Mummy in the foothills

When we moved back we didn't take any furniture with us, so the two bed house I rented seemed pretty big as it was empty.
What I found funny, we have owned two different home here in US, the first was 2 bed 900sqft 83.5 square metres the one we are in now is 1350sqft (125.5 square metres) and has 3 bed 2 bath still small seeing there are 5 often 6 of us in here.
My moms 3 bed with a mater bath the size of a closet still seems bigger, I think it's cause of the front room and not having an open plan like us. I can see my dirty dishes when I watch TV I've love to be able to close off part of the room.

ellimere

That's hilarious!

livinginreality

Totally know how you feel having been married first time round to an aussie myself!Love the thought he was god quote,made my day!

pgtips

The big house means nothing, unless you are shallow people who idolise material things. What is important is your happiness together.

What would you rather being miserable in a large home or happy in a small one. No choice really.

Nu-Shooz

What's more important to you... a big house....or happiness!!!

I had a big house in Perth, but it means jack sh*t because i'm happier than i've ever been in my little house in UK

Dont be shallow.

Mummy in the foothills

cricket1again

I've lived in large houses mostly and I found them to be very restrictive on my time. I never had any freedom because when I had time off work, I was always cleaning, decorating or gardening. It was a never ending chore. Big houses always incur big bills too. With energy costs soaring, this would have to be a consideration.

Having space is nice as long as it's easy to look after and maintain. Today, I would choose a home that fitted around my lifestyle. This means I will probably opt for a one bedroomed home (so my kids can't crash, I also hate guests staying over), a lovely spacious kitchen (I love cooking), a luxurious en suite bathroom, large lounge with inglenook fireplace and a study. I love gardening so I'd have a walled garden with a patio, water feature, raised borders and open views.

Yep. Will definately not be worrying about the size of house when I go back to the UK. I will be planning on a home that suits my lifestyle. I think as you get older, this option becomes much more available and attractive.

Looked at a show house today, just out of interest. It had 5 bathrooms. Who needs all those bathrooms and who in their right mind would want to be a full time slave to cleaning them?
Definitely smaller is more for me. No big houses this time around.

dunroving

As others have said, I think this is a very individual thing. Some people prefer a smaller house (less maintenance to keep up with, cheaper utilities, etc.).

I do miss the openness of my old garden - and the sandy fertile loam. My back garden seems to have been placed on a bomb site. Making new beds used to take me an hour or so of easy digging but in my current house it takes a day or two of back-breaking work and I'm left with a half-ton of some of the most bizarre rubble to dispose of. I end up having to create big pits that I then fill with soil and compost.

I think although US houses tend to be bigger, you often find they don't make good use of space. I'd rather live in a smaller place that's well planned than a bigger place with redundant floor space.

I do think bedrooms in UK houses tend to be ridiculously small - I mean often just about big enough for a bed but nothing else (not even a chest of drawers).

A more difficult thing for me to adjust to has been the single-storey vs. two-storey thing. All that walking up and down the stairs. It's especially problematic when I get the middle-aged man thing in the middle of the night - can't just stumble into the ensuite like I could in in my old house (the bathroom is downstairs in my current house).

Bevm

Dunrovin, have you tried the way of making gardening beds where you build them up? I haven't, but I know people who have who swear by it. You put damp cardboard and newspaper down to kill the grass and weeds, then layer more of it with compost and some earth covered with plastic, and in a little while you have a raised bed.

One name for it is a lasagna garden, because of the layers.

If what's underneath is really rubble there might not be enough room for roots or root crops, but it's worth thinking about it. I am for when I have a garden again. At the moment I only have pots. I put some together the other day to make a pretty picture.

Bev

Fleaflyfloflum

I have done this a few times. I prefer the raised bed as it saves bending over all the time. It is also useful if the underlying soil is not so good.
I also like to make sure i have little walkways between for easy access to all plants

dunroving

Nice plants, Bev (that's about my best chat-up line these days )

Thanks for the suggestion - I've been trying everything, but the one thing holding me back from using raised beds is that my back garden slopes very steeply up from the house - so the garden is already above eye-level (so I almost strain my neck looking out at the garden). For me, one of the joys in life has always been looking out the window at my well-tended garden - but in this case, raised beds would probably mean I'd have to climb onto the roof to see the plants! Looking out the front window is similarly problematic because of the slope - I'm looking straight into my front neighbour's bedroom windows, so I feel a bit weird looking at the front garden.

If I end up stuck longer-term in the UK, I'll almost definitely move house when prices stabilise. I've always been very smart with houses I've bought but this one was not-so smart, a quick purchase with very little prior research ... long story but I came to realise the guy who owned it before me was the do-it-yourselfer from Hell. :curse:

Posidrive

It is not so much the big house that we will miss when we finally get back, but the house that we designed ourselves. Especially after the blood swaet and tears that were shed having it built. Even if we moved into bigger house back in the UK it wouldn't be the same.

I feel more sorry for our dogs who will be giving up their beautiful huge back garden that they have so carefully marked

dunroving

Yes, I forgot that aspect - Suzy was a 9-5 outdoor dog in my old house, chasing squirrels and wagging her tail at the neighbours. Now I have to farm her out to a daytime dog-sitter as she just doesn't take to my current garden (plus it's p*ssing it down so often she'd drown if I left her outside). I found the high, solid fences here mean she can't see anything going on, so she barks her head off with boredom ... not popular with my new neighbours. So now she's a 24-7 indoor dog (except for our daily walks of course). There are so many little (and large) differences that you don't even realise until you move (regardless of which direction you're moving).

Bevm

Oh, we had a house like that! When he heard that he'd fallen from the roof at one point, we weren't surprised!

And we looked at one house in Devon that might have been nice but it had had a reno of the kitchen area that would have to be entirely torn out. For one thing, they'd cut the kitchen off from the dining room. You had to go out, up the corridor to near the front door, into the sitting room and down the back to the dining room. And the space between was filled in with a cramped downstairs loo and laundry area, so there couldn't even be a hatch.

I assume they ate in the kitchen, as they'd crammed all the cooking area into one unusable area to create a little dining nook, but it was a real "what were they thinking?"

Bev

dunroving

If I had a pound for every time I've thought that since I bought this house ...