Homes Under The Hammer Selfish Ruiners of EVERYTHING

[LNPW]

AIBU to really hate people on HUTH who buy beautiful Victorian family homes and turn them into scruffy flats set for a life of minging curtains and a million wheelie bins parked outside?

I know it makes financial sense to do this if you buy a big property but ffs ... leave the Victorian shit alone!

I watched one where they bought a gorgeous 5 bedroom Victorian terraced house. Huge original fireplaces, stain glass windows etc etc ... it needed a lot of work doing yes but the building itself was amazing.

“So, what are your plans for this gorgeous property”

“Well I’m gonna turn it into flats innit” fuck off

YANBU. Especially when ripping out the period features

Yanbu - I love it when someone buys the property, does it up and actually lives it in themselves.

Urgh yes, it's my dream to save one one day. Naturally they're without parking where we live so it'll have to wait until the DC are older.

I hate this program for exactly the same reason! The bit at the end, where they proudly show off the resulting nasty and pokey looking flats or house for rent, urgh.

I’m on the fence. On the one hand, some of these properties are so beautiful and deserve to be kept maintained as close to the original as possible.

But - on the other. There is a shortage of decent housing and many people cannot get on the property ladder. So making one very large house for one person/family into smaller flats for multiple people / families seems right.

In terms of HUTH - YABU as most folk are buying and doing up purely to make money.

Many of the properties are in such a poor state they are un - mortgageable , hence cash buyer developers buy them . The flats are very popular as not everyone wants a faceless modern flat , preferring the Victorian style of terrace house living .

There are millions of period properties around the country housing businesses, should they be put back to housing stock too ?

Well they do tend o focus very heavily on London and the South East where property prices are out of lot peoples reach ,so the show ends up being about property developers buying a ludicrously expensive house which the presenters gush at a snip of a price ,which they then convert into some bland looking flats etc for as little.as possible to sell for as much as possible and he estate agents always gave about the high end finish

Occasionally I see an old house that was actually something special turned into flats, and that bothers me, but honestly a lot of the old houses people get protective of are basically just the McMansions of their day. They look special and fancy at a glance, but on closer inspection not so much. For every house with stained glass and crown molding and so on that’s actually amazing and should be saved if possible, there’s a ton of houses with craftsmanship that would have been considered average at best in its time. I don’t see the point in any hand-wringing over those.

My pet peeve on that show are the landlords that do the very barest of minimum to a run down house and then let it out.
Reminds me of where I live!
Keep that beige bathroom suite with the side panel that's falling off
Keep the bathroom off the kitchen
Paint over the rubbish woodchip wallpaper job.
Put in the very cheapest carpet you can source.
etc

Rave *

I wish they could stay as single dwellings too, but what about the previous owners who let the house get so dilapidated that a cash buyer and turning it into flats is the only realistic /profitable thing to do?

The horrible cheap carpet - is there a special place where landlords buy that grey carpet.

I agree that I like it best when someone buys a house to live in themselves but I do like it when they a buy a run down terraced house, usually in Stoke or Liverpool, and do a proper renovation turning it back into a decent home for someone.

I worry about Martin

I think it gave me an unrealistic expectation of how much a house renovation would cost & take. On HUTH it's all "it'll take 6 weeks and £4k to paint, new kitchen & bathroom, rewire, carpet and put in a new boiler".

I understand that these grand houses need to become smaller units, but I think there should be two caveats. Firstly, they should be surveyed and key features identified as needing protecting and secondly, they should be able to be re-converted back to single dwellings.

I also hate when they buy it to rent out. It’s never done up with the same love as it would’ve if bought for a family home.

There's nothing wrong with living in a flat, particularly in a national housing shortage, and your post smacks of snobbery OP.

There is everything wrong with the landlords doing it to make a quick buck and not maintaining it.

There was a programme a few years back called My Dream Derelict Home hosted by a guy from Brookside. They did the exact opposite, took really old falling down buildings and brought them back to life TO LIVE IN! It was bloody brilliant.

I am on the fence for the same reasons as above. We do need places to live, and not everyone is a family with four to six children who also need space for the nanny and the maid. That's who those big houses were made for, after all.

I'd also much rather see decent, good quality modern facilities (decent washing machine?) than beautiful fireplaces. I've lived in quite a lot of rented Victorian houses and I really loved the LLs who provided the former, but some didn't half trade on the latter as an excuse for letting it all go to shit.

I love it when you get to the end of each house, where they show the refurb. The camera man always manages to home in on a bit of wonky sealant or a grubby tap.

I also love it when they are bought to live in and the owner doesn't care about the resale value

My favourite one was when the young family in Cornwall bought the cottage they were renting and were able to stay in it and do it up slowly.

Going against the grain here but I think YABU. Victorian isnt shorthand for quality building. Too many houses were shoddily built with the Victorian equivalent of 1980s gob ons (twee little bits of wood and plaster to add 'character').

Victorian houses were never designed for modern living. Our families tend to be smaller. We dont have live in servants getting up at the crack of sparrows to clean and light fires, pepare meals, clean the rooms and do the laundry.

We do these things for ourselves. We dont want the kitchen shut away from the rest of the house. We want a decent amount of indoor plumbing. We want light and air in our rooms not dark and draughty.

The Victorians themselves were not above destroying what went before. Years ago DH worked on an archealogical dig which involved removing Victorian 'improvements' to a Saxon church such as a ghastly lean-to which Victorian builders had plonked on top of part of the old graveyard sometimes straight through the bodies buried there. The Victorian Society wanted this monstrosity preserved.

I don't like this show. It's one of the things that has made us a nation of amateur (often graduating on to full time) property developers, sent property prices and rents rocketing and pushed a whole generation and more into poverty. It's a show about greed. I only enjoy the ones that are bought by someone to live in themselves (which is about, what, 5% of the houses if that).

I do enjoy watching, and also hate when nice houses are split into pokey flats or houses of multiple occupancy and have no parking and surrounded by family homes. Run by slumlords
Best ones are the ones bought to live in. The most spectacular ones are done up for resale but kept as a single dwelling.

YANBU - it is a tradgedy.

I had long wanted to see the inside of a detached Victorian house at the end of our street, imagining the inside as beautiful as the outside. When it was up for sale I saw it online and it was terrible - the inside was totally modern, no character whatsoever. Horrible.