Box rooms

[Beansonapost]

Why is it that houses in the U.K. are still being built with box rooms?

... and still being built with no laundry/utility room?

I grew up having all massive bedrooms... kitchen diner... lounge/living room... utility... garden... garage etc. This is in the Caribbean. My childhood bedroom could fit two uk sized box rooms.

I've lived in other countries almost all of them had utility rooms... except China where the washing was housed in the bathroom; which to me makes sense. Why would you want to do laundry in the kitchen?

Husband is British so is used to this way of life... but I am confused as it's 2018 and I am certain the way people use their homes has changed. Why are people still being forced to have a box room and do the washing in the kitchen? That slot could be used for extra storage.

We went to look at some new builds... while the house was nice for almost £500,000 it just didn't provide what I would want in a family home (based purely on my experience). I think when people buy a home they don't really intend to move anytime soon unless they have to... so why put a room that is useless beyond the age of 10? Then force people to either sell of "create additional space" why not just build a house people can live in for as long as they need or want?

Also where utility rooms are concerned... in a country where it rains so much, wouldn't a dedicated space for laundry be standard? Wash, dry, iron... leave clothes to dry with windows open. Clothes out of sight.

Why is this the norm in the U.K.?

Also... why are homes still built with such poor storage options? You might get an under stair cupboard, an airing cupboard but that's it?! Why aren't built in wardrobes standard in all bedrooms? Gives you back your floor space and means less furniture to buy.

It seems developers are more concerned about how many people they can cram into these developments than how people will enjoy their homes/space.

When I was renting box rooms I had to basically

Whoops... when I was renting box rooms I had to basically live out of a suitcase because it wasn’t big enough for me and my stuff. This was doable because my mum stored the majority of my stuff in my childhood bedroom for me, I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.

In some areas you do seem to have to search for 4 bed houses to get 3 usable bedrooms. I’d love a box room as a playroom or study, but many of the ones I’ve seen really aren’t big enough for a child beyond the toddler years, and in many cases the other child would have a bigger room and an en suite.

If there was a minimum area a bedroom needed to be to be called a bedroom, then box rooms wouldn’t up the value of a house in the same way. And overcrowding statistics could take into account the area of bedrooms. It currently classified different sex siblings over a certain age as overcrowded, so not just the size of house divided by occupants.

I’ve luckily moved on from my days of paying a fortune for a tiny room, but I don’t think landlords should be able to rent out rooms below a certain size. It would make a lot of family homes less attractive to btl landlords, and free them up for families

I’ve luckily moved on from my days of paying a fortune for a tiny room, but I don’t think landlords should be able to rent out rooms below a certain size.

As someone who also used to live in a rented boxroom, I just don't understand this logic. I rented it because it was all I could afford - if I'd been able to afford a double bedroom I'd have done so. If the landlord hadn't been allowed to rent my room to me I wouldn't have magically got a bigger room for the same price, I wouldn't have been able to find a room in the city where I was doing my PhD at all.

We live in a 1960s detached house. It was built with two normal sized bedrooms, and a "box room" which is tiny, but you probably have squeezed a single bed into. We used it as a nursery when the kids were small, then when we converted the loft it became an extension of the upstairs hall and now has a desk as a home office.

OP, you just can't compare American houses to the UK. Amrican property is vast. Huge. And so much cheaper than in the UK. Friends who moved to Pennsylvania bought an enormous house, three times the size of their UK property for the same price.

As for why they're building them, well small rooms as home offices or for a bedroom for a pre-school child are valuable for many people. There's not much point putting a baby in a massive room.

Oh and some of the holiday properties we've used in Florida have dressing rooms or cupboards which are larger than some UK bedrooms. You just can't compare.

My new build had three double bedrooms. It was bog standard, not even a dining room, but based on the income posts on mumsnet I'm sure most of you would consider it stupidly below budget. They build many different shape and size houses. Look at those that meet your criteria

@MargaretCavendish the logic is that if you have a lower cap on the number of people you can rent a house to, it becomes less attractive as a btl investment, so leaving it on the market for a family. In my hometown it’s not a massive problem because there is a fair amount of property available, but in some areas I’ve lived btl has ruined the market for ftb and families, as well as keeping renting standards hideously low.

Well I grew up in Northern England and we had a utility room and no box rooms .... so buy a house that suits you.

I think we should leave the OP to get on with her hatred of British houses (or more specifically her hatred of how she imagines all British houses to be) and call it a day now.

Actually, I think you'll find a large number of posters here agree with OP, apart from a coterie of defensive newbuild owners types

@MyOtherProfile I think you might find you need a flat white surface for this level of projection.

