What are your turn-offs when it comes to buying a house?

RelievedSheff

Turn offs for us are:

• any attached dwellings (we will only consider detached)
• lack of parking and garage. (we need a garage big enough for a car and a driveway for a van and a car)
• shared driveways
• private roads
• no direct access from kitchen to garden
• no kitchen diner (we want the dining table in the kitchen)
• stairs in living spaces
• front doors opening into living rooms (we like a hallway)
• no en-suite
• no downstairs toilet
• north facing garden
• split level houses
• sloping gardens
• generic 1930's to 1950's housing estates with streets and streets of the same house type
• 1960's to 1980's architecture (or lack of really don't like houses from this period)
• houses with tiny windows (I like a nice bright house full of sunshine)

All of this sounds a bit picky but we did manage to tick all of the boxes with our current house.

silvercar

We have a north facing garden, long enough that it gets a lot of sun, with the advantage that the house stays cool.

Grizebeck

JacJac1 said:

I'm a FTB currently looking and its HARD.  Feel like I'm being overly fussy but my dealbreakers are:

Open plan kitchen/living room

Front door opening striaght into living room

Only bathroom downstairs

No window in bathroom

Tiny bathroom with no space for bathtub

Leasehold

More than 1 mile to public transport

No garden

Busy road

Near a school

Normally to have downstairs bathroom in many pit villages 

Grizebeck

Olinda99 said:

does anyone have any views on buying next to a railway line i.e a railway in a cutting at the bottom of the garden for example

May get issues with Japanese knotweed but other then that no issue

annetheman

For context, I'm buying/was looking for an inner-London, period (Victoria/early-Edwardian or Georgian) freehold terraced house:

Downstairs only bathroom
Ugly road (no trees)
North- or East-facing garden
Very overlooked garden
>10 min walk to the tube station

Very happy to have found a house with none of these big NOs (plus bonus downstairs WC and - surprisingly - is a "semi"; quotations because the gap is so small, better than nothing!)

dander

Brand new kitchens and bathrooms (inevitably I will loathe other people's taste and resent having to pay extra for horrible things)
Loft conversions
Tiles everywhere, like reception room floors.
Massive open-plan-ness
Any rooms without windows
Destroyed original features (of any era - even if the house is 1980s or something, I want it to look honest)
Plastic grass
A bar
Excessive en suites
Large gardens (I've had enough of gardening, I want my weekends back for fun!)

GDB2222

I’m amazed at what people regard as absolutely impossible. I would want to weigh
 up the pros and cons of each property.  

Slinky

It's very interesting to see how many people don't want open plan. According to lots of those property programmes, it's how modern people live. Camped in their kitchens doing everything there.

Quite frankly I'd rather my dinner guests weren't watching me cooking.

Interesting that nobody has mentioned they don't want to be next to a pub. Was the compromise (along with previous subsidance) for us.

daivid

Anything I can afford not to put up with. I lived happily for ten years in a mid terrace, with linear parallel parking to the neighbours and 50m from a dual carriageway. Now I live in a detached house with a completely separate drive and in a much quieter location. I would hate to go back to the previous house but similarly if I had the money I'd have a house surrounded by it’s own land as far as could be seen…

Martico

GDB2222 said:

I’m amazed at what people regard as absolutely impossible. I would want to weigh
 up the pros and cons of each property.  

I'm amazed that people are put off by some easy fixes. Example: fake grass. I agree that it's the worst thing ever, a blight on all that is true and natural, ugly as sin and, well, horrible. But it's also the simplest thing in a property to fix. Simply lift it off and hey presto you have a blank canvas of a garden