to think that unless you spend £££, houses in the UK are not very functional??

[PussinJimmyChoos]

Seriously...what is it with houses in this bloody country (and yes, I am English!)...they are so NOT designed for family life....poxy pokey 3rd bedrooms, kitchens you can't swing a cat in, only one bathroom in most houses and no space for entertaining....

It pisses me off!! Struggling with space in our house atm and just thinking that if a bit more thought went into the design of it, it wouldn't be as much of an issue

And why are so many new builds so small?!!!!

Bertie I don't think anyone said having laundry in the kitchen is unhygienic. I, personally, just find it weird having grown up in Canada where pretty much all houses have a laundry room, or apartments have some kind of separate cupboard. Same in the US.

And I don't want my clean laundry smelling of cooking smells!

expatinscotland - It's not as crowded as Hong Kong, and therefore prices aren't as high. I know someone paying £8000 a month for a 3 bed flat.

We are however made to build as if we were more crowded due to planning rules, so we are cramped into a much smaller area of where development is permitted.

Also NOTHING in Hong Kong is old. (This is what I'm told I've not been there.) If you tear down your whole housing stock and rebuild it every few years, the layouts are going to suit modern requirements.

OK, fair enough, can only find one comment about it -

LadyPeterWimsey Tue 31-Aug-10 17:03:22
No utility room/laundry? - yuck!

I got the wrong end of the stick I think, sorry!

Fair point about cooking smells though. That does drive me mad. Especially with the weather being like it is. I guess if your bathroom is upstairs, it would actually make more sense, keeping all the dirty clothes on the same floor as the bedrooms where they are both taken off and put away. Actually I tend to have the clothes airer in the bedroom for this reason, but TBH unless you're frying things regularly the smell doesn't permeate that much. So I just avoid frying things if possible.

All this, 'Well, traditionally it was because of twin tubs, skanky tanks in lofts, etc.'

Yes, well, the rest of the world has moved on now!

:o

So do I Bertie! But since DH learnt to cook it's been a different matter. Pan-fried mackerel with your fresh bed linen anyone?

I'd really like more than one loo too. DH likes to linger in there which is quite irritating. No need for 4 though! (My Dad's house in Boston is like that - for 3 people - so weird)

Try telling that to my parents, expat. (I mean it - please?)

They live in a five-bed house and when we were still living at home, there'd be us three kids, our girlfriends and boyfriends coming over - often 6-8 people in the house. There was one, very ancient shower (circa. 1980), in the downstairs loo. There was one, similarly ancient bath, which - as a bonus - had the electrics located underneath it!

I could never get over my dad proudly inviting our friends back home with the reassurance 'there are two loos - plenty of space!'. He genuinely thought it was luxury. A queue of 8 people trying to use the shower/brush their teeth in the morning is quite something.

Do you really leave laundry in the kitchen so long it gets full of cooking smells?

I put the laundry in, it gets washed, I take it out and take it to the spare bedroom to dry.

About 10 seconds between the washer and the bedroom.

Perhaps my dinner is less smelly than the norm?

My mum had a washing machine in the kitchen but her clothes line airer was in the garden right next to an enormous rosemary bush, so her dry laundry always smelled of rosemary.

Yes, I tend to think 2 toilets is quite enough. Unless you have a huge family of course. That way if one is in use/blocked or whatever, at least there is a spare.

What about the separate bathrooms and toilets which were popular in the 50s and 60s? If there's a small sink in the toilet I think these are a good idea. How often have you been in the bath and one of the DCs announces they need the toilet? I remember having a "No pooing when someone's in the bath" rule when we were growing up - though you were allowed in quickly to do a wee! Bit embarrassing though to have to announce your intentions every time just in case someone was planning to have a bath in the next half an hour.

'Well, in the past, people had to bring up 10 kids in a shoebox.' Uh-huh, well, bet they smelled minging. So glad it's not necessary to live like that anymore in the West.

miggsie laughinghysterically spare room

Me too, Riven. And at the moment one of the canal boats underneath us is burning a wood fire at night, so if I forget about it it takes a while to dry, it comes in with a lovely faint smell of wood fire, which is actually rather nice as long as it's not bedsheets/underwear.

