To share my property porn peeves

[Canigetaoooh]

I love nothing more than a relaxing nosey on rightmove.

but want to share my dislikes.

new homes. Nothing wrong with them to live in. But we see nothing interesting in themes. They all look kinda “same”.

islands with a cooker or the main sink in them. Happy with a prep sink in them though

stairs in the living room

fully open plan

bedrooms off of the kitchen table or utility room

Arty plasterwork that stops to show brickwork. To me, it just looks as if the builders ran out of plaster, and I don't want to spend the next 10 years mentally filling it in.

Endless tones of grey.

Travertine or travertine coloured tiles.

Laminate flooring.

Twee signs.

A bungalow near us has been on the market for almost a year,it was listed as having four bedrooms until the vendor switched estate agents.

Now it has 4/5 bedrooms and the price has gone up by £30k.

I hate a hob on an island too, we redesigned our kitchen about 5 years ago and the sodding kitchen designer man kept putting it there and I kept telling him not to and shocked DH by eventually saying "YOU ARE NOT LISTENING TO ME" in the middle of Wren.

I am also not a fan of the houses where you look at the pictures and can't tell if they have been taken in black and white, or if the house really is so lacking in colour.

Also hate plastic lawns.

Yes, they do . We bought a ( very old) house with exposed beams in the dining room which had been a barn, and they were a dust trap and a spider hotel. DH used to go up a tall ladder every few months and clean them.

And also with very high ceilings, all the heat rises ( basic physics there) we reckoned it was two degrees warmer at beam height than in the floor. I get that if you are bonkers enough to live in a barn conversion ( guilty as charged) this comes with the territory, but when we used to watch Grand Designs, we found ourselves shouting at the Tv ‘ put a ceiling in!’ .

Re listings: please label the photo so I know which room it is . Room dimensions on the floor plan predispose me to really looking at the house. Drone shots from above with the garden outlined are very useful.

Pictures of your champagne bucket and two glasses are completely useless, waste my time and make me think that the current owner is a pretentious wa….r. ( I’m looking at you 89 ……Road)

Isn't there some planning law about that, from a health and hygiene perspective. Maybe I just dreamt it, but to me, I cannot think of a worse location for a toilet. The ones I have seen have always had a corridor to create a degree of separation.

stairs in the living room
I agree OP, we went to visit a property when we were house hunting, and it had a wrought iron spiral staircase in the living room and I was put off it for that reason. DH being a bloke couldn't care less!

A close up of the house number,a glass of Prosecco on the garden table,a vase of flowers on the kitchen windowsill.

No photo of the bathroom or third bedroom though.

Fake grass..so bad for the environment and not as low mateenace as people think. why why
en.suites off every room aswell as main bathroom. no matter how many bedrooms you need one en suite one main bathroom and a separate loo is all you need.
I love open plan to a certain degree. in my old house we had sliding doors dividing the the living room and dining /kitchen open during day and close at eve
love kitchen sink or hob in island. had it also in my old house and miss is. hate ny back to the room even if no one is there.
my loo was also by front door. no guess got smells of poo or hear people going toilet 🤷‍♀️
hate tv up above fireplace they are always too high and get a crick in your neck
furniture that is way to big for the room. craming in a corner sofa then no room for anything else
builders say you shouldn't put radiators under a window as half your heat hoes out the window but agree they shoudl be put behind doors or spaces that are not needed
extensions done with brick different to rest of house- this normally means if they had ti get planning that council want a distinction from old and new. However is has to be done right
pannnelling everywhere god am so fed up of it
modern style kitchens then whack a traditional Belfast sink in the middle..no no
Big American style fridges dominating the room especially when room is small
people trying to do traditional in a new build it doesn't work. you can put a modern twist on old but can't put old on new
lastly tidy up when you getting photos taken. just saw one listing there can't see kitchen counter for all the tesco shopping bags and clutter all over it
oh and roman blinds hate hate them block so much light out they do

Pointless ensuites that make rooms tiny.
Nowhere for coats and shoes.
Wall mounted TVs.

Square toilets and angular baths, no bidet, huge beige tiles and ugly engineered wood floors. Nothing wrong with traditional and original but it's all ripped out.

Open plan and sanitised like a laboratory, no internal walls or doors. Nice house but tiny garden because it has been extended to the limits.

Any new build or de-characterised house that once was a homely home with features.

And 'dining rooms' nowhere near the kitchen!

All these things are so picky, I looked at a really lovely cottage once, it was end terrace, downstairs bathroom off the kitchen, front door opened straight into the sitting room and stairs going straight up from the open plan kitchen/diner. It was a lovely house. Decorated immaculately.

My pet peeve though is the toilet seat left up in photos.

