Can’t believe it!

Went to look at a three bedroom house yesterday in a brand new development near us. Looked okay on the website but on closer inspection two out of the of three bedrooms were not big enough to swing a cat in. There was no storage space of any sort apart from a room listed as a utility room, but which turned out to be just a small cupboard mostly filled with boiler and large hot water tank.

To top it all off the windows were small enough to make each room feel like a prison cell. Even the garage was so narrow that I’m sure if I parked the car inside I wouldn’t have been able to open the car door – let alone store anything else inside.

And all this could have been ours for a mere 345 grand!

It’s really starting to p*ss us off now. Don’t house builders realise that we need somewhere to put stuff like bikes, snowboards and spare furniture, and that we might perhaps actually want to use the garage to put a car inside? Are they completely out of tune with modern living?

Why do we have to put up with this in Britain? Sh**ty expensive (yet low quality) houses crammed together with no natural light or space, and a floorplan divided up into boxy individual rooms so small they are no use to man nor beast.

What ever happened to the type of house featured so often on C4 Grand Designs? Big open windows, lots of natural light and an open-plan flexible living area that’s not cut up by a maze of walls and doors? A lot of the houses on that programme have been designed and built for a lot lot less than 345 grand, so surely someone like Wimpey (or similar) could mass produce this type of modern house at a fraction of the cost?

Surely the developers must cotton on to this at some point rather than continuing to turn out row after row of mock Georgian shoe boxes? Who buys these cr**py houses at these crazy prices anyway? Are we really so conservative as a nation that we don’t trust anything that’s not built in the traditional bricks and mortar style?

Or is it just us? Are we the only ones in the UK who want a house that actually works with a modern lifestyle and looks . . . . . well . . . . . modern? Is anyone else with us?

Rant over!

No its UK houses, the realization hit me when I moved abroad and UK stereotypical jokes were about food and housing quality

the sort of house you are on about, ie grand designs etc, take more time, thought and care at every stage, never get a developer doing that. The standard of houses built en masse by developers in this country is poor to say the least, just stay away from large suburban developments. Its all about the profit and quality suffers. Even if iy looks good it will need work within the first 10 years, possibly major work.
Buy a plot and contract a real builder to build your own house to your own spec. Depending where you are, plot fron £60k- £200k, 3 bed house build would ge around £170-£200k, you just gotta wait best part of a year to get it sorted.
Ive just done it myself £140k build costs for a green oak, open plan, seriously low energy, 3 bed house. Done all the work myself though for that price and has taken me just over 18 months. Well worth the pain…