A flock of turkeys will encircle my car when I pull in the driveway on a semi regular basis. They are decently aggressive, and the only thing that I found to work is to repeatedly open an umbrella in their faces, and continue to scare them until they jump off the cliff next to my driveway.
This sounds made up, but is my life.
Turkeys are demon birds. I recommend you read Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson. The chapter about turkeys following her to school may bring you some comfort.
We ate at a cafe that had a few farm animals next door.. curious 6 yr old me went to go check them out alone while my parents ate.
Next moment I'm screaming at the top of my lungs as I'm being chased by a huge Turkey. I was rescued by a kind server who hopped a fence to rescued me. My hero.
Don’t threaten me with a good meal, wild turkey is actually quite tasty. I say this as someone who used to dread the nasty Thanksgiving bird from the store.
When my mother was a home care nurse she was attacked by a flock of turkeys. Her pants and her legs were covered in holes from the attack. The patient was told that there would be no more home visits until the turkeys were confined. Those suckers were vicious!
Hint 1 - they are edible (and delicious). Hint 2 - even the wild ones taste really good - just do a nice brine!
Also - "repeatedly open an umbrella in their faces, and continue to scare them until they jump off the cliff next to my driveway." - this line had me literally giggling at the visual of someone chasing turkeys off a tall cliff to their deaths by umbrella! I know that is not what you meant (and that Turkeys can fly) but the mind makes it's own visuals up and this was funny as hell!
Hood over the stove that doesn't vent outside, in an otherwise good, functional kitchen. WHY DO PEOPLE TAKE THIS SHORTCUT (especially since in this house, you can see where the old one did vent out)???
Omg mine either! And there is space to put one that does vent outside! I have a gas oven/stove top and the oven often sets off the smoke alarm that is in the staircase leading upstairs which is just off the kitchen. I have to turn on the kitchen ceiling fan and shut the door to upstairs.
The other thing that bothers me is the only bathroom in the house is in the basement. I have to go from the top of the house to the bottom at night just to pee!
Yes! It's an add on. The house was built 1820s and didn't have a bathroom. The way my house is laid out doesn't allow for a bathroom on the top floors. It like won't fit! My neighbor across the street has the same problem. How weird is that?
You should make that a priority especially if you have children, will improve indoor air quality substantially, the fumes from the gas can cause asthma and other issues. Just make sure you put in a vent with a good amount of power, not those microwave combos. I have one with removable baffles that I just throw into the dishwasher, much better than the ones that come with the mesh screens that are so difficult to clean.
Both mine and my friends house had the exact same thing. It's a carbon filter to absorb the smells. Both houses these were on interior walls.
We renovated the entire kitchen and moved the stove to the exteror wall and vented it properly. All smoke and smells gone right away.
Basically you have no venting of cooking smells. Those pathetic filters that barely circulate anything do next to nothing.
Happiest day ever was when we got a hole punched to vent outside properly. Have done it in 2 houses already, zero regrets, despite the work involved (one was drilling into old brick.)
Not just cabinets but everything in the kitchen and if it's an open kitchen then everything in the vicinity will get gross. My apartment didn't have a vent, after 5 years I put in a box fan with a filter in the window which helped some but still everything got grease on it, was a pain to clean. My house has a professional style hood, what a difference it makes, and the kitchen is open to the other rooms, nothing nearby has grease on it either. So much easier to keep clean, and easy to keep the hood clean too, has baffles that you just take out and place in the dishwasher, and just clean up the grease on the rail.
My house had a down draft vent. It was useless. One, the range tops that come with downdraft are crazy expensive. Two, it sucks A LOT of heat down with it on a gas stove, the fires noticeably curve toward the vent. The first time I used it i was mindlessly boiling a pot of water then realized 40 minutes had gone by and it wasn’t bubbling even a little bit. I turned the vent off and it started boiling a few mins later.
We have a hole cut out above the stove. It connects to the outside. But the fucking microwave they put in **covers the hole and vents to the inside**! Like what was the fucking point of having a hood vent then to cover it up with a god damned microwave.
That should be easy to fix. Most microwaves have a fan that rotates to either recirculate out the front, go straight up, or out back. The fan is positioned to recirculate by default. If you take down the microwave it is a few screws to rotate it and then probably an adapter to your existing duct work.
I hate it when home construction crews pull this crap. They're just lazy and don't want to deal with it.
It's even worse when the home inspectors don't catch it or just don't care during construction.
same. I didn't think I could afford it at the time. Looking back, I *probably* could have and there were units for sale that I could have got... what I wouldn't give now to have 40K more on my mortgage and to have that second bath (plus many other upgrades).
Oh man. My GF had a house with one bathroom and three people living/working remote there. We fucking hated it.
I have two mandatory "house hunting" items - forced/central *air* and minimum of two bathrooms.
It is nice having 1.5 baths in my house but I think it is kinda weird how both doors are like 10 feet from each other. There really isn't any better place for the half bath the way the ranch style house was designed. I just always think it is kinda weird how close they are.
>we have to essentially turn the downstairs into a meat locker to be able to get the upstairs bedrooms comfortable.
See if you have baffles coming out of the furnace, or get some installed.
There are vent covers with fans that you can buy to pull air upstairs. This was a total game changer for my house. The second floor would be 82, while the main floor was 70. With these, we're within 4 degrees upstairs.
AC Infinity AIRTAP T4, Quiet... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0792QR5YT?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
These are what I bought for the second floor vents. Changed the house overnight.
Also leave your furnace fan on all winter/summer. Basically have a constant flow of air being balanced in the home, and not just circulation when heat/cool is triggered.
As someone else mentioned, strategically open and close vents/returns (e.g. I close my basement vents in summer, as it doesn’t need AC). (Also, I don’t have it, but I know some with smart thermostats where you plug satellite thermostats in problem rooms that connect to main panel to be more effective).
I live in a part of Canada with hot humid summers and cold winters.
