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????

We found it so frustrating when we were house hunting. We had a small 1960’s house on a large plot but extending would have cost way too much. Downstairs was reasonably sized but 2 double bedrooms and the smallest box room and only 1 bathroom toilet drove me mad.
What I would have loved would be a large 3 bed detached with a large kitchen diner and a utility room but was beyond our price bracket.
we now live in a 4 bed mid terraced 3 storey townhouse as it gave us the bigger bedrooms we needed plus extra bathrooms which again needed with teens.
I think there is a compromise on most peoples house wish list but I agree from spending hours house hunting a lot of properties don’t have an ideal layout or large enough bedrooms

You have a good point.
My childhood home was a terraced house, bathroom downstairs. The 3 bedrooms are better sized than the house I am in now.
My daughter's bedroom is tiny, she can only have her bed under the window as it won't fit anywhere else.
Both homes are owned by local authorities.

It's interesting that in Europe, on an EA board, it's easy to state a property is T3 or something, and everyone understands exactly what is for sale. Plus, there's a built sq m measurement and a plot size. I think most of the UK is functionally innumerate.

New builds have better dimensions for bedrooms, no box rooms. Many are doing special deals at the moment on price and extras.

Buy a cheaper 2 bed and extend into the loft?
Many houses are adaptable to suit different ppls needs.

I think some people really do value a downstairs loo as they are thinking about potty training and recently potty trained kids, and about older relatives who may have issues with stairs.

I agree about bedrooms though. I'm not space greedy, but would love it if DD2's room was the same size as DD1's. She's not old enough to complain yet, but...

The UK has pretty small homes by developed-country standards (though not the smallest). I am a permanent resident of Japan and often get comments from people about the Japanese having tiny homes, especially from the older generation who are still rattling about in their big houses and who remember all the stories about "rabbit hutch homes in Japan" from back in the 1990s. Actually, homes are small in Japan, but UK ones are about the same size. Since the 90s, Japanese floorspace per person has increased, while that for the UK has gone down, as newbuilds are mostly very small and huge numbers of young Brits are in houseshares with very little space each.

It's partly about population density but that's not the whole story. The UK has similar floorspace per person as Japan now, even though Japan is somewhat more densely populated. And the Netherlands is much more densely populated than either Japan or the UK, has a higher percentage of people clustered in particular areas, and yet STILL has significantly more floor space per person - see the chart.

Roughly speaking, the UK is a densely populated country which is reluctant to release land for building (so, less land available to build on), but is unwilling to make the kind of concessions which you need to make if you want to be able to live comfortably with less land (ie. you need to tolerate taller buildings and restrict car use).

The Dutch are more comfortable with taller buildings - more tall narrow townhouses with many floors, and also more apartment-living, compared with the British. This adds extra space per person because you're literally adding extra space with each storey. If you tore down a row of eight little two-storey houses and replaced it with an eight storey apartment block and then put the inhabitants back in, they could have an apartment the length of the entire road each; that's a grossly simplified example, but roughly speaking, we've increased floor space per person in Tokyo largely by getting rid of little old houses and building big condos in their place.

The Dutch have also shifted more towards biking, walking and public transport use and restrict car use in cities. Cars take up loads and loads of space, both for driving (roads) and when they are parked (parking areas). If you don't have to provide as much road area and all these parking spaces in every city, it releases huge amounts of land which can then enable bigger homes (or more green space).

The British, for cultural and historical reasons, a) don't want to live in flats or live near public transport stops/stations and do want to drive everywhere, so require loads of land to be sacrificed to roads and parking spaces, BUT also b) don't want to release lots of land because they don't want to build on the greenbelt and create American-style sprawling cities. The result is very small dwellings.

Yeah, but this goes back to what I was saying about adding more floors. It's a way of adding space.

The other way of doing this is to divide space into horizontal strips rather than vertical strips-- that is, have apartments, allowing you to have one-level living space and also freeing up a bit of extra space due to not needing all the stairs and landings. But flats are not very popular in the UK. A lot of people seem to think they are not "proper home" for children.

Or, the British could release more land for building, but nobody wants to do that, do they? Similarly, not many people seem interested in shifting towards public transport and bikes like the Dutch etc. so that every city would not have to waste tons of space to car parking and roads.

I'm sure some developers could do a better job, but at the end of the day, they are bound by the same laws of physics that the rest of us are.

I agree with you, except I hate when it's a two storey and all the rooms are together. I hate shared walls between bedrooms

OP has a point though - a well designed smaller house is impossible to find and it should not be.

I feel like building contractors get away with bloody murder. More should be demanded from them - in terms of internal layout and extranal community planning too.

Windows are terrrible, basic storage non existent, plastic pretending to be wood, paper thin wood veneer on everything making acoustics terrible, and of course the shelf life of that will be short.

With weather like ours front and back doors get a lot of action but you can only fit in side ways in most new builds from what I can see - and no where for a wet coat/boots/brolly.

Good luck op - not easy.

Fyi - my friend just went through this - she ended up changing the downstairs around a bit to accomodate another bedroom. It worked quite well actually.

Yes agree.

The UK is full of greedy developers building shoebox houses, trying to squeeze as many houses onto a plot of land as possible. And still charging a premium! Wouldn't mind if they were making affordable homes to help underprivileged families but no, not the case.

Find one that needs some work doing and extend to suit

Also, coming from a foreigner, why don't UK houses have basements? I've lived all over Europe and I don't think I've ever seen a house without one. That's where the heating is, often the utility room and of course tons of storage. Just a cost issue or is the ground different?

Some do these days - I'm told there are subsidence issues in some parts of London due to all the people building "iceberg houses"!

I think damp may be an issue for basements (unless very well maintained) in this rainy island, tho.

I bought a Victoria 2 up 2 down that had been extended out the back to create. Large kitchen diner.

We then later looked at moving to a 3 bed but it didn't make sense - we got a tiny 3rd bedroom and in most cases lost the large kitchen diner.

We extended into the loft for way way less than the cost of moving and end up with 3 beds - one really quite large with enough space for a dedicated office area, one good size double and one small double room.

Our first house was a 90's 2 bed new build on shared ownership- it had 2 double bedrooms. The non shared ownership properties on the development had one double and one single bedroom - the 100% ownership price was the same. Property built for social housing has more rules to comply with re sizes & storage than commercially built property. If you look at knocking through a 4 bed you'll devalue the house as despite its liveability when you come to sell it will be priced as a 3 bed.

@Orangello probably a number of reasons. Our house is built on solid rock, you only have to go down about 6ft in our garden to come across it.
@Kokeshi123 I was really worried about potty training as we only have 1 loo (upstairs). 4 months since starting (so we’re still having some accidents) but DS 2.5yo just walks upstairs. I think it’s one of those things that I presumed would be an issue but when you’re in it is absolutely fine.

@Naptrappedmummy it’s awful the way houses are built nowadays. We have a 3 bed Victorian semi. It has its issues (access isn’t great) but has 3 doubles, loads of storage, parking, a garden and a separate utility space. They exist but they’re hard to find.