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As above really and what are your experiences of it?
Me and MsSwoosh are looking at a house with kitchen with dining area on the ground floor and the living room on the 1st floor. We haven't yet been to see it but i'm not sure how it will work practically, especially with kids in the equation.
We are thinking of perhaps getting a small tele for the dining area as we tend to watch it a bit while eating and at least this way we will be much more likely to eat at the dinner table rather than off our laps on the sofas which we tend to do now. As and when kids come along we are thinking of maybe changing the dining area into a play area with sofa etc for the kids so that if one of us parents is preparing food or washing up or whatever then the kids aint upstairs and we'll just have a small table somewhere, either grond floor or 1st floor.
The bedrooms are split across the 1st floor and 2nd floor (master on 1st with en suite and the other 3 bedrooms and bathroom on the 2nd.
Its a nice looking house and a bit differnet, but will this difference get tedious after a while? We're not really quirky people but it's certainly not like my house at Uni which was over a cafe with entrance on ground floor, bedrooms and bathrooms on 1st/2nd floors then the kitchen living room on the 3rd floor. That got a bit annoying to say the least!
PS Don't worry, it has a garage for all my bikes so its great on that front!
[url= http://www.solhomes.co.uk/solhomes/denham_plot_7.htm ]Here is the layout of the house[/url]
1st floor lounge is good as you get both view and privacy, however those rooms are pretty tight, the 2nd floor bedrooms are a bit disingenuous as to where the ceilings drop below head height and you've also told the internet where you're intending to live.
Mrs soops and i turned a 1st floor bedroom in our terraced house into a living room and used downstairs as an open plan kitchen/dining room. It worked quite well.
We have now rented the house to a single mum who is also using it that way.
🙂
aP, the road is there now if someone wanted to break in to it! and anyway, there are much much bigger houses round there worth while breaking in to.
There seems to be loads of houses around like that now - I guess it uses less land
Mate of mine lives in something similar - he had to sell off a lot of his furniture & buy new stuff as it was too big to get it up the stairs to the lounge.
that layout would be fine with me, if it were all a bit bigger. it looks all a bit nooks and crannies?
A friend of ours bought one like that, and then realised that because of the slope of the roof the bedrooms on the top floor wouldn't actually fit anything useful like wardrobes, so check your measurements.
Yeah, i'm not sure about the room sizes especially with all the sloping roofs going on in a few of the rooms.
I'm still reserving judgement until we go look at it later in the week.
There are some important rooms there that are the boundry between you and the neighbours......dont know the spec of the house but experience tell's me it's worth checking out the acoustic properties of the party wall. If you get neighbours that are less than condiserate you may have issues...
If its built to Building Regs it will be pretty OK, as sound transmission is an important issue.
I still don't like the whole garage in front of the house thing - its only to get more dense housing in 🙁
I like the whole kitchen / diner on one level and lounge elsewhere - we have no television in kitchen or dining room (and I never would). Kitchens and dining rooms are for eating, meeting mates, conversation - so for me to have a separate 'private' lounge would be great.
I have a collegue who bought a similar house recently, that was built to building regs...you can literally hear their neighbours fart. As an example the house layouts were mirrored so in each property the sockets back to back. When you have a single skin party wall and recess two 35mm back boxes into it the acoustic properties suffer. You can hear the nighbours when they switch sockets on and off......
Yep and I love mine - its a bit weird tho as its on a slope, from the front, looks like a normal 2 storey, walk in to the hallway, on that level you have the lounge, cloak and study - go upstairs to the bedrooms and bathroom - go downstairs to the kitchen / dining & utility - that leads out into the garden / patio.
Spend most of our awake hours down in the kichen / dining area - its all open plan and the full footprint of the building so great place to hang out, got sky down there etc and the gaggia:)
The formal lounge has the huge comfy sofa and big tv but tends to only get used from about 9pm onwards once meals are done and ready to crash for the night with some mindless tv.
Only living in 'normal' 2 storey houses I was a little concerned at first but it was all about the location when we bought. Having lived there a year now, wouldn't change it for the world.
i think i'm coming round to the idea of the layout, but i guess i will just have to wait and see if the rooms are big enough at head height as those dims will have been taken at floor level in order to get the biggest distances.
My grandparents live in a house that's broadly similar - garage, dining room, kitchen on the ground floor, living room and master bedroom on the first floor and four bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor.
Admittedly theirs is a fair bit bigger (in the size of the rooms) than that one but it works well - ground floor for eating, first floor for living on and top floor for the other bedrooms.
The only thing I may say is that with young kids/babies, you could potentially be up and down the stairs all night if they're not sleeping...
Anyone with sound defects, you are entitled to do a sound test yourself - it would cost a couple of hundred pounds usually. If the building is under warranty, you can then claim that it doesn't meet building regs, and they would have to do remedial work to fix the issue, re-test to prove it passes, refund your test fee and expenses etc.
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In my experience, much like thermal performance in new houses, the majority scrape building regs, but a significant proportion do not meet our (already low) UK building standards.