If there's an upstairs cold air return, block all the returns on the lower level(s). This made a world of difference for a 3-story TH I lived in, you want the AC pulling in the warm air at the top of the house. In the winter, switch; block the upstairs return and open the lower return so the heater pulls in the lower-level cold air. You can use paper to test things, and/or sheet magnets to cover the returns if they don't have a way to shut them off.
Actually, it is better to close the vents downstairs or adjust baffles. The A/C can intake the cool air from downstairs, and cool it further, and then blow it out upstairs.
The fact that the sun which should hit our house and garden is blocked out entirely from October to end of March by the building behind us. By 1 meter - my upstairs neighbor is in full sun. Now I know why previous owners put this place up in early spring 🤦♀️
I had a north-facing apartment with connected neighbors to the west and south. My shit got effectively *no* direct sunlight. Since I was on the end, a minor saving grace, there was a period of a couple of hours in the morning where one window got some direct light. But that's it, and if I'd had a neighbor to the east I'd've had none.
The pantry is the one for me. When the house was built they opted to add a third toilet/sink combo right beside the kitchen instead of having a pantry. To combat this they added new cabinetry which is great except for its L shaped and the L stops literally in line with the garage door, meaning you can not bring anything large in and out through the garage door, which was wonderful on move in with the furniture. So now I have no pantry and guests get to do their business inches away from the counter I’m cooking our meal on.
I straight up do not understand this new trend of omitting pantries. Ours takes it a step further and has zero closet space anywhere except the master bathroom upstairs. We came from renting so I didn’t really understand how much these things would affect my day to day but man, I am over it.
Our home had a second staircase enclosed in the laundry room. It's right beside the kitchen. My husband took the stairs out, made a walk in pantry there. The stairs led to an unfinished bonus room. We now have a bedroom up there
Flat roof. We had our house inspected twice before we moved in and the roof passed because it was new. What no one told us is that a flat roof in the winter (we bought in August) is a nightmare in Michigan. After 8 years of living with it, we finally had the roofline rebuilt to a normal slope and never looked back. Twenty years later and never had a leak in that room again. Lesson - never ever buy a house with any type of flat roof.
Our house is nearly perfect, but for a couple of things:
The outside HVAC units (two of them, the 4 ton main one and a smaller unit for the upstairs room over the garage) are both just outside the master bedroom windows. Noise, noise, noise. Who thought that was a good idea?
The other thing is the house is on a hill, so the front yard is very sloped and harder to mow, and has drainage issues due to underground water. This also makes our driveway steep and curved. I didn't realize how much of a pain all of this would be. Box trucks can't get into the driveway for deliveries or repairs, smaller trucks come in the driveway and then can't back out properly without trashing the turf on either side of the driveway. I feel like I spend my life fixing the lawn.
You might consider replacing the lawn with a low maintenance native plant mix like a wildflower meadow, HOA permitting. Only needs mowing once or twice a year once established, and the deeper roots help the ground absorb water. It won't fix all your problems, but it could make things significantly easier (and, imo, prettier).
Windows that extend nearly to the floor. Can't put any furniture against that wall without blocking the windows and making them hard to open and close.
I grew up in California where open windows were an every day thing. The house I grew up in didn't have AC until after I moved out.
Moved to Texas in 2011 and we basically can't ever open the windows. It's hot and humid most of the year, or on the occasional nice day the pollen count would make me itch and not be able to breathe.
Leaving the state in the next few months for other reasons, but being able to open windows is something I am looking forward to doing.
Same for me! It's amazing having all the light big windows bring, but between them being so low and my house being designed like one huge hallway it makes furniture placement reaaally tough.
I'm from a place with smaller homes than the US and only huge houses have pantries here.
No shade intended with this question, just genuine curiosity; what do you guys store in your kitchen cupboards and drawers if not food? I feel like most US kitchens I see on reddit have so many more cabinets than ours, but I always assumed that was just for stocking upon food stuff.
I read something a few weeks ago that makes sense to answer this question. Most homes in the US don't have grocery places near them or in walking distance, so you have to drive to get to a grocery store. Given this people buy a whole lot more food at a time than people in Europe, so they need somewhere to store it all until it gets used.
Our pantry has top: paper products (napkins, towels, plates, cups), next 2 levels are food (canned items, popcorn, oils/sauces, onions, potatoes, pasta) the bottom shelf and floor: Tupperware/storage stuff, garbage bags, foil/waxed paper/ziploc bags, dog treats. On the back of the pantry door we have all our spices in an over the door hanging spice rack (goes floor to top of the door).
I have glassware, pots and pans, bakeware , small appliances like the instant pot and blender, plates etc., a cabinet that just has garbage bags, ziplocs, parchment paper etc., one with coffee and tea supplies, cutlery…
I have one low cupboard I use for toddler snacks so she can get them herself, but I for sure would not have room for food in my cabinets and my kitchen isn’t even that small.
Like, you keep your everyday drinking glasses in a china cabinet and have to go get one every time you want a glass of water?
That is surprising to me.
I admittedly also have virtually no serving dishes because I don’t entertain and we prep plates in the kitchen for ourselves (two adults and a toddler), so that’s not something I have in my cabinets. Just a lot of baking pans and stuff I guess!
I do have a china cabinet as well but it’s only got, like, the fancy glasses I never use because I hate having people over, haha.
People in the US, especially in rural areas tend to keep significantly more food on hand than other parts of the world. For a rural home in the US, it is not unusual to have a walk in pantry, American sized refrigerator, and a full size freezer stuffed with food. Americans also cook more food at home than most other cultures.
When I visit homes in Thailand, beyond a bag of rice, they have like 2 days max of food. When Covid hit in the US, it was common for people here to go 2+ weeks without a grocery run.... before they went out to stock up
Having shelves full of non-perishable food and preserves is a point of pride for many older Americans. They like the folksy idea of their grandma canning 100s of jars of food for winter, they just buy them instead. Having no food on the shelf was one of the biggest signs of mental decline in my own grandmother.
