aibu to buy a terraced house

[mattsmadmum]

Living with family with 2 dc. Will have enough to buy a house with no mortgage by april. Happy to live anywhere but dsis and dm are furious I will consider a mid terraced as think I will have terrible problems with neighbour's. Cant afford anything else as sp could borrow but dont want to.a . Something at the back of my mind thinks they could be right, aibu to ignore this and stick to a v tight budget

It's the thin walls you have to worry about.

Just keep the music down and be sure to bite the pillow when you climax and you'll be fine.

Make sure you know who is responsible for which bit concerning e.g. roof repairs - can be tricky

I think the age of the property is relevant. We had a Victorian terrace with thin walls-stayed in it a miserable year. The eighties terrace was better,but the seventies terrace we are still in after 12 years.
Budget is the priority-not only initial price but also cost of heating.Terraces are great for insulation.
Sure your family are not being snobs?
Flipping well done on your saving skills-envy pouring off me.

We had to move because of nightmare neighbours. This was big house, detached, in a 'naice' area.

Can I confuse things, and write something very diifferent to Waltonswatcher

I think the age of the property is relevant. We had a (late, does it matter?) Victorian terrace with solid walls, and it was as quiet as a church. The 80s semi DH had was awful - you could hear them climbing the stairs on the other side of the house.

I'd buy a solid terrace in a flash. I wouldn't buy anything with plasterboard walls that was attached to anyone.

Nice saving!

Take out a mortgage and buy a house you won't need to move from, for the longest time possible.

I was a long term terrace dweller in London and loved it - had fabulous neighbours and no noise problems at all.
Moved to another terrace out in the sticks and had to leave within the year because as I lay in bed at night I could hear next-door farting.

On the upside they are very cheap to heat and insulate but parking can be a bloody nightmare.

Well done for getting it together to live mortgage free.
Good luck.

I have only ever lived in terraced houses (am in my 40s) and have never ever had neighbour problems, plus heating bills are lower as you are insulated both sides!

Go for it, envious of being mortgage free!

FFS - you have to be VERY unlucky to end up living next to a bunch of smack heads, and most people in this country live in flats or terraced homes! We'd all love to live in a detached property within an acre of our own private grounds - BUT back in the real world........... It's nice having neighbours to feed the cats, keep an eye on things when you go away for the weekend

HELLO just wanted to post from our real world on our road, where we have had such amazingly dire problems with neighbours its affected our personal life to an un imaginable degree.

The problem with terraced housing is party walls.

One side you usually have entry hallway, stairs and corridors, so usually more insulation that side.

On the other side you will share living room and so on walls! This is where problems occur, also gardens in summer, windows open, one person playing loud music.

If you really want to take the risk, do talk to your neighbours, have a look at the house, is it taken care of, well decorated, do they rent or own, and are they likely to move, and if they do will they rent the house out or sell.

Our road is interspersed with horrific and hideous houses, packed to the gunnels with lodgers, think constant police attendance, drugs raids, fights, curtains half up at windows, rubbish and old furniture outside, urinating anywhere and everywhere, using other peoples gardens for access to their houses as they loose or don't have keys, summers ruined in the garden because of excessively loud music every night, crowds smoking front and back, and general unpleasantness. If your house is joined to such a house, ie one that is rented out at rock bottom prices to a high turnover or lodgers, think damage to your house that will never get sorted, fire risk, rubbish chucked into your garden and so on.

Lots of people on my road have been very un lucky and live next to selfish animals.

There is no way on this earth I would ever buy terraced again, and I would strongly urge you to ask your neighbours lots of questions. ur

One poor family I used to speak too, said " we are irish, we saw the car next door had irish plates and we knew he was renting but we thought he cant be that bad if he is irish....of course, he moved on a few weeks after then the arseholes moved in and that was the end of our happy time at the house"

I used to see that lady babe in arms trying to reason with the LL who has since been done for GBH.

YANBU. I live in a mid-terrace (rented) and have very nice neighbours (students on one side, an old lady on the other), despite living in an area that was until recently famed for its gangland shootings. You can sometimes hear what the neighbours are doing, but only when they're being loud and they rarely are. The big difference between in and the semi where I lived until recently is that it is SO much warmer and the bills are SO much lower.

I do, however, miss having a garden - all we've got is a postage stamp-sized bit of concrete out the back.

FWIW my dad lives in a semi detatched in a naice semi rural village, and has knobs for neighbours. Knobs live in all sorts of places.

