Sick of crap house layouts

[Naptrappedmummy]

A moan thread but probably deserves to be on AIBU…

Looking to buy, 2 kids (boy/girl) so need 3 bedrooms. Every single house without fail either has 2 bedrooms plus a room so tiny you can’t fit a bed and wardrobe comfortably in it, or they’re 4 beds and slightly out of our price range.

Add to that rubbish uphill tiered gardens where you’ll trip and nearly break your neck every 5 minutes, a lack of storage in almost every house (no utility rooms, cupboards, pantries or porches), and just absurd layouts in general which make no use of the space they have and are completely counterintuitive.

All I want is an actual 3 bed with some storage, an ordinary downstairs layout and a flat garden capable of holding a swing and some chairs. Why can’t I have it????

Personally in your situation I'd always want a driveway.
Every road with on street parking has been full of twats who think they own the road outside their house (either by putting up their own signs, or blocking the road with bins).

When you ignore their made-up rules they then get incredibly shirty. One woman threatened my then-partner with a knife for ignoring their home-made no parking sign!

@Fredthefrog we built new stairs directly above our original stairs therefore didn't sacrifice the 3rd bedroom.
Also because we were rewiring we shifted the wall between the 3rd bedroom and master to make it a small double instead of a single/box

Mine is a "shitty three storey new build".

It's got a massive second floor kitchen (hard to get stuff up the stairs but still), plenty of space on floor three and a stupendously large unused loft space that could be made into 2 more bedrooms if required.

Generally the 3 stories will give you more space at the expense of the convenience of having stuff on a single floor.

It works well for me.

Fingers crossed for your search OP, though you could do as we did once and knock a 4ft 'doorway' opening between two bedrooms and build a cupboard/wardrobe (proper walls) into the larger room. You would then at least have a small bedroom with a built in wardrobe!

YABU. I think an assessable downstairs toilet is compulsory in new builds. This saves people moving out if they become disabled or old. It also means that disabled friends and relatives are not excluded. The house you want will have a bigger footprint and probably be more expensive. You may not want an en-suite but wait till you have teenagers.

Im with you on that one. I wouldn’t thank you for an en-suite!!
we live in an Edwardian terraced house and have very big rooms. The smallest bedroom is 10 foot square. We also have a utility room behind our 20 foot x 14 foot kitchen. No drive though and a small courtyard garden. Not ideal when the kids were smaller but suits us now.

Could you look at 2 beds with a view to doing a loft conversion?

Mine is a "shitty three storey new build".

As is mine! 😬🤣

It works for us. We use the first floor 'bedroom 2' behind the lounge as a second lounge for the kids, to keep their stuff contained away from the main lounge. The main lounge is a brilliant size, bright and airy.

We have 3 bedrooms and a study on the top floor. Bedroom 4 is small, but works for DS now. He will probably move downstairs eventually, once they spend their lives in their rooms!

The downstairs loo has a chest of drawers in which we keep towels, tea towels and laundry stuff in, plus we've added a drying rack above the radiator which means we don't often need to use an airer.

It works well for our needs and is also adaptable for the future.

If your children are still young, they can share a room, then you may be able to afford a 4 bed or expand into the loft by the time they need separate rooms.

I was looking for the same a few years ago - 3 proper bed rooms plus a decent sized sitting room.
I gave up and bought a tatty four bed. I looked for a year and needed to get ds onto a school list, so had to make a decision.

I think the issue with UK housing is that you place too much value on how many bedrooms they have rather than the square footage. It's the only country I live in that advertise properties that way, everywhere else it price per square meter/foot that counts. By doing it your way you can get away with having tiny rooms (and they really are very tiny in many cases) as some ads don't even have the total square footage on them.

The person who had my house before me removed most of the storage. I hate her a little bit more every day.

After parking, storage comes next when we buy another house.