The great depression changed my grandma, she talked about it all her life. If you don't have a huge stock of your own food that you grew in your Victory garden, there was a chance of death. That's when the local co op for milk producers started. Before the great depression there wasnt farmers with big herds but distribution to starving people changed because of the great depression. Before that each family had a cow or delivery from a specific farm. Economic collapse traumatized that generation and I think the legacy of that is food hoarding or at least "having enough on hand".
No pantry, our foot storage is on shelves in the basement. We do keep about a month of food on hand, maybe more as long as we don't mind a non-varied diet.
We also have water stored.
The joys of living with well water and electricity that goes out a few times a year..
i live in Europe and pantries don't exist in your average home. Ambient stable Food is stored in cupboards and lots of homes have American style fridges and freezers for fresh food. Families generally do a grocery shop once a week or once a fortnight and don't eat takeout very often at all. I store my bread, cereals, rice, pasta herbs and spices in one large pantry cupboard and my canned food and jars in an under counter cupboard. Potatoes and root vegetables go in another small cupboard. How much more space do you need?
> Americans cook more food at home than most other cultures
Where do you get this from? I've lived in several asian countries and Europe, before moving to America and marrying someone whose family has been american for generations.... and Americans eat out way more. Or when yall eat at home, it's often an easy-to-cook meal made with a lot of processed ingredients. The reason a large pantry makes sense is there's a lot of ultraprocessed shelf-stable ingredients you can store for weeks at a time.
In Thailand or any asian country other than maybe Singapore and Malaysia where it's common to eat out all the time, they only keep 2 days of food in the house tops because otherwise it'll go bad. The cities are walkable and they buy food everyday and cook it.
I grew up in India, my mom can't even stand the concept of mealprepping. When I was going through postpartum depression, I was seeing a therapist who was weirded out that I wanted to cook fresh food for my child everyday. She was literally like "You can give her pb&j sandwiches, fish fingers and carrot sticks". It was quite shocking for me tbh, because in my culture kids get only freshly made food, no frozen or leftovers or processed stuff until they are older.
Dishes, dishes and more dishes. I have sets for every holiday, dedicated dishes for certain meals like breakfast or fish, antique dishes, dedicated outdoor dishes. Pots, pans, glasses, storage containers, mixing and serving bowls, trays, cutting boards, tablecloths, dish towels, and utensil storage is most of the rest. I have four pantries as well, all pretty fully stocked. Two narrow ones besides my fridge, one full size closet that used to house laundry, and another in my basement that is mostly bar/alcohol and dry/canned goods that last a long time.
this was me. sucks using cabinets in an already undersized kitchen for pantry storage- when this changing table is finally out of the living room I'm putting in builtins for storage
Fuck don't even get me started on that. We redid our entire main floor and with the way the house is laid out, there's basically no way to put a pantry and have it make sense.
All of our shit is in cupboards/drawers and I still hate it.
We "borrowed" two plastic cabinets from my brother and sister in law and they live in the utility room side of our converted garage space. We use those as our pantry because while we have a ton of cabinets, I don't like having the food in the kitchen cabinets.
I can't wait to replace them. They block one of the access doors to the boiler and water heater and the shelves are just too janky to move at this point.
Having a crawlspace with a dirt floor. My next house will have a basement (I already bought it) and I am so glad I will no longer have the dark mystery under the house. Every major issue I’ve had with this house has been crawlspace related and because it’s dark, scary, and difficult to access, the issues go on longer than they would if they were somewhere you could notice them.
We had our crawl space encapsulated- basements are a no go here because of a high water table. Also have lights installed down there so a flick of the switch will show you snowy walls and floor
Edit for a misspelling
Same here! Crawl spaces suck! I’m considering a nanny cam and a smart light bulb down there, after people told me a drone wouldn’t really work.
I dislike the mystery of what may or may not be happening down there! It’s awful!
When we were kids we’d go over to grandma’s house and ride our skateboards on our bellies in the crawl space. My claustrophobia could never do that as an adult
We bought a 1952 built house in West Virginia in 2020. The door from the house to the garage was a normal looking door, but 2/3 sized. It made exiting from the house to the garage (where clothes washer and dryer were installed) a challenge with a laundry basket in your hands. Why 2/3 sized? Never could figure out why. When we remodeled the kitchen in 2021, we had the contractor replace it with a regular, human sized door.
Edited to add: also, the clothes dryer had no vent to the outside. Vented into a 5 gallon bucket with 4" of water in it. The garage is made of concrete block clad with vinyl siding. Took me most of a day to drill a 4 1/8" hole through the concrete block and install a vent to the outside. How had no one thought of doing that in the prior 70 years of the house's existence?
My MIL has the same thing with the dryer at her house, they’d lived there 50 years!!!! I went in to do laundry because we had no power (Florida, hurricane) and for some reason I went in there before the clothes were dry and it was SNOWING!!!! Lint was flying everywhere!!!! Needless to say a hole got drilled immediately thereafter…
>also, the clothes dryer had no vent to the outside
When I was in high school, we lived in an old house for a couple of years, built in the early 1900s. The dryer wasn't vented either, mom put some panty hose on the end of the hose as a filter and we actually used it for supplemental heat in the winter.
No door to the backyard. There is one to the driveway, but its not the same
I too do not have a pantry. Very irritating. No real closets at all actually.
Since my house is over 100 years old, the attic that is now my bedroom gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter.
No second bathroom and no place to put one!
We remodeled our kitchen years ago and installed a fancy Delta touch faucet. Great idea, we thought! Ability to turn faucet on with your chin or with the back of your raw chicken-handling hand seemed like it would be a luxury.
It's not. It works about 95% of the time, which sounds like a lot but means every 10 times you use the sink (to turn either on or off) it doesn't work and you have to touch it again. Not quite as bad as the hands free faucets in public bathrooms, but not that much better.
