British housing standards (long...)

[wanttounderstand]

Wasn’t sure whether this would be better in living overseas, but I’ll try here…

Not from the UK originally, but have lived here for a long time. Looking for a property I find the standard British houses quite badly planned and some common features really annoy me. In a way it is interesting that different countries have such different preferences – I read a thread a while ago where someone posted a link to a house with a bedroom on the ground floor (in addition to a few on the first floor) and many people seemed to find that odd. In my home country it is a great bonus that not all bedrooms are next to each other, e.g. for parents, when the children are old enough to (and want to!) have more privacy.

So I’d be interested in trying to understand British priorities…

I should preface this by saying that I accept that there is less space generally in the UK, so properties are generally, in my opinion, tiny. Especially the “extra” areas seem soo small: very often there are no hallways, but you get straight into a room (the lounge e.g.). Where do you hang your jackets/leave your bags? And in winter with dirty shoes, how can anyone want to walk straight into the lounge? Sometimes if there is a hall, it is so small that even a tiny coathanger would be hard to fit. And a few times I have seen properties where there are hooks for jackets in the downstairs toilet!

(And there are no laundry rooms and very little storage – annoying, but understandable, space reasons of course!)

Taps – in the four countries I have lived, the UK is the only one where mixers, to get one flow, is not the only thing used. Why do many people insist of having two taps, often at opposite ends of the sink, so that you'll intermittently burn or freeze your hands? And why are the taps so short that you basically have to stroke the back of the sink to hold your hands in the water flow? This is almost more common than not I'd say - and in public places I reeeally do not feel an urge to stroke the sink…

Windows – apart from very modern flats and houses, the windows are often really small (and often there is a whole long lounge wall with only one small window). Why no desire to get light in? Sometimes the windows cannot be opened, but there is a tiny one at the top that is the only one that opens. (The fact that it is so much more energy efficient to open a window a lot - or, even better, lots of windows - for a short time and then closing them, instead of having a tiny one open all day, is apparently unknown!)

Double glazed windows are still a novelty in places, whereas other cold parts of the world have triple glazed windows as standard. Why feed energy companies more than necessary?

And when I search for new properties, why oh why is it not possible to search for properties based on their sizes – a 3 bed property can vary from 320 (yes, I have seen that!) to 1200 sq ft, but cleeearly don’t appeal to the same people, so it is completely pointless to use bedrooms as a search criterion…

So, tell me what you find really good or really annoying with properties, and what you have seen in other countries that you thought was strange!

I think it's that the housing stock is so old, it's sort of 'always been that way'. I read once where a poster would be scared if her bedroom was on the ground floor because of burglars. I nearly did spit my coffee out at that! Okaaay, so if you're upstair asleep you're safer?

I am from Australia and having a double storey house is seen as a bit unusual (well it used to be) and I miss living in a 'bungalow'. Being attached to another house is unsual for me too but we are end of terrace and have the quietest neighbours on our joined wall so we are very lucky.

The window thing, once again I think it's because way back then, before double glazing etc, a smaller window meant less cold in but enough light if needed but like you can't understand why they don't put in a bigger window. I am someone who does not sash windows at all. I can't understand why you wouldn't upgrade to a lovely draught free double/triple glazed window. When we were looking to buy, any house that had sash original windows were struck from my list.

Be interested in reading the other replies!

welcome to 2014 - how was the journey from 1970? Because that is evidently when you did your survey of the entire British housing stock. Quite a lot has been built or renovated since then.

BTW you CAN find out property sizes. Most online details have floorplans with measurements. The EPC document is compulsory for all properties advertised for sale or rent and that does the sums for you and gives the area of the property in square metres. Use of a calculator will enable you to convert to your old-style units.

Your 'most' and 'very often'....well, not in the houses I've seen and I've viewed a lot in the last two years. We have mixer taps, double glazing and houses with storage. Guessing you have too little money for the area you want to live in and so are looking at tiny conversions.

you mention the houses and rooms being small. I think you have not lived in Japan or other countries with a dense population.

Lack of mixer taps is due to the plumbing and water supply system in UK being relatively low. London and some other cities have had piped water for several hundred years (some Roman pipes were still part of the network in living memory) and the cost of changing to a modern high-pressure system, and the liability of all the bursts and leaks it would cause in equipment and pipes designed for low pressure, has never seemed worthwhile. The system was originally intended to cope with fluctuating and unreliable pressure, hence a storage tank in each home (usually in the loft) to run all but the drinking water taps. You may have been in countries where the water supply is turned off at certain times, to ration it, and all the taps stop working.

