What's your number 1 top pet hate?

[HildaHosmede]

Just curious.

If you're house-hunting, what's the top thing that will make you stop looking at a listing and move on straight away?

For me, it's unequal bedroom sizes. We're looking at 4-beds and there are SO many that have one absolutely massive room, two decent sized doubles and one tiny box room. ARRGHH.

We have 3 dc and don't want to put one in a 7x6 box whilst the other two enjoy large double rooms. It's an absolute deal breaker for us and as soon as I see huge disparity in bedroom sizes it's 'FFS next' no matter how good the rest of the house is (unless the walls upstairs could be easily reconfigured which they usually can't).

Having an alleyway bordering the house/garden
On the same street as a school
Front door opening into the living room (unless this could be changed)

Stairs off the living area. It made the room hard to heat and you could hear the upstairs toilet being used very clearly.

No driveway, absolute deal breaker
Tiny box room or half the bedroom taken up by the stair bulkhead
Any sort of shared driveway, garden etc although we have a shared alley which is fine

We have a windowless ensuite right beside the bed. Hate it. But it's the only upstairs bathroom, another pet hate.

I have an alley and the other side of it is a school! Both were listed as potential issues on my survey (just in case I hadn't noticed the huge school next door 😂) but neither bother me.

Leasehold

Sloping gardens (one memorable viewing had a small cliff-face outside the kitchen window, with a flight of stairs up to the garden, and a railway line at the end of the garden. Ideal with young children)

Shared anything

Same street as a school or anywhere where parking is likely to be a regular pain

A conservation area where you need to get permission from a curmudgeonly retired accountant as well as the local council to paint your door / replace drafty windows etc, and the work can then only be done by a team of geese hatched from eggs laid by King Charles.

Open plan where the kitchen is the dining room is the living room. Jog on.

Some of these are very much linked to price though- front doors that open into the living room, lack of downstairs toilet space etc usually are due to smaller therefore cheaper homes!

For me I would never entertain a new build whether £80k or £800k. Just not for me.

Parking is handy but street parking would be fine if my dream house otherwise! Same with downstairs toilet- a bonus but not a deal breaker.

I also hate sinks on islands!

Decking.

Totally open plan downstairs. Quite like kitchen/diner but like my lounge to be separate.

Can’t bear a huge master bedroom, such a waste of space unless you could make a walk in wardrobe in part of it.
Too many en-suites, hate cleaning bathrooms.
No frontage.
No surrounding greenery.
Small windows so dark and dingy.
No storage.
No utility room.
Tiny kitchens.
Dinning table in a lounge.
Totally open plan.
Luckily my house has none of the above although it’s not perfect.

Houses with loads of bedrooms and bathrooms but barely any living space.

I think it's a case of choose your compromise. We are buying a place with a shared access driveway (but with private parking at the end), which at the outset we wouldn't have chosen. However, it ticked most other boxes and once we had an offer on our house, there wasn't an awful lot to choose from in our preferred location. We went into our search with a whole host of what we thought were non-negotiables, several of which were gradually chipped away at as we came to terms with what was available. The one thing we didn't compromise on though was location. I think it helps that relocating out of London, we are used to living with many compromises so everything seems like an upgrade 😀.

En suites everywhere. Seeing a fairly small house which has been bloody carved up to shoehorn ‘bathrooms’ or rather a shitter with attached minuscule shower into already small bedrooms so you can’t even fit furniture in properly.

I don’t even look at new builds…

Pile of rotting wood ideal as a home for rats.

Why people have this instead of a patio I have no idea.

Not detached, no hall, no downstairs loo, no parking, no access to rear except through the house, no bathroom upstairs. Most other things are fixable.

Depends on the new builds. I know someone who used to live in one with big bedrooms and very roomy en-suites. Presumably it depends on the price.

no space in hallway for shoes & coats

No floorplan.

En-suite shoehorned into a bedroom that's nowhere near big enough for it.

When the toilet is completely separate to the sink and shower room.

And rooms that are labelled (and monetised) 'bedroom' that can't find a standard sized single bed in.

Boilers in bedrooms.

Old houses flipped by a developer - ripped out anything of character and installed grey laminate floor, grey tiles in the bathroom, cheapest finishing, plastic everything.

Next to a house with any sort of flag in the window.

Next to any commercial building.

Busy road

Low ceilings
Small windows/ not enough windows
Next to motorway/A road
No garden/only tiny overlooked yard
Small galley kitchen
Not enough bathrooms. Ideally 1 per person

• Kitchen with no space for a table

• Something that has had all the character ripped out (as a pp mentioned, developer fitting it out in cheap grey laminate)

• something that has been badly extended

• en suites shoe-horned in everywhere

• shared gardens or rights of way etc

• on a main road

As a pp said though, so much of it is dependent on price and having to make a compromise somewhere.

Traffic noise. Doesn’t even need to be on a busy road. If I can hear traffic from the back garden I wouldn’t buy.

It's doubtful any of these small rooms can't actually fit a bed in though. I have a really small box room, even by box room standards, but it can still fit a single bed in it. Not room for much else bar a chest of drawers and a cupboard over the bulkhead though.

People on here advise posters with rooms bigger than mine that they're not actually bedrooms and they should be marketed as .5 of a room or as a study etc. My room has been used/sold/bought as a bedroom for the past 80 years without issue.