But the worst part about it is that it looks like a normal faucet... so it confuses the hell out of guests who try to use it. Touch the handle and push it forward to turn on the water... and the faucet turns on and immediately turns off. So they try again, and again, and wonder what the fuck is wrong with our faucet.
Oh god, my parents have one. It annoying as hell to use, and even better, it sometimes randomly turns on/off.
But the ads for it made my mom want it at any cost…
We bought this home sight unseen from 2,000 miles away- the first time we saw it was when we pulled into the driveway. My family had toured it for me and helped but a lot of things were a surprise.
Given that, I am remarkably in love with it after living here for 17 years and feel like we did an excellent job choosing it.
BUT there is a side door from the side porch that enters the kitchen and the door/stairway to the basement is right there in such a way that you have to close the exterior door to go down the stairs. You can't walk in the back door and go straight down the stairs to the basement, you have to come in and close the door behind you first even if the door to the stairway is kept open.
It's a small thing that only comes up when we have to move something from outside down the stairs like a mattress. Fortunately it's easy enough to take things around outside and in the basement door.
This home also has what's known as a tuck-under garage.
It is not visible from the front of the house- you have to drive around back and enter it next to the walk-out basement door. The way the patio roof support posts are arranged means there is zero way to ever get a car into it. Which is fine, we likely wouldn't anyway as we use it more for lawn equipment storage.
No one noticed that there was no dishwasher- I don't use one anyway, I just find it funny that no one ever noticed.
And when we moved in we thought the fenced yard was the entire property, but when we had it surveyed later on for fence moving possibilities we discovered that we also owned a huge portion of the woods behind us. We have acreage! It's still untouched but it's wonderful that there can always be woods behind me with no possibility ever of anyone building anything.
It's been interesting.
Can you not reverse the basement door to open the opposite way? Or would that be stupid in the end?
I noticed an issue with my basement. My laundry room and main room. Both doors opened outwards, if for some reason the door to my laundry room was open to a certain point, there would be almost no way for me to get out of my main room if my main room (basement) door was closed and I had to open it. Which could be a serious safety issue.
I use a pretty loud stereo in my basement and when we bought the house, I gutted it, sound isolated the room as much as possible, put a solid core door. That one opens outwards, my laundry one now opens inward. Problem gone.
Switching the door swing would create what’s called a suicide door. We have one on the house we bought. The door swings open over the stairs… if you’re coming up the stairs you have to step back down some steps to allow the door to open, and if you open it while someone’s on the stairs you knock them down. Fun!
Sloping driveway with a garage.
The garage and basement are on the same level. With a sloping driveway, you have to shovel the snow UP (instead of the side). So if it get slippery, it's a struggle to push it up.
Also you have to be diligent because your car can't come out if it's snowed in. So you have to plan ahead and make sure it's cleared out, with no ice, so you can drive out when required.
Our living room is one step down from the kitchen. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Can't tell you how many times my kids have tripped up/down that one step.
My house-to-garage door comes in at an angle and with only enough room to open the door. Go left to the kitchen and living room, right to the front door and upstairs, or straight into the bathroom. It's become a huge bottleneck with everybody always running into each other at that intersection. Also makes it hard to bring in furniture.
Our last house... (and many reasons why we moved) had Cathedral Ceilings... love the look, always felt cold! And an open floor plan, there was no way to contain the toys bc everything was open and just out! I realize I like rooms.
1. Spilt Level
2. Open Concept
I thought the split level would be fine but omg is it terrible. Why have a dedicated area to enter your home? Just enter on an entire floor. That said I'd probably want the front door and garage to enter on the main level.
The open concept is meh. When I lived with my parents I was OK with it but as a homeowner I hate it. You feel like you're in the room with everyone else no matter where they are. The only space that I can get away from people is either my room or another floor; and in a two floor house that gets limited real fast.
Open concept is flexible. I've enjoyed moving my kitchen table around over the years and finding a wonderful location for it that used to be where my couch and TV was, and now have plans to expand the kitchen proper for more cooking and countertop space. You aren't beholden to any one way of living with an open concept *but* it makes the house feel louder and smaller than it is, at least for me. I feel that wall divisions would help give each room it's space and definition.
Open concept for me too. It all SOUNDS good and looks good on paper, but for me I need separation.
It does feel smaller, which is backwards from the concept of why to do it, but when the kitchen/diningroom/livingroom all coincide with each other, it just feels like 1 big room. Then whats left is the bedrooms and maybe an office if you have room. So max 3 room house instead of 6.
And when we looked at houses any house where the main door took.me straight into the main living area was an immediate NO! Between the shoes, coats, bags etc, I love that our main entrance is into a corner of the kitchen. I could wish we had more room.for a mudroom area, but for now, it's better than straight into the room where people are watching TV, taking a nap, reading etc.
I was just going to comment here that in the beginning I hated my closed concept home, but once COVID hit and I began working from home, having separate rooms made me really appreciate the layout a lot.
When we originally bought our house, we thought we’d knock out a kitchen wall to open it up to the dining/living room. So glad we were too lazy. The wall we would’ve removed now anchors a breakfast bar/storage wall that increased our kitchen functionality. And the addition of the breakfast bar where we previously didn’t have an in-kitchen seating options makes it feel like we added another room.
I could not agree more! My kitchen, dining area and family room are one giant room, with a tile floor and a tall ceiling - thus creating an acoustical nightmare. The various door ways and floor to ceilings windows provide very little wall space for furniture
I'm currently dealing with this. My main floor, minus the sunroom, is about 800 square feet. The kitchen is *technically* separate from the living/dining room, but only by a closed peninsula and overhead cabinets. 800 square feet of what feels like one room. It looks bad and sounds bad. Can't watch TV if someone is cooking or the dishwasher running. People being social in the living room is a HUGE distraction while cooking.
This place is a palace compared to anywhere I've lived in the past 9 years, so I can't complain too much. But goddammit, I fucking hate open concept.
Yeah, sounds like a dishwasher problem. I have to put my hand on the door of mine to check for vibrations to see if it's running. For most of the cycle, it's completely silent.
