Normalising small homes

[lorieats99]

I feel like you just see those big 4-5 bedroom homes on Instagram, and it’s often young-ish people in their 20s or 30s in them. I think that will be a thing of the past soon with rising costs. We rent a small-ish 2 bed new build and it’s easy to begin to feel inadequate about it! When guests come over there isn’t really anywhere for them to sit, as we just have one sofa. Two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, downstairs WC and upstairs bathroom. Lovely spacious garden.

It feels like our home, I’d like a 3 bed in an ideal world but I don’t think that’s happening for us for realistically quite a while. Despite both being on average incomes we will probably be in our 40s before we achieve our forever home status. We are TTC soon, we have a small bedroom for the baby but we would have no room for a playroom or anything like that & I’m wondering how much this matters. I know in some parts of Europe people raise families in flats and apartments, and it’s very normal over there!

Does anyone else have a small home?

I am amazed anyone actually thinks 130 is a low annual income. That's quote deluded isn't it!?

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER we live in one of those maisonettes and they feel spacious. We paid £199,000 5 years ago in an area where the average house price is £650,000. We are in a block of 4.

We viewed houses too that were in our price range and they felt so much smaller as they were 2 up, 2 down and narrow.

We have our own front door, our own - pretty big - garden and off road parking for 2 cars.

We say homes have become smaller but so has the number of people in them.

I live in a three bed terrace. It's not huge but does everything I need it to. My father in law was brought up two doors down but there were six kids in that house - and they considered it roomy!

My childhood home had a tiny kitchen and I had the box room. Virtually every one of those houses has had a lift extension or an extension.

I don't think that for most families four bed detached is the norm. Maybe on Mumsnet and Instagram. Personally I'm not prepared to pay a mortgage for loads of extra years for a spare room or office. I do work from home but everyone else is out so it's fine.

The size and condition of houses in terms of decor, furnishings etc seems to have gone up enormously when you watch property programmes. See also multiple bathrooms and ensuites. I didn't know anyone who had these things as an 80s child and family life was fine.

In fact I wonder if increasing the size of your home lessens rather than strengthens family connections. Overcrowding is different but small children sharing a room was completely normal in every previous generation.

@rosetintedmemories2023 are you actually being serious, with your "low household incone" ?

Its certainly the case in the SE now and many parts of the SW.. Manchester now has very high GDP per capita (second richest city in the UK!) So the house prices will correspond to that as well. The housing crisis isn't just a London issue, it is most acute in London. But it is surprising how things change..the average rent now exceeds £1000. As we can see with the mortgage rates, things can change so quickly and there doesn't seem to be a real program to build more housing. So that would mean more expensive houses relative to income and that is a disaster if the wages are not growing relative to inflation either.

I am often surprised at how high the prices are. I have a London flat in zone 3 and I can't afford houses in many parts outside London unless I took on a bigger mortgage which I wouldn't be able to do without a London job where I can reliably increase my earnings 40% every 5 years (which is what I have been doing and the main reason I can afford up to 10% mortgage interest rates).

Yes. Majority of people have low household incomes unless you are the top 1% of PAYE income earners or have significant assets (other than your primary home). That's how capitalism works. You have top 1% , top 5% (who you can consider the middle class) and 95% (low income and precariat). We are top 5% but only because we are DINKY. So I don't consider myself middle class as we wouldn't be top 5% with a baby but more like top 7% or something.

@rosetintedmemories2023 that's not a low income
I lived in a house with a garden before and it was 85k. I earn min wage

It may be possible now but I am saying in the future, 5-10 years from now. That is where it is going with the supply shortage. Your house probably rents for more than a minimum wage earner can afford and the minimum wage has increased significantly too! Problem is so has everything else!

Combined not single. It is higher than many people but that doesn't make it not 'low'. Most people have low incomes relative to the overall wealth that can be generated through assets or inheritance. Which make a bigger difference. You have to have a 40k pay rise to earn the £20k someone inherited from his grandma as a simple example as more and more people will be in the 40% tax band. Which is why property will become more feudal in future- based on who your parents were

We have a three bed but the third bedroom is pretty small. We nearly stretched ourselves financially to buy a bigger house when talking about DC but I’m so glad we didn’t now that COL has hit.

For the time being the DC can share. If they want their own space in the future, we can make do with using our room for a work from home space.