It is horrible drying laundry in the winter though, I could use a laundry room then!

Yes, I have a spare room...we bought an old wreck 20 years ago, as it had space and we could do it up. We used to have a lodger in the spare room for extra cash to pay the mortgage.

Last week, the spare room was decorated, finally, only took 20 years...

Btw, Miggsie, your mum's rosemary-scented washing sounds like something out of Laurie Lee - should you be writing an rose-tinted family memoir now?

Round here most people live in flats not houses.

Lots of the stock used to be large 1 bedroomed flats with big dining kitchens. But in the last 10 years most of these have been converted into small 2 beds, with tiny internal kitchens (no window, standing room for 2 people only).

These flats are filled with 4 person families.

Small island. Over populated. Not enough space for everyone to have decent-sized houses.

Oh you are so right. I live in a new build HA 2 bed.House is a good size but spoilt by bad design.

It has a lovely big hall (mmm spoilt by a stupid radiator so can't put a cupboard on that side) and small loo on the other.
Kitchen too small to put up a ironing board but....a large living/dining room big enough for a 10 seat dining table and huge 1980's puffy furniture.
That's it downstairs so we only have one room effectively. Works well especially when it's the room that leads to the garden and then car park. People are always just popping in the back and catching me in a right state and I have no where else to put them...grrr.Why not make the bloody kitchen bigger then we would have 2 useful rooms.

They also have great insulation between houses but none between upstairs and downstairs. Effectively you can't use the loo without being heard.It's really embarassing when guests come over.They soon find out the noise from the downstairs loo is very audible from the living room.They politely go upstairs and then it sounds like they are weeing on your head.
Likewise you can hear anything in the downstairs loo from the main bedroom.
Poor poor design.

That sounds really soul-destroying, forever. It annoys me that there aren't more rules about what people can and can't legally live in. I'd hope that if there were more regulations, the standards would go up. But then you worry about prices becoming (more) unaffordable.

bagged and tagged " A peculiarity of the HK furniture market is the triple layer bunk bed so you can get all your children in a bedroom measuring about 6ft by 4ft."

i need to get us one of those...

isawthreeships azazello - very good points.

i didn't even look at new build or new build style housing whilst looking for a house - we got a bungalow which has the major advantage of flexibility (and have changed round the room functions, so ex-bedroom is the kitchen..)

though the kids bedroom is v. small.

construction firms are currently up against it - they are currently seeking to survive rather than profiteer.

Government policies are set to protect the land-owning minority despite the large negative effect on the poorest (those who don't own even one property) as well as those who can buy their own home. The only people that profit from house price rises are those that own two or more houses.

Although the UK has a nominally denser population spread than The Netherlands, say, the concentration of population in certain areas exceeds that - think about it - Scotland is pretty large and only has 5 million residents. 13 million in greater london though.

People look down on flats, becaus

1. no own front door (no clear delineation of what you own and don't)
2. difficult with pushchairs
3. hard if you own a dog (no garden)
4. some very low quality flats have been built in this country!
5. the potential legal/ financial problems when you don't have outright freehold.
6. your neighbours noise is your noise.

Nancydrewrocked - I've got everything on your list. Cost a bit less than £250k.

Mind you, it's in West Yorkshire, & it was previously in multiple occupancy, so we'll be eradicating surplus washbasins, magnolia emulsion & Fire Exit signs for years to come.

"Do you really leave laundry in the kitchen so long it gets full of cooking smells?"

Ha ha, no of course not. We are lucky enough to have our cellar converted into a laundry room, and a small garden to hang clothes out. But in our old flat, the washing machine was in the kitchen, no spare room and literally NO space anywhere to put a drying rack other than in the kitchen. Ridiculous. So you come home from work, hang out laundry and then need to cook dinner, hmm... it's like that for a lot of flat dwellers in the UK, because the properties are badly planned or are converted from 'tub and rack' days.

Where my Dad lives in the States, more often than not, when a family buys a house, they rip it down and build one to their spec. Wooden houses, easy up and easy down but well built and spacious. Very different here where lots of us are making do with inadequate spaces that don't match today's lifestyles.

Miggsie - we're 8 years into that sort of house! Glad you got there - we have space but the house is still falling down