I've actually loved the 2 3 storey houses we have rented- it does mean a lot of toing and froing up stairs but both had3 good doubles plus a smaller room that we used for storage and clothes rails etc and both had decent gardens- one was built in 2004 and one in 1996

Link detached. The upstairs is bigger because it goes over the 'link'. I had a 3 double bed reasonable house like that once. In a terrace now so no parking but 3 massive bedrooms (one in the attic).

Maybe look at ex-local authority homes. They tend to be more generous in size.

My parents bought an ex-local authority house in 2001 for a family with two children and a dog. Two bedrooms are large doubles and the third is smaller, but it can still accommodate either a double bed with a chest of drawers or a single bed with room for a desk, wardrobe etc etc. They do have steps in the garden, admittedly, but only down from the patio - once down those 5 steps, they have a vast expanse of grass with room for a shed and a greenhouse, as well as room to play. It also has a downstairs toilet, three built in cupboards and an extra brick coal shed (which they converted into a utility room).

I think people are sometimes a bit snobbish about that sort of home and they miss out on space as a result.

Our house was as you described.....2 large bedrooms & a box room. We now have a loft conversion with the stairs to it leading out of the old box room (there is enough space for a small office there too.)
Obviously you might not want to do that kind of work & prices are ridiculous at the moment but it might be worth thinking about.
I agree that it's annoying (and strange) that so many houses are built in this way, I don't know what the designers were thinking.

Our third bedroom could squeeze a single in it and nothing else - what were these rooms designed for originally?

Guest room, walk in wardrobe, study, home gym maybe. We have a 5 bedroom our smallest room is the dressing room you could squeeze a double bed in it but would leave you very little floor space.

Nearly everyone I know uses their smallest bedroom as storage so developers now seem to account for it. The master is massive but the 2nd and 3rd rooms don't really match + en-suite is small. The original plan was to make the 5th bedroom part of DS room but he got the downstairs mancave. Ours was built in the 1990's.

Could you convert the garage or add a conservatory OP so the kids have a space to share and bedrooms are just for sleeping?

I know exactly what you mean op. When we bought our house we looked at probably 30 houses and all were as you describe.

We wanted it all though, 3 decent sized bedrooms, a large hallway, good sized back and front, built in storage cupboards, garage.

We found most of what we wanted in our 1950s house. But there were compromises.

DNiece and her BF looked at shared ownership and when they crunched the numbers, they worked out that with the service charges, rent and mortgage, they'd be better off renting and carrying on saving until they could afford to buy a flat in the normal way.

They'll be able to save a lot more, and her salary will take a big jump when she's qualified in 2 years time, so they'll be able to get a bigger mortgage. And it'll mean that they'll be able to buy a doer-upper, rather than a new build that's not very well built.

@sleepyscientist it's a 1930s terrace. We'd had the plans drawn up for a loft conversion, along with the savings - used some savings in lockdown (self employed) and then long covid happened, along with Truss and mortgage deal renewal, so not sure what happens when kids get older now.

You can’t generalise like this. My Victorian terrace has no built-in storage other than the kitchen, no under stairs cupboard, landing is 1x1m. Loads of period houses also have crap layouts from being badly extended over time.

People have also mentioned 1930s semis, most of those I’ve seen also have the tiny 3rd bedroom!

Not generalising, just describing my house, which is not the same as yours.

You said look at older properties- I was saying that older properties also frequently have crap layouts so there’s no point looking for a particular period. Unfortunately I think you have to sift through dozens of properties of all types before finding a non-crap gem.

You’re right. I lived in a rented 3 bed semi detached new build. It was a tiny house but had THREE toilets. Tiny kitchen, small living room, downstairs loo, garage. Crappy garden that was on a hill and wasn’t big enough for any play equipment. And then upstairs 3 bedrooms that were quite similar in size, I’d say small double. But the ‘master’ bedroom had an en suite that was almost as big as the bedroom itself. And completely pointless because there was also the family bathroom upstairs, and from the only possible place I could put the bed in that room, it was half the distance to go to the family bathroom than it was to get to the en suite. I ended up using the en suite as a storage room as there was no storage space anywhere else in the house!