Am I the only one fed up with houses being so small? do others feel the same way?

Mossfarr

Ex local authority house tend to be generously proportioned and well built but not always in nice areas. Having said that you can have neighbours from hell in good areas too!
Older properties are usually bigger, 1930's semis are my favourite properties. They are bigger, and very adaptable as your needs change. larger gardens too.
I live in the North West where property prices are much lower than the South East and plenty of lovely well proportioned houses available.

seashore22

New build houses at the cheaper end of the market are small.

Some people are ok with that, but if it bothers you it might be worth buying an older property.

I wouldn't buy a new build because I've look at the costs versus the space and have decided that they aren't good value for money.

Edit - I've just seen that you aren't looking at new builds, so there are no easy answers. There must be some houses you can live in for your budget though, unless that budget is very small. Space has always been a priority for us, but it has meant some compromises - buying in a cheaper area or a house we had to do a lot of work to or on a busy road. What are your compromises?

SuzieSue

I bought a 3 bed new build 20 years ago. The downstairs is ok, but the bedrooms are very small compared to the house I grew up in. There are only 2 of us and we find the space ok but I don't know how a family would cope.

I would rather have larger bedrooms and at first it did concern me but then I realised that there was nothing I could do about it so I have just accepted it.

stator

I too find it annoying. That's why I bought an old council house built in the 1950s. Very well proportioned and a decent garden.

If you want someone to blame look at thatcher. Before thatcher there were 200,000 houses being built a year, 50% private 50% council. After thatcher there were 100,000 all private.
House builders have to compete for development land. The landowner wants the most money, the most money comes from building the most houses, tiny houses.
It's also exasebated by the governments insistence on 'affordable homes' quotas. Developers have to squeeze in a certain proportion of cheaper houses, on schemes and that means small matchbox houses with matchbox gardens.
The problem could be solved by scrapping quotas and instead allowing new builds to be bigger and instead charging a levy that can be used to purchase houses elsewhere for social housing. The average house size would increase.
You also need to scrap green belt protection and replace it with something more sensible, that allows houses to be built in the south west whilst protecting only the important areas.
I would also give councils back the ability to build houses. If the councils were given the funding and quicker compulsory purchase powers they could oversee house building more efficiently and get a higher quality of housing built. They would purchase land, design a housing estate, parcel up the land with outline planning requirements and then sell off the plots to house builders. Use the profit to fund the next project

paddycharlie

Both old and new houses will have small and large properties which will usually be related to price. If you want a larger home you have to pay for it and house prices in your area may be unrealistic for the average buyer to get a large property either new or old.


I recently purchased a 4 bed new build and all the bedrooms are double rooms so no issues with space. But a lot of 4 bed new builds will have a couple of single bedrooms and very poor storage.

ripplyuk

I moved from an ancient farmhouse with huge rooms, and lots of them, to a 1950's council house. I can just about fit a double bed and a small wardrobe in the main bedroom. The living room can only fit a two seater sofa and a tiny slimline table. There's no way I could fit a table in the kitchen. Not all council-built houses are spacious!

I felt claustrophobic at first and actually kept bumping into things because I just wasn't used to moving about in such a small space. Changing the duvet cover was especially challenging :rotfl:

But now, I love it. It forced me to declutter massively (about 75% of what I owned). It's cheap to heat and quicker to clean. Also, the garden is huge compared to the house, which is a bit strange really!

AdrianC

stator wrote: »

If you want someone to blame look at thatcher.

It's now 28 years since she left office, and there have been five prime ministers, split between both main parties, since.

At what stage will that stop being waved around?

zagubov

AdrianC wrote: »

It's now 28 years since she left office, and there have been five prime ministers, split between both main parties, since.

At what stage will that stop being waved around?

When the effects of her government have worn off.:o

moneyistooshorttomention

As you can see - a lot of us get frustrated with this issue.

It boils down to = too many people in the country and therefore land is expensive.

So houses get smaller and smaller basically with each passing decade and are now "way too small" for standard type houses.

There are only two solutions imo - move to a cheaper part of the country (ie that's the one I took basically) or chuck out even possessions you intend to keep/are hardly "over the top" by any reasonable persons definition.

Either way - most of us have to start being a bit "ingenious" to cope with the small housing most of us have to cram into in this country. So multi-purpose furniture and maximum utilisation of space is necessary. So that means things like:
- buying beds that have storage drawers underneath them
- buying sofas that convert into guest beds (ie if there isnt a guest bedroom available)
- shelves/shelves/shelves everywhere
- choosing the highest height kitchen wall cupboards one can get into the kitchen (and ensuring one has a safe stepladder to get to the highest shelves in those units)
- careful choice of bathroom fittings to maximise use of space

I've done all the above and could still do with more space in my house (ie 2 bedrooms/1 kitchen/1 bathroom/1 sitting room - taking 1000 square feet of space) - but am aware that some new-builds here have got 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms crammed into marginally less square footage than that.

It's not easy to adapt to that being how things are for many of us in this country:cool: - but that is the best you can do, ie "Think outside the box and make absolute maximum possible usage of whatever space you do have".

There are a lot of us in the same boat - and the only consolation is things like viewing photos of those "hell holes" in countries like Hong Kong - where one can even see that one bedroom flats have been divided/sub-divided and there are people that only have one room (or even a bed's worth) of space to call their own. Those poor people - but Hong Kong is even more over-populated than we are.

hazyjo

stator wrote: »

If you want someone to blame look at thatcher. Before thatcher there were 200,000 houses being built a year, 50% private 50% council. After thatcher there were 100,000 all private.

So not 'during Thatcher years'. Didn't she have an average of over 40k council properties a year built?