Do you use your house the way you thought you would?

Nebulous2

We want to do a major revamp - change the spare bedroom into the sitting room, rip out the bathroom and shower room to make a kitchen / diner.  Make what is currently the kitchen into a big en-suite and add an en-suite to one of the other bedrooms. We waste time discussing it, wondering what to do first, how much it will cost, how easy it will be to get permission, whether to start with an architect to see how feasible it is (it’s a listed building) 

Meantime - in the real world, I’ll probably end up pulling out that horrible 80s fireplace I don’t like, and park the plans for everything else. 

ProDave

Since we designed and built our present house, it would be a complete failure if we said we did not use it as expected, of course we do.

The one thing not yet finished is a balcony from the master bedroom.  I suspect that may not get as much use as we might hope.

MovingForwards

I'm living the lifestyle I wanted in my flat, as I picked it to meet what I planned for years.
After moving in I started transforming the neglected garden into a veg and herb garden, dealing with a bit at a time as my OH got on with removing tree stumps and other physically demanding tasks. 
It took me a month to unpack and organise the flat, then I made a start on painting and got the lounge finished in time for Christmas, the hall was in done in the New Year.
I've now got my fruit section going, together with this year's first crop veg and I'm preparing second crop.
A few weeks ago I got my outdoor seating area finished.  Sitting in the sun, looking at my garden felt as good as I imagined it to be.

I would have done a lot more but health and workload means I prioritise outside over the internal temporary makeover.

Ramouth

We did a loft conversion in our last property to be the master bedroom.  We never used it for this!  We were happy in the smaller bedroom.  The room really wasn’t used much at all until lockdown when it made an excellent office!

tinytiddles

Yes and no - we moved here last August and have been working from home the whole time so we have never just lived in our house. That being said, we don’t have to live and work in the same room any more and we have a kitchen diner now instead of a lounge diner so we have separate rooms we can be in at different times of the day too. All in all, things are pretty much as planned. 

Scotbot

I bought my house as it was walking distance to the station and I expected to get a job where I commuted. Ended up working for a company in the US so WFH and my commute is 10 seconds. Nothing to do wirh covid, started working for them in 2018. If I had realised that would be the case I would have bought a different property. 

RelievedSheff

We moved to this house a couple of years ago. Never expected I would be working from home.

We moved due to only using half of our house due to very noisy attached neighbours. We still tend to only use half of or house now as we seem to spend a lot of time in the kitchen and the garden and not a great deal of time in the living room. Upstairs is even worse, we only use a third of it currently due to Covd restrictions and no one staying over  

We love the house though and have no intentions of moving from this one for a very long time, if ever.

lookstraightahead

We moved areas and it's exactly the right decision. The house interior is secondary as it's location rather that the building for me. I am surrounded by countryside's I would live in a shed if I had to.

Sapindus

When we moved in I said I wanted to change the bathrooms round so the bath was downstairs and the shower up.  In preparation, had a fancy sunpipe with extractor fan in the downstairs.  Husband broke it trying to change the battery.  Husband became ex-H (there were other factors).  I changed the bathrooms round and now use the bath about once a year... my thinking was that in the morning you're in a hurry, use the shower, in the evening relax in the bath and someone might pop through and bring you a glass of wine.  Well, the option is there for whoever buys the house and there are plenty of people who don't have a second bathroom at all, and their houses still sell.

Murphybear

Renting can be like this as well.

We were living in a typical 3 bedroom mid terrace in mid Devon.  We had the opportunity to rent a big property on a farm on the edge of Dartmoor, 4 bedrooms and 3 receptions.  The rent was similar to what we were paying.  We thought it would be great to have a separate dining room, spare lounge, room for books and drying clothes, tons of storage  etc but after a while found we never went into most rooms.  We lived in the big main lounge which was heated by a log burner (never again  ) and most of the other rooms were not heated.  It was a rare winter in that part of the world with snow and freezing temperatures and the landlord wanted us to heat every room in case of damage to the property (it was a few hundred years old with 3ft thick walls) and we fell out over this.

We found our “forever home” after that, no dining room or spare lounge or log burner but it had a cat flap already