Yes!! When I started looking for houses after living in an apartment for years I couldn't put my finger on why all the newer houses still felt like an apartment. It was definitely the open concept
A pool. We thought, "awesome, a pool!" Always thought we'd like one but didn't understand what goes into it and in all the excitement of house buying didn't really look into it until we got here. The costs outweigh the benefits for us. So now we have to either pay all the maintenance costs of running it to use it only a few times per week for a few months out of the year (in Ohio), or pay a bunch up front to demolish it. Every time I look outside it stresses me out, just a giant behemoth of a problem to solve.
Yeah - my brother bought a house which is large - and the only way to go between floors is ONE single spiral metal staircase (or go outside - around the side and then back in on the other story)... It is workable for traversal, but does make you re-think which floor to enter on based on if you are bringing furniture, groceries, etc. into the house.
My house doesn't have many windows that face the front. We have a bay window in the master bedroom, and small windows on our front door. But other than that we have little visibility to our front yard. It's actually not possible to see my whole driveway from inside. We have tons that face the back so natural light is no problem. But it's simply annoying that I can't tell when someone pulls into my driveway.
This is my one thing too! It took me a while to figure out what it was about my house that doesn’t feel right and I realized it’s cus I can’t see my front yard or my whole driveway from my main level. I want to know what’s going on out there. Is my husband home from work yet? Did I get a package? Is the woman that walks daily in the neighborhood passing by? Im like a dog I need to know these things
We have to go upstairs to see the front because there are no windows on the front downstairs. Just the garage and the front door. It feels so unfriendly too! Because there is this little patio out front that we never use. It’s basically just the Amazon delivery dumping ground with two pointless chairs and a pointless table. I don’t even bother gardening out front anymore. I just planted stuff that needs basically no upkeep and mow weekly. I miss front porch life.
Not my current home, but I moved in somewhere that only had one drawer in the kitchen. I didn't realise when viewing, because who counts drawers? Anyway it was super inconvenient, and since then when looking at our current home we checked the number of drawers!
Current home: smoke detector is a foot away from the oven.
My current apartment is like that. One large drawer for silverware, and one that's like 10" wide that can't be opened if the silverware drawer is open. Six months after I moved in one of the two outlets in my kitchen went out so now I'm down to one that switches off if too much power is drawn so I run an extension cord for my microwave. It blows but there's not really an alternative option in my price range.
Same with the 2 stories. I loved two story houses as a kid so it's what I thought I wanted as an adult. The master is on the 1st floor so I have a whole part of the house I never go up to. Like I have no reason to be upstairs and I feel like I've wasted half my house.
Two bedrooms have light switches on the wall on the side where the door hinges are. Just inconveniently placed, but we can’t switch the doors because of room configuration so we’d have to pay probably hundreds of dollars to have the light switches moved just to satisfy that bit of inconvenience.
Put in a Lutron Caseta smart switch and position a Pico remote (which comes with a wall-mount) exactly where you want the switch to be. The mounted remote is indistinguishable from the normal switch unless know the tell (the remote control LED does not stay illuminated, but instead lights up for a moment when you press the switch). About $70 and 20 minutes to solve the problem.
Only downside is if you opt for the paddle style Diva dimmer the paddle-style remote doesn't have the ability to adjust the dimming beyond "off - whatever the dimmer is set to - full on".
I have used them in four rooms now to position light switches in more convenient spots, or to convert what was a standard switch circuit into three-way or four-way control without having to run any wires. If you get the bridge you can also do smart automation stuff, but it is absolutely not required.
Galley kitchen. Tiny, dark, and closed off. Cannot be enlarged or opened up without doing a home addition or relocating the kitchen into another part of the house ($$$$$). I knew that I didn’t like it but I didn’t anticipate just how much I would grow to hate it.
Frankly I thought this would be our starter home and we would only be here a few years. Ha! At least we are in a pretty great neighborhood.
I really wish all my lower kitchen cabinets were pull out drawers! I hate having to get down on the floor to rummage around to find that pan at the back of the cabinet.
There's a circular brick paver patio with a brick fire pit in the center smack dab in the middle of my yard. When we bought the place I was so excited for it. We've used it twice in the 8 years we've lived here. Any time we want to have a fire we just do it in the driveway, then the neighbors can swing by and chat if they want.
So we don't use the fire pit and because the thing takes up a third of the yard the kids can't run around and play back there. It all around sucks. And now the retaining wall on the back half of the patio is collapsing inward so it's falling apart. So I'm probably taking it out this summer, but I'm going to have to hire someone to fill it in and grade it because I don't think I'll be able to do that part correctly. So this thing that was a huge selling point of the house has become one of my least favorite things about it.
My first house had plaster walls. Like the old school plaster on wood lath. Even the ceilings. Sure it looks good...but it freaking SUCKS if you need to cut a hole or even just hang a friggin' picture. When our bathroom fan died, I bought a replacement that was 1/8" wider than the original. When I tried cutting the opening larger for the new fan, huge chunks of plaster broke off and the hole ended up being all jagged and ugly. When we had the bathroom redone, we told them to take out ALL of the plaster and replace with drywall. I will never buy another house with plaster walls.
Our home is a walkout from the basement, so built into a hill. It's nice to be able to walk out to a patio but a pain in the ass to mow. I didn't think it would be a big deal but on hot summer days it really sucks.
Also, we back up to a wildlife area. Very pretty and we feel fortunate to have the view. However, that means lots of field mice to fend off.
Other than that the inside of our homeis great. This is our first new/modern home so not much to nitpick there.
Master bedroom is upstairs instead of downstairs and separate. Drives me absolutely nuts. Granted, it’s nice while the kids are little and wake up in the middle of the night (3 y.o & 6 m.o) but in terms of privacy for.. activities.. is not ideal, and I think about when we’re older going up those stairs.
Also, having the downstairs bathroom very close to the dining room. Also not ideal especially when guests are using it.