I live in a terrace, never heard a peep from the neighbours

I used to live in a very middle class semi and the neighbours were so noisy it wasn't funny!

I lived in a terrace and loved it. We now live in a semi and the neighbours are a bunch of shits and we've had endless problems.

We've just put in an offer on another terrace

We live in a mid terrace (just three houses on our run) and have no problems. We have a shared drive but all the covenants are in place so no issues at all.

One side is a house share and we've perhaps heard two peeps out of them in two years, other than friendly exchanges, and the other side is a single mother who prefers staying at her mums so we never hear anything from them either.

yonisareforever

That is not a problem with terraced housing, that is a problem with the neighbourhood.

I lived in a mid terrace and the only real problem was parking as it was a narrow street with no driveways but the neighbours were fine, only occasional noise from one side when the teenage son's parents were away for the weekend and he had mates over but it wasn't often.

Firstly, this is your decision, not you dm or dsis, secondly, you can get bad neighbours anywhere.

Yes you need to be in a good area and you can't tell just by looking. Good thick walls very important. Gardens can be a problem. But to be living mortgage free is a huge bonus so if you can find a good house I would do it.

you can get bad neighbours anywhere but the nature of terraced housing with thin walls makes it far more of a problem.

check the walls adn the neighbours,

having a couple being a PITA is one thing, having 8 or 9 people living next to you all being PITA is another entirely.

talk to the neighburs.

I agree that it can be pot luck if you get good neighbours or not. Terraced houses do sometimes cause problems with noise and parking. But so do other houses with people parking outside their houses and not on the drive and so on. And people having 3 or four cars parked. And folk in detached houses can have problems with noisey neighbours barbecuing till dawn and loud music.

I think Victorian terraces do often have thicker walls and better soundproofing than say 1930s semis, but perhaps that isn't always the case?

I think the argument's more about neighbourhood than type of house. We are in london and in the last 30 years have lived in 60ks flat, vict terrace, vict semi (with about 6 inches betwwen pairs) and now 1990's mid terrace. All ur neighbours have been lovely professional people.

I find the view that terraces are somehow third class quite offensive actually.

I have just moved from a mid terrace where we lived for 10 years.
We got on well with both of our neighbours. One was a single chap and the other was a widowed lady, therefore there wasn't too much noise. Except the man was a DJ and used to play music quite often, it was Northern Soul though and we didn't mind too much. If we ever asked him he would turn in down. The only time I every heard anything from the lady was when we would both get up at 6 am and I would hear her having a wee! When her grandchildren came to visit I could hear every word.

For the last year we were there they both moved out. He moved with work and she moved into sheltered accommodation. The people who bought the mans house were lovely and doing it up to rent. We knew that when the ladies family had got everything sorted then hers would be sold, undoubtably to rent too. We sold up as quick as we could.
And about right too, the new neighbours in the mans house were really not very friendly at all. Loud arguments and drug use. That said you could listen into the arguments, it was like Jeremy Kyle! The ladies house was bought by a guy for band practice!

Like any house you can't choose the neighbours. The most expensive house could have dreadful neighbours. My thoughts would be about the size of the house. I personally would get a tiny mortgage and get something you never have to leave.

Every thing has it's compromises, and I would think long and hard before compromising my ability to live mortgage free! The thing that might swing me is, will you be wanitng to upsize in the future? Where I live (London) I would buy the biggest I could afford now because by the time I was going to move in another 5 years, say, prices would have risen so ridiculously that I wouldn't be able to afford and inflated extra mortgage.

Whereas you might be in a sensible part of the country where you can save as fast as house prices rise.

I lived in a flat, then 2 terraces, then a semi. There are terraces and terraces. Terrace houses in London count as quite-very posh in most areas. Had 3 lots of lovely neighbours in our terraces, and one truly awful lot. And it was my own fault, I could easily have researched it. Many many terraces are in calm friendly roads. I would happily live mid-terrace again.

Is it a Victorian terrace, or modern?

The only drawback apart from the neighbours is that everything for the back garden has to be carted through the house: workmen's ladders, turf for the garden, slabs for the patio, debris back out...

Not sure why your dsis and dm are 'furious': apart from offering any helpful experience if they have any what is it to do with them?

Im in a terrace and have no problems. On one side, i hear their dog when it barks to be let back IN! That is the most annoying noise but it would be the same in a row of semis.