I’d rather keep as much of our quality of life as possible than be struggling to pay the mortgage on a bigger home (and I know I’m really lucky…complaining that I don’t have the extra space I’d like feels ungrateful when other families are struggling to pay their bills in small homes).

Plus there’s less to clean which is always a good thing!

I live in the SE, no idea what the distribution of housing stock is but most people buy houses where I am because most properties are houses. We don’t have a lot of flats generally. Hence my comment about how London centric your view is.

Also you’re a bit out on your understanding of household incomes in this country, I assume coming from a place of privilege. The average household income is something like £50k (it’s £30k take home). £100k, as I’m sure you can calculate, is literally double that. So someone earning £100k is double the average household income <> not a low household income. Maybe it is in London… coming back to how your experience is slanted.

I've sat on both sides of this debate.

Started off in the South East in a flat, bought and sold my way up to a four bed end of terrace, having 3 kids along the way.

All 3 kids disabled, became a full time carer and gradually worked my way back down the ladder.

Bought a two bed terrace with a tiny yard in the North East earlier this year.

We own it outright. Put another window into the biggest bedroom and made another room and currently putting another window into the front of the house to make a small bedroom just off the living room.

I am a minimalist so there is room for everything and no need to use the loft for storage.

It works.

I know many who have the money prefer to hold onto their four bed detached well into their advanced years, but it just feels so trapping to me.

More cleaning, more maintenance and rooms to store posse they don't use or even like that much.

They often say they are hanging onto the family home for their kids and grandkids to visit. But I bet they would prefer a nice lump sum to improve their own lives rather than a choice of bedrooms when they visit their folks.

I live in a fairly spacious 3 bed that has a lot of downstairs living space. We have two DC and I’m pregnant with DC3 and people are very surprised that we aren’t currently considering moving to a 4 bed (even though our existing two children are the same sex so could in theory share a room throughout childhood). People are obsessed with kids having their own rooms!

There are lots of people in London on minimum wage and i came to the startling realisation recently that DH earns more than what the prime minister is paid! PM does earn more than £75k due to MP allowance of £80k, but the money he actually gets for being the PM is £75k! But of course most PMs are from rich backgrounds and/or have rich spouses so the salary doesn't really matter. In fact the fact that the salary is so low means that it can only attract people who would not rely on that money to survive and would treat it as pocket money. I would caveat that when i say we are a lower income household, what i am really saying is that our money is all earned via our labour and we have no other inheritances or external sources of incomes. I know we are in the top 5% of incomes but the relationship between income and wealth has become so disjointed that you need a very high PAYE income (top 1%) in order to have a high disposable income/assets that would actually make a huge difference to how you live.

I suspect that as houses become more unaffordable, more houses would be carved up to be maisonettes.

Those are some interesting points. @continentallentil I’d be interested to read more about those different housing systems.

@rosetintedmemories2023 Boris Johnson always had private speaking engagements before he was Mayor of London, during and after same as he was PM. There seems to be revolving door in the world of politics. Though I can’t imagine who would want to hear Boris speak for long periods of time, I have long thought that he’s actually quite smart in how he portrays himself to be this affable buffoon when he’s anything but that.

@rosetintedmemories2023

There are lots of people in London on minimum wage and i came to the startling realisation recently that DH earns more than what the prime minister is paid.

Gosh. You managed to shoehorn a bit of a stealth brag into your post. Aren't you clever? Is your DH very tall as well? Does he have a long commute?

@bagforlifeamnesty I think the mindset of children sharing room has slowly shifted, hence the need for more space as each kid would need their own room and privacy. The problem is we just don’t seem to have spacious housing options. Small houses should not be normalised. They should be designed to be spacious with plentiful storage options so that the floor space isn’t taken up by wardrobes and drawers etc.

I really like how some of the Korean and Japanese homes are designed with storage in mind so that everything seems very minimalistic and clutter-free.

Not really but now you know why our politicians are so dreadful. they are people who are rich enough not to care about the salary and mainly doing it for their ego/lucrative speaking gigs. And the average person cannot afford to pay for lucrative speaking million pound gigs which is why they have to suck up to big corporations.

i just saw a job on an online site- German speaking executive assistant for an asset manager. Pays between 60-70k which is not massively far off £75k. So it can't be that DH's salary is high or that the PM's salary is high, both are low but the PM has huge earning potential as long as he keeps up good relationships with the big corporations.