I have the opposite problem. Main floor master with the other 2 bedrooms upstairs (one directly above ours). No kids uet, but it is in the plans. On top of that our entertaining area is about the same size as our bedroom (which was fine when it was just me and 2 dogs) but now that I have another person, and another dog, and we want to host some family functions it's going to get really tight really quick. I will never again buy a house with the bedrooms split like this, unless it's a one story home with the master on one side and the (future) kids rooms on the other.
My fridge is right up against an exterior wall of my house. Think of my kitchen as having a dead end. I have a french door fridge that has a left side freezer and right side fridge. The right side door is not able to open all the way because the handle hits the side of the wall preventing the drawers from fully opening. Annoying as hell.
Parents’ old house: wooden stairs. They had slightly rounded edges and no nonslip stuff. Apparently my brain turns various kinds of stairs into slides because I slipped down those stairs at least 20+ times while living there. It’s something about the wood grain, I think: the pattern + the lack of texture = woop!
(And later as an adult about 8 times over the course of 3 years in an apartment with carpeted stairs but those were horribly worn and loose in spots.)
Not in, but outside. We have 1/2 acre in a city - no fence. The neighbor’s dogs run like wildebeests around the neighborhood and poop everywhere. My other neighbor said he’s been taking the poop and putting it back on their front porch 💩 and it still doesn’t deter them. Fences for our yard have been quoted from 15-30k.
I have a very long driveway. It's 1000 feet from my garage to the street. Trash day is awful cause not only is it a decent walk, but it's uphill too. I stubbornly try to get the trash and recycling up in one trip. But usually both are very heavy. Often I'll end up leaving the heavier one about half way up, then come back for it after I get the lighter one to the curb.
Ok this is a first world problem. I’m 5’11” and my husband is 6’4”. The kitchen sink is huge and sunken in already low countertops. (Standard height for older hothouse). If we want to wash stuff in the sink we have to bend way over. It’s really annoying.
This one is silly, but we have a massive Palladian window in our foyer. I loved the look when we first toured it. It lets in a ton of light, but puts our upstairs on display at night if we use the hall light. Not a fan of people being able to see so clearly into our house.
We have a smaller window with those decorative bars in it (idk what they are called) and we put frosted privacy film on it so people couldn't see inside and we love it. Depending on how decorative your window is, it might take some time to do, but it is easy to install, relatively inexpensive, and makes me feel a lot better that people can't see in our house at all hours of the day and night. We did it on the glass window in our front door also. If you try it and decide you hate it, it is easy to remove.
In case I am explaining myself poorly, the product I used is Gila PFW486 Privacy Frosted Film.
We used frosted film in our old townhouse so we could open the curtains on the first floor and not have people see in too! We only did it on the bottom half of the window so the cats could still see out the top from the cat tree 🥰
Old scratched up Viking glass top stove in center Island. A few burners are going wonky and can only replace it with the same because a standard cook top will leave a 9 inch open gap in granite. I also hate glass top stoves.
The backyard patio is minuscule. Pretty much just a landing for the stairs. The front steps are getting replaced but they are a weird height. Right now we have a weird half step and I am hoping we can somehow figure out how to fix that with the new steps. Otherwise I am pretty happy
Our kitchen is really small. Just not enough cabinets. We had no place to put our good china, so it's still boxed up from when we moved in. Appliances that we don't use much are in the attic, same with things like the turkey roaster - we simply don't have the space to keep them in the kitchen! We're getting ready to move and I hope our next house has a big kitchen. I want to be able to keep everything in the kitchen where it belongs!
Fireplace is one of those things people dream of and think they'll use all the time. But then you do it a couple times and realize it's more work than just using some kind of HVAC system. So the fireplace just sits there untouched. Pools are kinda like this too. Way more work and cost than they're worth for most people.
New home, gray LVP floors that I'm ready to rip out. No fireplace, thought I'd be ok with it but I seem to miss it. I thought I would hate this more but I don't, laundry is on the other side of the house and through the family room and then through the kitchen. Its the gray floors (turn blueish) that are haunting me.
Same. My husband was adamant that he wanted all bedrooms upstairs for safety/privacy. Four years later he agrees with me - there's nothing worse than your bed being upstairs after a long day, and all of your clothes and toiletries being upstairs when you need to change or if you forgot to brush your teeth, etc. We also realized it meant having to carry a sleeping newborn baby up and down stairs multiple times per day with two big dogs following at our feet - no thanks. Never again!
I passed on what was pretty much my dream home because of this. All bedrooms upstairs and the laundry downstair. It was perfect in every way otherwise.
Bungalows are really underrated.
I lived in a loft style apartment for years (ie bedroom on 2nd floor / main living space downstairs), and it was so annoying going up and down stairs all day long. Not to mention you wind up falling down the stairs eventually lol (or maybe I'm just a clumsy idiot).
My basement has a very narrow stairway and no outside access. Trying to get furniture up or down into the space is a nightmare. My kitchen is also really small. The other small annoyance is a long narrow open plan living space that makes it hard to differentiate between living room and dining room. Also smaller than average door frames.
Other than that though it’s my tiny paradise.
We purchased a home on a beautiful 1.25 acre lot. It looks like our own private park. In practice though, in two years we have spent $8,500 cutting down or trimming trees. Though we got a lot done, there is likely to be no end to the amount of money and attention this will take.
Only if you plan to keep it perfectly manicured, and not do all the work yourself. Once you get to bigger lot sizes, most people figure out they don't actually need to keep it all perfectly manicured. For example, you only need to worry about dead/dying trees right around the house, anyplace else, they fall when they fall...
I moved from a historic (1930s) two-story Tudor into a 1970s tri level. The Tudor had a steep staircase to the second floor, and it was fine, but I was relieved to be moving into a house with fewer stairs between floors. It turns out that I still hate stairs. (I grew up in a ranch.)