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If it really is that bad, splash the cash on an acoustic test...
He did...it satisfied the min requirements.
It may have been submitted for building regs before the current requirements. However, if this is a double leaf pasterboard wall then Part E states:
2.146 b. Do stagger the position of sockets on opposite sides of the separating wall, and use a similar thickness of cladding behind the socket box.
We went up to visit some friends who had moved up to Inverness (Bunchrew)a while ago and was really taken aback with what you could see 😯 from their first floor lounge, a superb view of the estuary and surrounding hills/mountains.
Even from the kitchen downstairs the veiw was fantastic, if I had the right location then I would not hesitate to have my lounge upstairs
its real ugly!
Not sure we will be getting a view of anything other than the garden and the other houses around.
it's better looking in the flesh!
well then,
we went to see the house last night. I am totally sold on the idea of having upstairs/downstairs living areas. absolutely not a problem now.
but as some people suggested the headroom is a bit low in places. I think i can totally get on board with it in some places but there are two places. the 4th bedroom (which is more of a study anyway) and the top floor bathroom. The bathroom is probably ok but i will have to see what it's like to have a shower in there as the head height will be reduced by the height of the bath. and at 6foot tall i can get halfway into the study without having to stoop and we might put a futon at that end anyway so there would be no need for standing up there.
My question has changed slightly, does anyone live in a house with sloping ceilings and do they ever bang their heads on them or do you just adjust to them being there?
As a pointer, when we design housing with sloping soffits we don't count anything with a head height of less than 1500mm as being floor area.
I think that you fill those areas up with chester drawers, shelves, stuff which stops you walking into them.
Must say that 4th Bed is pretty tight!
does anyone live in a house with sloping ceilings
Yup
do they ever bang their heads on them
Yup - used to when we first moved in
do you just adjust to them being there?
Yup - and then you get to laugh at your visitors hitting their heads.
The only problem with bedrooms built into the eaves is finding enough space for wardrobes.
My question has changed slightly, does anyone live in a house with sloping ceilings and do they ever bang their heads on them or do you just adjust to them being there?
I have a low beam in the middle of my kitchen, I now duck under it instinctively, even moving backwards, though the odd guest has been known to smack their head painfully on it. People are pretty adaptable, but also quite individual, so if you have the spatial awareness of a dead ferret, my experience probably won't help you.
On balance, I reckon you'd adjust fine, but you do seem quite wary of anything that's not the norm...
My parents flat is layed out allong a long corridoor with the kitchen at one end with the bedrooms arround it, then the bathroom and lounge at the other end. The lounge is massive so half is sofas/chairs the other has a big dinging table.
The kitchens pretty big and has a 6 seater table so plenty of space for family meals day to day. Then birthdays/christmass/get togethers/sunday lunch are all in the lounge/dining room.
As someone said, it gets you out fo the bad habit of eating dinner and watching TV rather than having a conversation. And the lounge gets used for reading etc a lot more as the bigger kitchen lets you have conversations there instead.
Sloping ceelings, just something to get used to. If your putting a bed in there, put the headbord/pillows under the eves, works much better.
all of the rooms have an area of wall that is full height and would take a wardrobe or tall shelves etc so i dont think that will be an issue.
Doubt very much we will use the 4th bedroom as a bedroom, mostly a study unless our second pregnancy is twins in which case we will have other issues!
I think i'll adjust to it, i just wanted other peoples opinions on the matter if they have had experience of similar circumstances. MrsSwoosh wont have a problem with the headroom cos she's a lot shorter than me. she walked around last night oblivious to the fact that the ceilings were sloping!
Aren't there nicer not brand new houses for a lot less money in bramcote / chillwell / wollaton / beeston? With an older house you could avoid all the hassles with new builds and the small rooms compared to older houses.
Or are they doing some insane cheap deal to get the stock off their books?
Jo, they might part exchange our house which would save all the hassle of marketting the house and potentially losing moeny cos of some cheeky **** wanting to knock the price right down (that happened to us last year when we tried to move and we dont want to go through all that hassle and heartache again but we still want to move). And this place have said they will pay us market value for the house. We are gonna get them round to see what they say the market value is before we even think about it anymore.
And i've just thought about how much awake time we spend in our bedrooms compared to the living rooms and it's something like 2 hours in the mornings of weekends compared to 5 hours a night during the week and almost all weekend (of course that doesnt take into account how much we are out of the house at any time) and the living rooms at this place were gorgeous and just what we would want.
Mine is an apartment split over 3rd+4th floors (top 2 floors), with large kitchen-diner on 3rd floor (with small balcony), and Living Room, bedroom+balcony, and bathroom on 4th floor. Garage is in basement.
TBH, I would say I use the lower floor at least 75% of the time, since I set up office space in the dining room, and even routed SatTV cable there, so I don't need to constantly run up/down the stairs to watch TV while cooking dinner.
My friends at uni had a similar place to that in the OP, but theirs was bedroom on ground floor, and kitchen/diner/livingroom on 1st floor, backing out on to terrace/garden. It was on a steep hill though.