Reading this thread makes me wonder how we have just been (and in some places still are going) through a time where every single house on the market got snapped up as soon as it was on the market, often with a bidding war.
From the sounds of it, most of you would hate my house. It’s on a fairly busy road, but set a long way back and it has a four car drive, plus front garden. No garage, but no parking issues locally either. It has a tiny square hall with just enough room to hang coats and then you are straight into the living room, which leads to the kitchen. The only toilet is off a rear lobby area, that also leads to the door to the back garden, so two doors to the kitchen, but still downstairs and the only loo. Bathroom is off the other corner of the kitchen through a single door.
BUT, it is cute, quirky and cottagey. Still has all it’s original character, including deep skirting boards, fire places, high ceilings, picture rails and original doors. It has 3 decent sized double bedrooms upstairs and a long, south-facing back garden, backing onto a quiet park. It isn’t overlooked at all and has lovely neighbours both sides.
It’s less than two minutes walk into the village and 30 seconds into the park, plus there are country walks at either end of the road and three other lovely parks within a 20 minute walk. It’s a 25 minute walk to the next two villages and a ten minute drive into the nearest town. Schools are excellent and people fight to buy here for that reason. Primary school is literally a 4 minute walk door-to-door and the secondary school is a 20 minute walk. The bus into town takes 10 minutes as well or you can walk to the next village and catch a train to the nearest city in under half an hour or London in the opposite direction.
We are in the process of planning an extension, to include a second shower room, toilet and ground floor bedroom for my disabled dc. We were going to do a two storey extension and add a bathroom upstairs before prices became ridiculous for building work, but will be making sure foundations can accommodate a second storey sometime in the future. We’re also updating and renovating the rest of the house. This is our forever home and we can see past the slightly inconvenient quirks re having to go through the living room to the kitchen and ground floor bathrooms/toilets.
Imho, if you are too prescriptive about the houses you absolutely won’t view, you might miss an absolute charm. Personally, I really dislike the fact that all the houses I see listed online look the same, with similar kitchens and decor (mostly grey) and very little true character, but similar accessories in each one bought in an attempt. to make things look a little bit more interesting. Which I suppose is why I like this one, that hasn’t been messed about with and modernised to the point of losing all it’s character.
When we’ve been looking, the only thing that really put me off viewing was parking issues, as that’s something you really can’t do anything about and is a real pain to live with if it becomes problematic, especially if you have dc with physical disabilities that need the car parked close to the house.