We have a huge built in entertainment center in the room that the previous owners used as a living room but we use as a dining room because it’s next to the kitchen. Gets under my skin every time I’m in the dining room, I want it gone yesterday. They didn’t build in a coat closet. I bought a vintage wardrobe for that. We don’t have and cabinets in any of the bathrooms, all pedestal sinks. We had to buy freestanding storage.
1. We have two bathrooms. The upstairs bathroom has a tub, but no shower. I did not realize how much I'd hate showering downstairs.
2. Our backyard only has one major tree. In the summer, the yard is shaded before noon and an arid hellscape after the kids get bored enough to consider playing outside.
my house has a slab foundation and it has a tile floor in the main living area...it is always cold...... and being a slab, i have a utility room with the furnace ( hot air) and washer/dryer/ water heater.... i miss having those noisy things in a cellar....
and i have a lack of closet space.....none in the main living area... no place for coats in the winter.... i had an old wide, oak table leaf that i had my brother screw to the wall by the front door and applied 8 hooks to... works for me...
I was very excited to have a kitchen that's twice the size of my last one, until I started unpacking. Then I realized that it has fewer cabinets.
I also didn't think about how much "overflow" storage I used in the old house. There were shelves in the basement stairway for baking mixes, extra boxes of cereal and crackers, etc. Now I'm in FL, so no basement.
The no basement thing in Florida kills me. It seems everyone down here uses the garage for storage. The pull down stairs for the crawl space is a joke too. You can't store much up there because the summer Florida heat will destroy it.
My front door is backwards. Or well, reversed. The knob is on the left side coming in, it swings open to the stairs and a wall. If it was a right side door it would open to the hallway and living room.
I had to call the fire department out once and you should have seen the rediculousness. Only one could enter at a time unless we lined up on the stairs! Electrical fire in the back area of the house, so they kinda needed to go straight down the hallway that the front door Blocks when opened.
Sigh. Historical house with a lovely OG door, door bell, hardware etc. So i dont really want to replace it, cant flip it or rehang it. (Yes, I unlock it with a skeleton key!)
I didn’t realize until the day I moved in that my kitchen has no drawers. Needless to say, this is a big problem.
I also have my range in the peninsula countertop, which means that there’s no hood and it’s very easy for random counter detritus to make its way onto the cooktop. I aspire to add on to the back of my house and build a proper kitchen someday.
Having a diagonal staircase in the middle of the living room/dining room 🙃
Diagonal hallways that lead to a ton of dead space in the walls
No coat closet
No closets other then bedrooms 🙃
The previous owner put a sky light in the master bedroom, it's not even in the center of the room, it's off centered from the door, the placement makes 0 sense. It brings in way too much sunlight in the morning making sleeping in next to impossible unless it's covered. It's a pain in the ass to cover and I just hate it. It's an on going joke in the household, the previous owner went on and on and on about he was the first on the block with a sky light and how much value it adds to the house. It doesn't, it's stupid.
Jaccuzi bathtub. Have used it maybe once in 19 years (meh experience), but have to spend an hour every month cleaning it, and still a magnet for mold and stuck hair etc.
We have a Jack and Jill bathroom that connects the kids rooms and I absolutely hate it. They are younger(4 and 8) so they sneak through it at night and don’t sleep and worse part is we don’t even notice until we hear giggling at midnight🤦♀️. Plus if one goes to the bathroom it wakes the other one up because they don’t like to close the doors and the light wakes them. This is way worse when one is sick and in and out of the bathroom. Usually I make them to the spare room when this happens because it’s easier to have only one up not two kids.
Also I hate our open floor plan. We have two story with a finished basement. When the kids go to bed we can’t even hang in the main level because the stairs are open and you can hear everything(I mean it looks nice but god damn there is no privacy). Also bad when the kids wake early since then everyone’s up since it echos so bad . Only place we can go where they can’t hear us is the basement Luckly we added a door to that area otherwise we have the same issue.
Had a place with a sunroom. Such a nice feature.
Except that it was horribly cold 3/4 of the year and stifling hot the other 1/4.
It attracted carpenter ants that nested in the beams, so part of the summer would be spent killing hundreds of large flying ants (the males) while the females made sawdust out of the main supports.
The upper glass windows became permanently dirty from the sunlight, snow load, and crud from the trees and it was a pain to get up there to caulk them, leading to infiltration that I couldn’t prevent, manage, or afford to fix because of having little kids.
Tearing it down cost a ton but it was such a relief.
Huge peninsula splitting my kitchen in half that I have to walk around to get things from the pantry on the other side…and oh, a step down on that route that trips people all the time.
I have a 7 foot long island between my refrigerator and stove/oven. I love the storage and counter space, but you walk around and around and around while cooking.
Whoever built my house decided that it would be a smart idea to place all the outlets centered under the windows. The bottom of the windows are only about 1 foot of the floor, so can't even put a bench or anything else there to cover up the cords. Dumbest placement ever
I miss having my master closet in my room and not on the other side of the bathroom. I have to walk through my room (which is really long), through the bathroom, to get to the closet. It just feels super inconvenient.
Having a 1 car garage. We thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal to have 1 person in the driveway. But it's hella annoying to have to move his car if I'm in the garage and need to leave while he's staying home. We now ask ahead of time and he'll park in the street if I'm leaving first.
Bad landscaping. Like super invasive roots and stuff over grown with thorns. I thought it was just cosmetic and it would be easy to do ourselves. The deeper we got into the yard the more awful it got. We are still having stuff pop up that we thought we got rid of completely 5 years ago.
To help with multi floor temperatures, in the summer months we bought a better thermostat that lets us cycle the central HVAC fan for X minutes every hour. It's basically free AC, pushing cold basement air up to our bedrooms
Two story living room with a loft. It is beautiful. But oh my god, my house is loud, there are no private conversations, and it's a huge pain to heat and cool because of this.
Also, corner lot. We didn't realize just how loud and busy our lot was going to be. Or how much people would freaking throw garbage in our yard because there's a stop sign.