There's some great YouTube channels
Never too small and living big in a tiny house are my faves, loads of great ideas

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jul/28/how-uk-house-prices-left-the-middle-class-behind

But official data shows that the middle classes are increasingly squeezed, with only the cheapest 10% of houses now affordable (no more than five times a household’s income according to the Office for National Statistics) to middle-income England.

In 1999, a median house in England cost 4.4 times the median income, according to the ONS. The median is the midway point in any distribution of numbers (in this case, the income or house price at which half fall below and half fall above). The ONS uses median because high house prices or incomes could skew the average upwards.
The late 2000s saw a house-price boom. But although house prices recovered from the subsequent crash, wages did not keep up after the global financial crisis. The latest figures for 2022 show that the ratio had almost doubled to 8.4 times income in 2022.
The national figures also don’t tell the full story. Southern England has consistently been the least affordable part of the country to buy in – last year only the top 10% could afford the average home in the south-east. Buying in London is even worse, with the average home now beyond the official measure of affordability even to households whose income is in the top 10%.
However, in recent years the area of unaffordable house prices has expanded beyond the south. The north-east remains the most affordable region to buy a house in England – but the median house cost 5.3 times the median household income last year.
While unaffordability has long been a problem in England, it is a more recent trend in the rest of the UK.
A median-price home in Wales became unaffordable to the typical household in 2004: in 2022 that ratio stood at 6.4 times the median household income. The equivalent Scottish household stopped being able to afford a mid-priced home in 2006: in 2022 it was 5.3 times income. Northern Ireland became unaffordable again in 2017 after a brief stint of affordability, reaching 5.1 last year.

This is why small homes would become more 'normal'. We need to rejig our definition on what is a 'middle class income'. I am not sure how you are middle class if (a) you can't afford to buy the roof over your head or (b) can't afford private healthcare when the NHS malfunctions.

What defines you as middle class then? Having a degree (many working class people have degrees), going on holiday (its possible to have a cheap holiday with budget flights and a hostel stay) or not starving (thats a pretty low bar). No what has defined the middle classes has been a combination of education, comfort and a safety net. You are not middle class if you struggle to buy the average or median house. For myself, we could afford the median house in London as the median house (£530k) is less than 5 times our combined salary but not the average house (£726k) which means we are not middle class. And as the article shows, this isn't just a london thing. other regions have lower house prices but also lower average salaries and fewer jobs that pay 'london style salaries' outside of the usual 'doctor, CEO etc"

we recently moved but before we had a small 2 bedroom house . Front room could only fit one sofa in and kitchen was kitchen/diner. No cupboards built in etc so it was small and no where really to put anything . It was built in 1984. We just moved in to another 2 bedroom house which was built in the 60s , it had a massive bedroom at the front which had been converted to 2 bedrooms so now the house is classed as a 3 bedroom . We found a large 2 bed as couldn’t afford a 3 bed . I always remember when I was a kid we lived in 3 bedroom townhouse built in the 70s and it was a very big house . Across the road the built new houses in the 90s and they were so small . I defiantly feel the build houses smaller now

comparison is the thief of joy. I love a smaller house, we chose location over house size so we can walk everywhere and only have 1 car, and be in a community we love. Less cleaning and maintenance, lower bills, you just have to stay on top of the amount of stuff in the house.

You've missed the point completely - I never said there was no benefit. You are clearly financially fortunate to not only be able to purchase a property with such a large garden, but also maintain and grow all of that stuff. That takes time and effort so you're not working your fingers to the bone.

But this thread is about small houses - the implication, based on the OP being that it is all people can afford. I'm not sure if you've seen the size of new builds etc but most houses in the 'small' price bracket have postage stamp sized gardens. Maybe room for a bird feeder, but like I said, not much other use. Of course, I am sure you being a great gardener will explain how it can still become a lush wonderland with potted plants, hanging trellises etc etc but the fact remains that you can't do much with such a small space.

Just my own humble observation but British people would rather have this tiny garden, tiny house. And then constantly moan about their lack of space. Rather than move into a bigger flat! I can understand if they were worried about leaseholds etc but no - they want that small 'outside space'.

And while I'd normally say people can 'do what they want' land is unfortunately finite, especially on our tiny island. People insisting on landed property means less houses built on that space - where is everyone else going to live? Even 'small' flats like a PP mentioned, blocked of 4-5 would be better than individual houses with tiny gardens just for the sake of bragging about a garden.