Size of windows varies with the climate of the country, and the cost of energy. For example USA has traditionally had a cheap energy policy, and you will see homes with great expanses of glass. This is of no consequence if the cost of heating in winter, and air conditioning in summer, are as unimportant as energy conservation and climate change.

oh yes, small rooms - thinking about my visits to Singapore and Hong Kong. We have much to appreciate.

are you an American, OP? It does sound like it..

I am Irish so very similar climate and am always amazed at houses here built without porches or big halls which are a godsend In wet countries. All my family at home have then (or added them on).

After living in Germany I miss utility and storage rooms. Even blocks of flats had storage and utility areas built in. Very sensible design.

OP a lot of these are historical.

small windows in old houses are due to heating costs and difficulties. The irony in your post is that houses built between the war and the 1990s had much bigger windows, and then modern houses went small for energy conservation again. Now the trend is larger for light!

Double glazing wasn't around when most of our housing stock was built, so unless someone has put it in it doesn't have it. Having said that, most houses I see have been updated and do have it. Not sure where you are looking.

water taps - it comes form the old system of hot water tanks and cold water tanks, the systems had to be separate. The kitchen tap was from the mains, and so could be a mixer. Th move away form this is relatively new I think and fairly slow, as it means replumbing, so you still see a lot of separate taps.

People in the UK are obsessed with period features.
Many don't want to modernise their house or replace single glazed sash windows - there was a massive thread on here recently with loads of people wringing their hands about this.

Thank you for all responses, have definitely learnt some things! But no, am not American - I in turn find the standard American house massive, read somewhere that the average is over 200 sq m, that is big! - but Scandinavian, where a standard house is probably 120-150 sq metres (1300-1500 sq ft), so many places here seem small. (And no, have not lived in Asia, only four European countries!)

@PossumPoo, completely with you on the windows, why anyone would want them...

@Specialsubject, I am sharing my experience, you are welcome to add yours. No, am not looking at tiny conversions, prefer newer things built to be what they are. Re property sizes, I think I specified searching for properties based on sizes - I have property looked at close to 500 properties online now (not sure where we want to go), and oh the time it would have saved me if I didn't have to click the three extra time + often waiting time for popups with floorplans to open to see the sizes.

@PigletJohn and steppemum, very interesting! What you wrote explains the bad showers too ;-)

@turkeyboots, oh yes, German houses :-)

Still hard to understand why not everyone immediately switches to triple glazing though... or why the taps are so close to the back of the sink...

Even switching to double glazing from single glazing is really expensive and the payback time is really long, over ten years. Many people here don't stay in properties that long and of course many don't have the cash and don't want to buy on credit. There are ways to keep warm and keep energy costs down without double glazing.

By the way I live in an old house, 18-something and we have really large windows. I thought old houses had large windows to get as much light in pre-electricity.

have a word with rightmove about the search, it's not our fault. And new builds are notorious for being tiny and badly designed. Buy an older house.

But I have to say that the whole tone of your post was 'UK housing is crap', a lot of it did sound very 70s and I was expecting the next one to be 'why do you all have such bad teeth?'

if our dead-from-the-neck-up politicians took VAT off energy saving measures such as insulation, better glazing etc then more would get done. But no, we have fuckwit measures such as the useless 'green deal'.

I wholeheartedly agree re. taps!
The childrens' school bathrooms were renovated and when the head showed them off I nearly asked if they had ordered joke taps!

I also cannot understand why you would have windows that open to the outside only or not at all. I miss the German windows you can put on "kip" and clean yourself.

The two taps thing is because usually hot water is from a tank which has a header tank in the loft and is therefore not potable. Now that combi boilers are more popular you should see mixer taps become more popular.

My Australian cousins thought it was weird that we don't usually have aircon in our houses. They were here one summer and were too hot and fair enough there are usually a few weeks where it's too hot but it's not the norm. Likewise when I was in Australia for their winter I was freezing. No central heating.

I think the cost of triple glazing v double glazing would explain why it isn't used. Double glazing is fine most of the time, so triple seen as an unnecessary expense.
Also, I have only heard of triple glazing in the last 10 years or so, I am not sure it was available before.

I don't like downstairs bedrooms.

