- many more of the US homes seem to be fully open plan downstairs. Some don’t even seem to have doors between the rooms?
In my house you walk into the mudroom which has about 34928 hooks and spaces for shoes/boots, boot warmers, and a loo off it. You then go into an open plan kitchen/sitting room/dining room. From there you can go to 3 more rooms (2 offices, 1 bedroom) which each have doors. Upstairs all the rooms have doors. The whole set up works perfectly for us.
- the bathroom count / ratio to bedrooms is much higher! (Eg 3 bed / 3 bath or even 2 bed / 2.5 bath)
We have 5 bedrooms, 2 offices, and 2.5 bathrooms.
- heating systems, I don’t recall seeing radiators, instead vents in the floor, are these used to flip between hot and cold air depending on the time of year? How effective / efficient are they compared to our big radiator bars here?
To flip the question - if you wanted to run a heat pump system in your house with radiators, how would you do that?
I'm in a very cold New England state and I have baseboard heaters rather than proper radiators. My house stays warm all year round so I'm going to assume they're pretty effective.
- toilets - they seem smaller and the flushing mechanism is different
My husband could bore you stupid about the range of toilets available, having bought thousands during his career. Yes they're different to UK toilets. They're also quite different to each other.
- baths - they also seem smaller, short and strangely blocky
Baths designed to have showers over them are indeed shorter and have a flatter bottom so you don't slip. Baths designed for bathing in are bigger.
- Space and size - all of the bathroom stuff is unusual when the overall size of homes, even cheaper ones, is so much larger. And some ‘back yards’ are absolutely huge! Obviously more land space in the US compared with the U.K. but still, notable but often not much privacy / fencing?
We have no fences around our garden. Some of our neighbours do, some don't. Like most houses in my town we have an acre of land, and half of it is woodland. We're pretty private.
One set of neighbours' kids used to come over with their skis, and ski through the woods from our house to theirs. We skied with them. My other neighbours' grandchildren used to come over and use our trampoline or climbing set when we still had them. This was fine by us. If we're sitting outside, our neighbours quite often join us and bring food/beer. Again, this is fine with us. If it wasn't then I guess we'd put fences up. We have an Invisible Fence so that the dog doesn't escape.
If we are mowing the lawn then we do our neighbour's lawn too, and vice versa. Similar with snowblowing and leaf raking.
- waste disposal units - what ARE these?
They've been explained above. We don't use ours much as we compost pretty much everything.
- closets - I haven’t seen any free standing wardrobes. Are these just not used in the US?
I have some if you'd like to see them. They do exist, they're just not needed because of built in closets.
Having said that we redid our built-in closet recently to our exact specifications and I absolutely love it. Imagine a wide Ikea Pax wardrobe but about twice as deep, and designed exactly how you want it. That's what we have.
The biggest bedroom upstairs has a walk-in closet which is about the size of a medium bedroom in a UK house.
Our kitchen is built with standard non-bespoke cabinets because actually you can buy those very easily in the US. We replaced the hob a while ago, and while we were there we put in a nicer piece of granite worktop, so that was cut to size. Our cabinet doors are painted duck egg blue and our walls are cream. We have a built-in oven that looks like a spaceship. We have an electric kettle. I adore our pantry. We don't have any eye-level cabinets so the kitchen feels much more open.
Our walls - interior and exterior - are all filled with insulation. In more modern houses the insulation is blown in during the construction process. So while they're not particularly thick, they're well sound-insulated.
We have occasionally knocked down walls - it costs very little because they're wood-framed.
There is no garbage pick-up service in my town because we took a vote on it and we thought funding the schools was more important. This is not particularly normal for the US but if you lived here then moved back to the UK you might think it was.