Does anybody here live in a mansion or huge house?

[CuppaTeaJanice]

What do you do with all your rooms? Do you just use a few rooms and shut the rest away? Do you have any rooms that you haven't entered for months/years?

I always wondered how people these days live in such a huge place. They were obviously built to accommodate large numbers of maids, servants, plus lots of children as many families had in previous centuries. Surely a modern family with two adults and two or three kids would be rattling around in such a big house.

I'd be really interested to hear from people who are lucky enough to live in a very large house. Is it as wonderful as people would imagine, or do the practicalities (expense, cleaning etc) throw up their own challenges?

I don't. We live in the smallest cottage in the world and a flat in East London. But some of DP's rels live in old piles (some of them are old piles!).

One cousin and his family up in Scotland have opened some of the house up as a conference centre/wedding venue and I think now live in a lodge on the estate (with their eighty seven ferel children).

And some friends in Glocestershire live in a sort of extended commune of brothers, sisters, children and spaniels as none of them can afford their own houses.

We also have some lovely friends in the next village who have spent the past thirty years restoring a wonderful Tudor hall. They have to get permission from English heritage before doing anything at all,and can't have central heating fitted. It is freezing, and their electricity bills (for the three heaters Mr lets Mrs have on) are massive!

I love their house, it is beautiful. But I suspect it's far, far more beautiful to visit than to live in!

Then again, I may just be jealous!

Our family has a farm that originally had 7 bedrooms,but only 2 people live there now and the rooms not in use are shut off.They need too much work to make them useable and we don't have the money.I think 2 bedrooms and 1 attic are safe enough and useable.We also have an old dairy which is slowly collapsing.It is listed apparently,and if restored,would have to involve English Heritage checking everythng and dictating what can and can't be done,so would be an expensive nightmare to even repair it.The floors have fallen through an there are cracks in the wall you could put your hand in.It is late 16th early 17th century I believe and a lovely building,but a liability.

I suspected the reality of living in a big mansion wouldn't be quite as exciting as the fantasy! Such a shame that English Heritage have put such stringent controls on repairing old buildings. It almost defeats the object of the controls being there at all. I understand they can't have people butchering old buildings willy-nilly, but surely an old building repaired with 21st Century materials is better than it crumbling into a heap of rubble and lost forever.

How on earth did people afford to live in the big houses in the olden days? Aside from the huge costs of upkeep they had to pay all their staff. I know there was no minimum wage but it must still have been incredibly expensive.

My BIL lives in a masseeeeve house which has 3 living rooms, one of which is bigger than the whole sq foot of our entire ground floor of our house. Also has a dining room, 2 studies, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms and there are only the 2 adults and 1 child there.

They always sit in the same room and don't really use the rest of the space. Crazy.

I grew up in a 10 bedroomed house, built by my parents in the 1970's as GP's still living in the manor house.

It's bizarre that English Heritage et al make it so difficult for people. Anyone would think they would rather old places just crumbled away.

Live in an 8 bedroom farmhouse, on the face of it it looks lovely and what I always wanted but the reality is that we can't afford to heat it all so three attic bedrooms are freezing/uninhabitable in the winter and the whole lot takes forever to clean. We seem to have lots of nooks and crannies and very old fittings that just don't seem to sparkle no matter how much you scrub.

When I go on holiday I can really appreciate a small kitchen where you can stand still and reach the sink, oven and fridge without walking so far (god that sounds really shockingly pretentious...)

ilikeyoursleeves* - same as your BIL. We rent a large house and basically live in the kitchen and two bedrooms and apart from the utility room and bathrooms we hardly ever go in the rest. There are rooms I have not been in the dining room for several months.

Compared to the price the landlord wanted to sell it for we pay very little for it only just enough to pay for repairs.

It is a ridiculous house but we could not find anything else suitable in the area. It was either this or a flat.

I always tell people not to buy Listed houses unless someone else has put a lot of money into repairs already or thay are at a massive discount. People always underestimate repair costs. If they are big the running costs are also huge. We have no double glazing and it is freezing all the time even with heating full on - which is why we only live in a bit of it just like lovesunnydays says.

I just wanted a 3 1/2 bedroom house with a nice garden like most people.

not a mansion, but we live in the US Midwest, where land is next door to free, so houses are big - we do have a room that we just have no use for, but i still have it looking good - dh has the kind of job where we may need to sell & move at any moment, so the house has to be 'showroom ready' at any moment. there's also a guest room, study & dining room which get minimal use, and dd has a playroom & bedroom, which would be a ridiculous luxury in the uk, but is standard here.

tis a modern house, though, so only needs to have walls painted & furniture arranged - we do turn the heating off in several rooms during the winter. i'm hoping that occasionally family will come over to see us, and we'll open up the spare rooms.

We now live in a 6 bedroom very old listed framhouse, it is beautiful but our children are learning to wera extra clothes, heating is on at a minimum, we have wood burning stoves in playroom, kitchen and sitting room, and radiators turned off in rooms that we don'y use.

Only got to see all my grandfather's house after he died, it had an original Victorian bathroom with a most amazing contraption over an enormous bath. He lived in a quarter of the house and shut the rest off so it was in a state of disrepair when it was sold but could still glimpse how fantastic it would have been in its heyday but whoever owns it now must pay a fortune for its upkeep and staffing.

When kids leave home, DW and I will have 3 rooms between us: one for her, one for me and then a common room for both of us

I did for a while. You tend to cluster in the warmest room! We had a sort of apartment on the middle floor with a master bedroom suite (ante room, dressing room, bathroom, bedroom with sitting area), which led onto a large study that we used as a family room, and DD had a setup across the landing which basically was a large bedroom, dressing room and bathroom. We spent most of our time pottering about in this area, with trips down to the kitchen for supplies.

But we had fabulous parties where we filled the place up. TBH that's what big houses are really for.

Just a quick note on listed buildings

You don't need permission to repair like with like - so if you have a wall and want to repair it with the same materials, that needs no consent at all. For example, a ceiling collapsed, and we had it repaired there and then. In fact, we had it repaired with more modern materials, and again the conservation officer wasn't fussed. What you need permission for is actual changes.

The problem is that if you start to mix old materials and modern materials you genuinely can cause huge damage accidentally - which is what has happened in our house. You'd be astonished at what the well-meaning application of a bit of concrete here and there can do to the structure of a building! They won't always cause damage, but they can.

You need to be good friends with a lime plaster man, and also watch humidity constantly.

The reason it's often cold in large houses is not because people are too mean to put the heating on, it's because if you bake the fabric of the house with central heating it dries everything out and bits start dropping off. It's best to continue to use open fires where possible.

The secret's in the ventilation. Airing rooms and using fireplaces helps.

Lime mortar good, cement bad. Limewash on lime mortar good for breathing as well.