Just buy a 5 bed......

[InBedBy10]

.......This was said repeatedly on another thread, where the OP was trying to figure out bedroom situations with kids and step kids.

Am I the only one who thinks Mumsnet is breathtakingly out of touch? Most people I know have struggled to get a basic 3 bed. Alot cant even get that. Casually telling someone to "just buy a 5 bed" , like its so easy is down right moronic in my view. The housing crisis is well publicised. You cant be that stupid!

Very different scenario. Many people grow up sharing with a sibling, that’s not the issue.

Presumably when you shared with your sister as a teen is wasn’t a result of being forced to move in with another family and needing to share when you’d previously had your own room.

Wonder if the kids have been consulted on their feelings about blending with other children.

Exactly!

that OP also had the decision not to blend families and frankly she needed to hear that if she couldn’t get a 5 bed then disrupting DC in the proposed manner was unfair and unreasonable.

They have two children each from previous relationships. It's hardly Watership Down.

Maybe the parents have options, like converting a loft, buying in a cheaper area etc and can get away with buying a 4 bed?

I think it's more of a dig about parents selfishly 'blending' families when they can't accommodate all family members than an assumption they can afford to that. They know they can't afford to do it and are passive aggressively telling they're wrong.

Unlikely. They'll just be told that this is what's happening. Tough.

Yeah that's fair enough

As usual on MN the OP is choosing one part of a suggestion about specific circumstances to get all angsty about.
5 bed houses do exist and there are plenty that can be affordable. Not down in the south east obviously but not all MN live in affluent areas. There are choices in this situation.
Don’t blend families - all DC’s are suitably housed at the moment it’s the parents who want to change this.
Buy a bigger house, probably in a cheaper area
Buy something that has room for a conversion
Make teenagers who aren’t related share a house with two of them feeling resentful which will affect the family dynamic.
Dont keep a room for your DC at Uni and potentially never see them, damaging the relationship irrevocably.
Yet OP here feels the need to get all cross and post about one of those choices.
Despite many PP’s explaining the nuances they continue to feel offended by the views of strangers on the internet.
Typical MN.

My thoughts precisely. They’ll just have it foisted on them and have to get on with it.

Agree OP. Posters on here also seem to think it's ludicrous if siblings have to share. I shared with 3 sisters! It hasn't done me any harm (I think 😂). In fact it makes me appreciate what I do have and how lucky I am.

Haven't read the thread but if anyone has used the word 'just' before 'buy a five bed' I'll eat my hat.

Perhaps people could not move in with a partner when it is detrimental to the children involved. Completely selfish.

Surely the point of asking a question is to get a range of views, from a range of people. Some will be pertinent and some will be pointless.

I think the point people were making was that if she wanted to move in with three other people, they would need a five bed. I agree that sometimes it’s an outlandish proposal but for two people selling a three bed each it’s not impossible, although would probably mean moving to less desirable location. If I said I wanted to live with my sister and her family people would rightly point out that I would need to buy a bigger house. If that wasn’t feasible then it would be miserable to combine households. For those saying they shared with five siblings and it never did them any harm, I would say there is a different in sharing a room with a sibling rather than a random person.

I think the point was that the kids had their own rooms in their house and then when blending the family they would not. For me the comment was stay put until you can afford not to completely disrupt their lives. I read it as tongue in cheek

I do agree with you on principle but on that particular thread, it was a case of either move to a cheaper area / partition off a room etc to get 5 bedrooms or don't move in together.
In the particular circumstances of the OP in that thread, and considering the ages of the children / what they were already being asked to sacrifice, not giving each a bedroom would have yielded some serious relational damage down the line.

It's the wrong thread to pick on.

It's just me me me mentality. If they put their DC first they'd have separate homes to prioritise the living arrangements for the DC. They are what matters.

There was a hilarious thread recently about the horrors of having to slum it in a flat.Imagine -no garden or spare room!

As you say, it’s about the adults and the kids will have to crack on

Oh I know. Hilarious. 😂

I bet they use a toilet brush too!

Where I live, there often isn’t much difference between a four and a five bed in price. In fact I sold my last four bed house for
£50k more than my next door neighbour’s five bed. We had more room downstairs, they had more bedrooms.

Kids need a safe, warm roof over their heads. Their own room would be nice but it's a luxury most cant afford.

It's funny how you criticise other posters for making assumptions based only on their own experience and then do exactly the same.

Is it true that a child having their own bedroom is "a luxury most can't afford"? That's not my experience but I recognise that my experience is not universal.

So I have found this report that takes a detailed look at overcrowding in UK housing. It reveals that about one in five children live in overcrowded homes, defined by such things as opposite sex children over 10 sharing a bedroom. It's not quite a perfect match to "kids sharing a bedroom" but it does suggest that most people don't experience separate bedrooms as some unobtainable luxury.

https://www.housing.org.uk/globalassets/files/resource-files/overcrowding-in-england-april-2023.pdf

It's really easy for any of us to think that we are living an "ordinary" life, but it goes both ways. We all need to remember that anyone can post on Mumsnet. They may be fabulously wealthy or horribly poor or anywhere in between. We all need to remember that our own lives are always individual. What's ordinary to one person isn't ordinary for everyone.

So we just write the idea off and never aim to achieve anything more because of the financial or emotional costs? How do you think people do well in life?… do you think they think nah that’s to emotionally challenging so I’ll just sit here and do nothing? No people get up and make shit happen