AIBU to buy a house with terrible parking?

[Seaandsand83]

We currently live in a 2 bed terraced and have found a fantastic 4 bed semi with big beautiful rooms, well within our price range. We'd have enough money to build an extension on the back for a really spacious Kitchen diner. However, the parking situation is terrible. There is only parking on one side of the road and it is always full. There are a few spaces about a 1 or 2 min walk way, round the corner. I know that doesn't sound far but if I have done a food shop it would mean a few trips back and forth

We are in a position to put an offer on but AIBU to buy a house which is perfect for us but with such bad parking?

There is a reason O/P why this house is up for sale. There is a very high probability that they are selling up because of the parking problem.

Of course they would never admit to that......

There is a very high probability that they are selling up because of the parking problem.

you don't even know if they have a car

That's true Thumbwitches, but usually the reason why parking is difficult in an area is because there aren't any private parking spaces for anyone, so everyone is using the onstreet spaces! So it's unlikely to be a distinguishing feature from the houses nearby in sales terms. You're right to be wary of suspiciously cheap houses though. In this case I'd be most suspicious of a reason other than parking for it being cheap though! That could entail a whole lot more headaches than where to unload the shopping...

It's not worth the aggro and that's why the house is so affordable.

Could you put a driveway on your property? Could you remove any front garden and drop the kerb?

I wouldn't buy a house with bad parking unless absolutely desperate.

Zillions of houses in towns don't have their own private parking. That's not why they're occasionally sold on!!! Get a grip. You'd think no-one on this thread had ever set foot outside the suburbs.

"Zillions of houses in towns don't have their own private parking. That's not why they're occasionally sold on!!! Get a grip. You'd think no-one on this thread had ever set foot outside the suburbs."

Exactly this! It's the exception rather than the rule in most larger towns and cities for a house to have its own parking.

Ours is a London Borough, a long way from the city and it still has permit holders parking. Even where every house has a driveway.

I wouldn't buy it. Trying to find somewhere to park every night could be really stressful you would end up resenting the place.

We have the opposite problem. Our house stands way back from the road and we have a drive long enough to accommodate about six cars BUT the entrance to our drive is literally just wide enough to get a car through with about six inches clearance on either side. We can’t widen it because there’s an old stone cottage at the bottom of the drive and one wall is theirs and the wall on the other side is a retaining wall for our elevated garden. You have to pull well over half way across the road before you can turn or you’d hit the wall.

Our road is a very old one which in times gone by was little more than a farm track. There is now a row of terraced and semi detached houses across the road and not one of them has off road parking. At each house there are either two cars or two cars and a works van - so we have Mr Openreach, Mr Plumbco and Mr Roofing among others as well as all the cars.

There is also a school at the bottom of our road which has doubled in size since we first lived here when they closed another school and moved all the kids there. Then, they added in a special needs school and an adult learning centre. The traffic at school times is fucking dreadful! If I’m trying to reverse out of my drive, I have to try and negotiate parked cars or transit vans parked opposite and take my life in my hands trying to avoid the school run lot who all seem to think this short narrow road is a racetrack. I’m seriously not a bad driver - I drove all over the country for work until recently- but THREE times I’ve knocked one of the cars parked opposite our drive. Every time it’s cost me £200 or £300 to pay for their repair.

We bought our house 40 years ago and one of the reasons was for the driveway and how quiet this road was. We didn’t bargain for all the crap that’s happened since. Our road is one giant carpark and when people opposite have visitors they have no compunction at all about blocking our drive. When I was working shifts as a theatre nurse I had to go knocking on people’s doors asking their visitors to move their cars so I could go to work. One CF said ‘we didn’t expect anybody to want to go out at this time of night.’

It doesn’t matter how bloody stupidly somebody has parked their car. You hit it, it’s your fault.