.

It’s tiny, it was designed with a larder cupboard and no room for a fridge freezer. It has a few cupboards, a sink and room for a washing machine or a dishwasher but not both,

It’s literally a small square.with cooker at one end and an archway at the other. ....around 8ft by 6-7ft.

I just wonder who thought that size and design was practical.

I’m going for inexperienced youngster who had never run a home in their life . Anyone with experience of family life would not have come up with a silly design.

Even worse is that because it’s a HA property (yes I know I am lucky to have a roof over my head) I can’t make any changes.

What’s even better is that the living/dining room is 19ft in length. ...on what planet was this sensible when they could have taken three feet or more off the living room to make a bigger and more practical kitchen?

Yep definitely designed by a youngster who should have been sent back to the drawing board.

My bathroom has two windows. They are obscured tall narrow things. One is over the toilet. In summer we leave a lot of windows open all the time. I hate that the flush might be heard. I suspect it can be because I go to work in the early morning and can hear other's showers running. The other window is over the bath, that has a shower over it. Again, in the summer when it's warm I'd rather not have to shut the window but you can see me from lower thigh upward. In winter of course when it's darker out I presume my neighbours can see me showering.

Our hallway. The front door obviously opens inwards but the staircase and bannisters are just a fraction too close to the front door. Therefore if you are coming down the stairs and the front door is opened...you are trapped standing on the stairs. Really difficult if you are moving furniture or suitcases. End up having to shuffle around opening/closing doors.

I often look at it and think why did they just not added literally add 1 foot to the hallway length? House was built in 1980s, so not eons ago when things were different!

Also, our house originally had warm air heating. So there is a big redundant vent through the centre of the house. If you are sitting on the upstairs loo then the bathroom wall is only 1 foot away from your knees because of this vent. We plan to remove the vent when we redo the bathroom, but bloody bizarre design.

My house is allegedly big enough to house seven, but it’s too small for the four of us. The garden is 100+ feet long which is useless. There are so few electrical outlets that we recently failed the electric inspection. There is no storage at all in the house apart from the under stair meter cupboard, and there is no room to put in storage. The smallest room has enough room for a bed and a small chest of drawers, but no wardrobe.

I hate my house, but we have a roof

Oh and my front door (into the porch) and the next door (into the kitchen) are ever so slightly offset. So you open the front door, then there's about two feet of porch, then the next door, but it's about six inches off. Big furniture won't go through, because of this, and it means lots of banged elbows and squeezing and shuffling if carrying anything larger than a carrier bag of shopping.

The open plan staircase is very narrow and goes up out of the living room, where the ceiling and drop combined with the bend in the staircase, means that nothing rigid over 18in high will go up the stairs. Difficult to explain, but desperately impractical and means all bedroom furniture has to be built in situ. Mattresses are fine because they fold!

When we moved in to our house it had a tiny kitchen, with a toilet one end (no sink) and the shower room the other. When you had used the toilet you had to walk through the kitchen to the shower room to wash your hands.

We put an extension on and moved the toilet so, whilst it’s still downstairs, at least the loo and the sink are in the same room!

The toilet had folding doors with see through glass.. we stuck paper up over the glass whilst waiting to do the extension.

Our lounge is quite a good size, but you have to go through it to get to the kitchen so a lot of the floor space has to be reserved for walking though. It means there is only one option for where to place the sofa, and a lot of the room feels wasted.

No because I designed it myself 🤣🤣🤣

When we first moved into our new house, we couldn’t find the light switch for the bathroom. There was a light fitting so we knew there must be a switch somewhere! After a week of peeing in the dark, dh found the switch behind the door in dd’s bedroom. So to use the loo with illumination at night we have to walk from our bedroom, across the landing, into dd’s room to turn the light on, back across the landing and into the bathroom. Then we have to do the same in reverse once we have completed our ablutions. Who on earth thought that was a sensible place for a light switch

God, yes I think this about our kitchen too. It’s 5ft 6in by 8ft 3in. It’s long and shallow with the door right in the middle of the wall opposite the oven, window at one end and a fridge at the other. I hate it. You can only get two people in at a time and if the door is open you can’t get to the fridge.

Sorry 6ft 6in not 5ft. That would be even bloody worse!

Agree with the pp who mentioned two large bedrooms and one tiny box room. These are typical in 50s/60s built semis like my mom’s house and mine, and it drives me so mad.
The box room is only suitable as a nursery, although I was in the one at mom from the age of about seven to 14 and there was room for nothing other than a single bed and chest of drawers.
Our current neighbours have moved the wall and made the box room bigger and the adjacent front bedroom smaller, but it would be better if they were just designed properly in the first place.

I quite like my house however my living room/dining room is massive. I would have preferred a kitchen/diner and a smaller living room. My house is so cold so a smaller living room would have been easier to heat and keep warm and when you live in a cold part of Scotland this is very much an important part of life.

oh yes,

• my office / our bedroom has windows so high up that I can get light but no view and it is impossible to clean them without removing all the furniture instead of the normal windows and little balcony my neighbours have.
• kitchen and bathroom located as far away from the water supply and downpipes as possible making for bad gradients and frequent blockages

My bedroom is lit by 4 spotlights one in each corner, and has a hook in the ceiling. When you look in the loft, it's pretty obvious that it has a load rating of at least 400 kg.

Yup, we bought a house with a sex room.

I designed my rooms. But part of the house is soold, knocking through was not an option. One wall is 2.5m thick.

I love my quirky old house. Absolutely hate new builds

Our utility room was clearly designed by a man who was divorced with his ex-wife citing failiure to do his own laundry as a factor in their divorce there is enough space for the washer and dryer, but the washer door collides with the back door and there's very little floor space without being in the swing of the back door and applience doors.
At least there is a utility to separate off the sound of the appliences.

Late 1980s house so in the era of home computers etc, and the quantity and positioning of sockets is poor. We have a lot of extension leads to make them accessible as they are usually blocked by furniture.

Our DIY projects drag out forever as we always end up adding and relocating sockets, straightening up walls and floors (right angles were clearly overrated )

We bought the house for its potential through umpteen flaws

We have a small kitchen too. Should have sad had - we have just extended. It was a small kitchen on a reasonable sized house and totally out of proportion - our new kitchen has provided a wow factor to the entire house, so glad we went ahead and extended.

Also, previous owner took all sorts of short cuts in regards to DIY, gradually unravelling overtime, house is slowly looking less shabby.

The bloke no woman would ever dream of it who designed my wardrobe.
It’s built into the wall. With lots of dark nooks and crannies. You can’t fit that many clothes in it because of how the rail is fixed. It’s sliding doors which keep falling off.

Also the kitchen tiny kitchen decent size dining area but because of how the windows and radiators are you can’t extend the kitchen into the dining area.

Our kitchen is also small, it is a 1930s house and I’m sure they were renowned for their small kitchens, it also has a huge window so more dead space, we did covert the old rear porch area into a small utility but it’s all still rather cramped.