Some of these gripes are financial. If you can't afford much you're less likely to be able to afford space for a hallway or corridors or various other things without shrinking the living space.

Toilet off anything other than a hall way
All one colour ...everywhere!
Kitchen without space for a table
Utility room without room for a washer and a drier
Stairs off living room
Having to walk through rooms to get to other rooms
Dark
Windows divided into small sections
Bidets
Walking straight from the street into the living room
No garage
No drive

In reality if we ever manage to be able to buy a house it'll probably have them all🤣

I was looking at a house yesterday online and it had a photo of a plain glass vase, I mean why?🤷‍♀️

Yes this! Photos where 90% are of the current owners furniture, flowers etc and stuff that they will take with them when they move out.

Cannot get with the open plan. Do people not cook? The smell of food everywhere 🤢Also don't like stairs in the living room .

Kitchen in the living room. Brand new multimillion pound properties with a cinema room, study but kitchen is in the living room - why?
,

@Sisterpita aren't they just kitchens with sofas? If it's a multi million pound property highly unlikely to not have a separate living room.

The fad for such open plan layouts in standard sized family houses.

I can only assume the architects either live in mansions or don't have teenage children/multigenerational living.

Yes, sofas in the kitchen must be impregnated with cooking smells. And you’re trying to watch telly with someone banging around cooking, the dishwasher rumbling, etc etc.

I once went to view a house and the garage was converted into a large kitchen. Very nice. EXCEPT the garage was detached, and what you couldn’t see from the online floor plan was that the connecting corridor was actually just a Perspex cover over an outdoor path. I couldn’t compute wanting a glass of water at night and having to unlock the back door, sprint through the night, unlock the kitchen, and then do the reverse. Bizarre.

Me three. Yuk.

A former colleague of mine has a master bedroom that can only be accessed from outside
I

Fully open plan.
No floorplans on listing
Wide angle photos that distort the shape of rooms.
Grey
Pale pink walls - I dunno, I like pale pink but somehow they just seem to look dirty - just doesn't seem to work.
Badly done diy / decorating.
Black handles on bathroom fixtures.

Stuff we have others on this thread don't like:-
Metro tiles - sorry, love em.
Feature walls - we've a couple of these with bold wallpaper and the colour / pattern would have been too much for the entire room.

Im looking at houses currently to buy, my pet peeves are:

• Open plan (if I didn't want walls and doors I would live in a field, I have kids and pets I need to section the house)

• Door that open straight into the living space (same as above I have toddlers and pets to keep inside)

• Huge kitchen diners (who the fuck wants to sit in the kitchen? same as the open plan issue really... walls people, they exist for practical reasons)

• No storage (what the fuck have people got against cupboards now a days? the amount of people ripping out cupboard to create 'reading nooks' etc... is insane)

• listing that are 'incorrect' (we need a 4 bed+ but so many are listed as a 2 or 3 bed but it then has a conversion of 2 attic rooms... say that then or I'm not going to see it)

• Fitted gas ovens/hobs and gas showers... I want electric

• unwalled stairs straight into the main room (the cats are going to use the banister as a springboard for their acrobatics)

• Bright white everything usually combined with blinding spotlights (as a migraine sufferer its awful)

• Grey everywhere (paint fine, furniture your taking fine but grey tiles, fixtures, flooring etc... its just dull and ugly people)

• Extensions with flat a roof (I live in one currently, I know the roof doesn't last well and leaks, if every other house on the street has a pitched roof why not this one?)

• New kitchens (I'm not paying £20k because you stuck in a cheap new kitchen I'm going to rip straight back out. I'm disabled and need accessibility so those new white gloss wall cabinets are useless to me)

• No chimney breast (its the focal point of a room, stop destroying every ounce of character)

• Those huge deep porcelain sinks (ugly and impractical, give me a nice stainless steal double sink)

• Shower rooms (we have kids, we need a bath)

• I know its rare now but I love a wood window, or at least a fake wood window but everything is the awful white UPVC everywhere now.

• owners declaring they are leaving all their junk behind (nah mate hire a skip. I dont mind if its a really good size fridge/freezer since they are hard to move out or a working nice dishwasher as we need one anyway... otherwise I dont wan't any of your crap, I have my own belongings)

• Artex (everyone hates artex right, and that old 3D wall paper thats a nightmare to get rid of)

• Photos of empty houses that don't say what room Im looking at (is that the living room, the master bedroom, the dining room, the office... bar the kitchen and bathroom you need to give me a clue)

I dont mind unreferbished (old wood paneling, colored bathrooms, ceiling roses etc... all have charm for me), I actually like a galley kitchen, I like 'dark' (light sets off my migraines) and the stone used in the extension doesn't bother me.