I don't mind it if is is a large well laid out bungalow, with bedrooms to one end and living to the other, but that is pretty rare here. I like having the 'public' part of my house, and the 'private' part, so that I don't feel visitors could wander past and see my unmade bed. For the same reason, I hate houses with only an upstairs loo, and conversely hate those with a downstairs bathroom! Need upstairs bathroom and a downstairs loo as well.

You mentioned coat hooks in the downstairs loo, this is/was quite usual. When I was a kid we referred to the downstairs loo as the cloakroom, and in many houses it would double as coat storage. Most now would be too small.

When I went to Holland I was amazed that most houses are built with the attic as a study and a laundry room. It still does my head in to have the laundry upstairs, but of course it is good use of space. But then Dutch houses have the smallest kitchen in the world, you couldn't do a Great British Bake off cake in most Dutch kitchens

Because it was one of the first countries to industrialise, Britain has a longer history of building cheap housing for the masses. This is what most people live in now - and pay a premium for, if in London or the SE.

There was a window tax on houses until about the 1850s, so a financial incentive to keep windows small/nonexistant in older properties.

I also think that a lot of Europe had a good go at rebuilding significant proportions of their cities after WW2, and whilst the UK did suffer especially in London and Coventry, it wasn't to the same extent as in Germany, for example. The Parker Morris standards did produce some pretty good houses; it was such a shame they were repealed.

I totally agree about the size of taps though!

And WEES about triple glazing - the UK doesn't actually get that cold, so they payback time on triple glazing is ridiculous.

exactly - we live in a fairly benign climate, not an unsustainable desert and so don't need air-con. It's great.

I also love our decent sockets, never seen a design anywhere near as good. They hold the plug solidly and are failsafe. unless you put a socket cover in.

If you had to choose, then I think it's far more helpful to be able to search by the number of bedrooms rather than the sq feet/metres.

Apart from the fact the measurements wouldn't mean anything to me, when looking for a house, the number of rooms is the most important feature (after location), not the actual size of them. If I wanted 4 bedrooms, then I'd not be swayed by 3 bigger ones, where the sq footage might be bigger, but I'd have 2 of my dcs fighting sharing.

Oh yes, our sockets are fab! There's a few great pieces on the web written by foreigners who have seen the light of the great UK plug. They're fab (until you stand on one).

OP, I'm Scandinavian too but lived in London for about 10 years. I recognise a lot of the points you make but I also see a lot of positives about housing in the UK compared to what it is in Scandinavia. Older properties have much more character, there are many more actual houses here rather than flats/appartments etc. On the whole I try not to do the "we had it better where I'm from" thing because well, I have chosen to live here and not there.

The only thing I really miss is a big hallway with plenty of space for shoes, coats etc. But on the other hand it probably wouldn't be a good use of space if it meant living spaces were smaller.

I don't find the taps shorter than some Scandinavian ones, by the way. And in any case it's a very easy thing to change in your house very cheaply.

Will someone post comparative tap pics please?

Every country has its housing quirks. We're in the USA and I find the layout of homes here very wasteful. You would probably like it, OP, because there is a ton of storage space and built-in closets etc but I would rather have more rooms than some useless expanse of hallway or a huge walk-in closet. Also the heating systems are woefully inefficient, where I am at least, might be different in colder states.

If you don't like the housing stock in the UK, why would you buy there? I find that a lot of the housing stock in the UK is badly maintained, for example, I think because housing is such a pyramid scheme where you buy a house as a 'foot on the ladder' to move up from later, unlike Germany, for example, where anyone buying a home will probably be staying in it long-term and have an incentive to maintain it well.

Home maintenance seems largely cosmetic in the UK so every property I ever saw there, renting or buying, had a crap heating system / boiler but lots of cosmetic paintwork or DIY projects that are cheap to do like shelving etc. The structure of the UK property market disincentivizes long-term investment, I think.

another one looking at the wrong houses...what a silly generalisation.

People have covered a lot of the stuff, but I think that the taps to the back of the sink is because they're old, and they're assuming you actually want to use the sink to wash in, so the taps are there to fill the sink, and be out of the way of using the sink, rather than to put your hands under iyswim

I got a marvellous bruise in the middle of my forehead bending down to splash my face in a sink with a mixer tap, it's strange what you get used to.

Searching by size is just that we don't really think of that, so no-one's implemented it.

Triple glazing costs a fortune. I'll stick with plain old double until I have to pay to re-furbish.