But then where do the people currently owning box rooms go? It probably would have been good in some ways if a nice young family could have bought the house where I lived along with two other adults - but where would the three of us have gone, if all across the city people suddenly stopped renting out houses? It was already a horrendous, expensive and intensely pressured (if you saw a place and didn't say you'd take it on the spot you wouldn't get it) rental market. None of us were in a position where we could - or would even have wanted to - buy a house, even if prices had dramatically dropped. That's not unusual - where do the renters go if you discourage people from BTL?

*renting box rooms

I’ve been in that position too, and rented some horrible places because it was all I could afford. All the while my landlord was making a fortune. Disclaimer: I know #notallbtllandlords are like that. But btl isn’t regulated as an investment or as a business, and in some areas there’s only a couple of landlords so not even any competition.

I imagine without btl there would be a lot more lodgers. I don’t think that getting rid of btl is a perfect solution for everything, and it would obviously throw up its own problems, but I do think it’s net contribution to the market is negative.

It’s not true that everyone in the US lives in massive houses. They may do outside of cities, but ime property in certain hotspots is ferociously expensive and SMALL. People certainly don’t all live in the Home Alone house, any more than all British people live in Downton Abbey (or indeed a cramped new build).

It’s nice to have a spacious bedroom, but really not essential. Years ago kids/teens all used to share bedrooms and certainly didn’t lounge around in them during the day. For a start bedrooms would have been freezing cold and people had to pluck up courage to go to bed, with all the trauma of getting into nightclothes and standing on some icy linoleum.

Yes, I lived in some tiny places in NYC. The kitchens were almost nonexistent and the laundry rooms in the basement were an endurance test all summer. Elsewhere friends were living in huge places for next to nothing as students. But their healthcare and tuition was crippling them.

And someone one said traditionally the washing machine was placed in the kitchen because of the convenience of the back door...

But also bathrooms were placed off the kitchen... they have moved them. Except for the odd exception where most people who buy these older properties will try to relocate the family bathroom.

Most new builds have the kitchen at the front of the house... with no side door, so you have to walk the length of the house to get out the back to hang the laundry.

No most new builds are not built with the kitchen at the front, some are yes but not most.

There are loads of different types of new builds, but in areas you do tend to get a lot of the same type, so there isn’t any choice.

I like the fact that OP has seen at least 80% of new build houses in the country in order to be able to know what the majority are like. It's impressive really.

I live in the U.K. and am also confused why we don't have laundry rooms or big washing machines like my brother has in Canada. I'd love an American style home with a basement but they don't exist here. I do have a utility room but it's not really big enough.

Forgot to say, Canadian building materials wouldn't last as long here due to dampness in the air. We have to use more expensive materials.

Not all new builds are as you describe This one for instance. But one look at the price tells you why developers are also building smaller units with - God forbid - a box room. There has been much sense talked already on this thread about the smallness of our island versus the size of its population and its out of control property prices. I think when push comes to shove and money is tight, buyers will often prefer a box room - to use as an extra bedroom/ baby's room, study whatever - to a utility room which has less flexibility. Of course they would rather have another proper bedroom, but presumably they can't afford it. Part of the problem in the UK is that homes have become a form of investment rather than a place to live - fewer and fewer can afford to buy and so are thrown on the mercy of buy-to-let investors. This is not the case in many of the European countries mentioned by way of comparison. People in rented accommodation have rights and security of tenure - homes are for living in not a license to print money.

But also bathrooms were placed off the kitchen... they have moved them. Except for the odd exception where most people who buy these older properties will try to relocate the family bathroom.

Bathrooms were off the kitchen usually because there wasn't a bathroom, merely an outside toilet. And when bathrooms became a 'thing' the most sensible place was to add it on as an offshoot off the back of the kitchen. No one ever thought it was the 'best' place. Just the easiest/cheapest place.

Sorry OP, you've really hit a nerve here! Amazing how touchy people are.

In the 1950s and 60s there were areas of study devoted to analysing and simplifying the housewife's life - how should a kitchen be planned to be easy to work in? What sort of materials should you use when building a house to make it easy to clean? Stuff that lead to standardisation of homes - not only as marketing but also in actual building regulations - because it was understood that these things were important. Of course these measures immediately started to be sneered at as cookie-cutter standardisation with no room for individuality and creativity. So we dismantled a lot of those building regulations and allowed them to be more "guidelines".

In 2018 we have hundreds of years of architectural and design experience to draw from. We have access to marvellous machines and innovative materials. Our society is more egalitarian so we have a communal interest in good working spaces for household labour (instead of building any old shite for the working class servants, who cares about them - examples include kitchens in the dark cellars or servants' staircases). We can see where the builds of the 1960s/1970s social experiments failed and surely why they failed too. We should surely be able to build good homes for people to live well in, even if they have to be small!