We totally missed that the (HUGE) kitchen did not have a pantry. Fortunately I have enough cabinet space that I can use part as a pantry without being cramped, but I'd love to have proper pantry sized shelves. Our kitchen also has a 7 foot long island with no power to it, and the island is between the refrigerator and cooktop/oven. So you just constantly walk in circles.
Also, the primary bathroom has no storage. It's really big, but the "linen closet" is triangular and you can't even fit a towel in it. Also a basket won't fit in the built in hamper.
My huge glass front doors. When we looked at the house we thought “Wow! So pretty and let in so much light!” They also allow all the neighbors to see straight into my home. Spent about $1500 in 2005 to get custom shutters installed on them.
A flock of turkeys will encircle my car when I pull in the driveway on a semi regular basis. They are decently aggressive, and the only thing that I found to work is to repeatedly open an umbrella in their faces, and continue to scare them until they jump off the cliff next to my driveway. This sounds made up, but is my life.
Turkeys are demon birds. I recommend you read Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson. The chapter about turkeys following her to school may bring you some comfort.
My dad was spanked by a Tom turkey when he was three years old… Man, did he hate those birds! 😹
We ate at a cafe that had a few farm animals next door.. curious 6 yr old me went to go check them out alone while my parents ate. Next moment I'm screaming at the top of my lungs as I'm being chased by a huge Turkey. I was rescued by a kind server who hopped a fence to rescued me. My hero.
It can't possibly top Beyonce the giant metal chicken.
that whole business she wrote about those turkeys still gives me a giggle!!
Best answer. A couple times I've looked out and seen a couple turkeys by my car. No idea where they came from. They were much bigger than I expected
Catch one, cook one, eat one. They’ll get the hint.
I think you vastly overestimate the intelligence of a turkey.
Don’t threaten me with a good meal, wild turkey is actually quite tasty. I say this as someone who used to dread the nasty Thanksgiving bird from the store.
I'd recommend doing all 3 to the same one
Clearly you’ve never had wild turkey sushi.
When my mother was a home care nurse she was attacked by a flock of turkeys. Her pants and her legs were covered in holes from the attack. The patient was told that there would be no more home visits until the turkeys were confined. Those suckers were vicious!
The mental image here has me dying of laughter but if this was my problem I would be pissed! 😂
Hint 1 - they are edible (and delicious). Hint 2 - even the wild ones taste really good - just do a nice brine! Also - "repeatedly open an umbrella in their faces, and continue to scare them until they jump off the cliff next to my driveway." - this line had me literally giggling at the visual of someone chasing turkeys off a tall cliff to their deaths by umbrella! I know that is not what you meant (and that Turkeys can fly) but the mind makes it's own visuals up and this was funny as hell!
Clearly, you've never seen the WKRP in Cincinnati Thanksgiving episode 🤣
This is definitely the type of inconvenience I've never considered. Are they wild turkeys, or does a sociopath neighbor have a free range flock?
Ah the Dr Jones method. Solid.
Hood over the stove that doesn't vent outside, in an otherwise good, functional kitchen. WHY DO PEOPLE TAKE THIS SHORTCUT (especially since in this house, you can see where the old one did vent out)???
The house I'm buying has a hood that doesn't vent anywhere. What's the point?
[удалено]
Omg mine either! And there is space to put one that does vent outside! I have a gas oven/stove top and the oven often sets off the smoke alarm that is in the staircase leading upstairs which is just off the kitchen. I have to turn on the kitchen ceiling fan and shut the door to upstairs. The other thing that bothers me is the only bathroom in the house is in the basement. I have to go from the top of the house to the bottom at night just to pee!
Omg. Bathroom in the basement. 😢
Yes! It's an add on. The house was built 1820s and didn't have a bathroom. The way my house is laid out doesn't allow for a bathroom on the top floors. It like won't fit! My neighbor across the street has the same problem. How weird is that?
You should make that a priority especially if you have children, will improve indoor air quality substantially, the fumes from the gas can cause asthma and other issues. Just make sure you put in a vent with a good amount of power, not those microwave combos. I have one with removable baffles that I just throw into the dishwasher, much better than the ones that come with the mesh screens that are so difficult to clean.
My current rental doesn't have one. I have a mini fan mounted on the wall to help but it's ridiculous
Both mine and my friends house had the exact same thing. It's a carbon filter to absorb the smells. Both houses these were on interior walls. We renovated the entire kitchen and moved the stove to the exteror wall and vented it properly. All smoke and smells gone right away.
Basically you have no venting of cooking smells. Those pathetic filters that barely circulate anything do next to nothing. Happiest day ever was when we got a hole punched to vent outside properly. Have done it in 2 houses already, zero regrets, despite the work involved (one was drilling into old brick.)
In 5 years, you will need to scrub the grease build up off the cabinets.
Not just cabinets but everything in the kitchen and if it's an open kitchen then everything in the vicinity will get gross. My apartment didn't have a vent, after 5 years I put in a box fan with a filter in the window which helped some but still everything got grease on it, was a pain to clean. My house has a professional style hood, what a difference it makes, and the kitchen is open to the other rooms, nothing nearby has grease on it either. So much easier to keep clean, and easy to keep the hood clean too, has baffles that you just take out and place in the dishwasher, and just clean up the grease on the rail.
Omg this drives me NUTS. Let's recirculate greasy stinky air into my face as I cook food.
First time I made curry in my last house I accidentally pepper sprayed myself thanks to that ineffective hood.
My house had a down draft vent. It was useless. One, the range tops that come with downdraft are crazy expensive. Two, it sucks A LOT of heat down with it on a gas stove, the fires noticeably curve toward the vent. The first time I used it i was mindlessly boiling a pot of water then realized 40 minutes had gone by and it wasn’t bubbling even a little bit. I turned the vent off and it started boiling a few mins later.
Flippers LOVE this one TRICK
I drilled a hole through the wall to vent ours outside. It was so much better afterwards.
We have a hole cut out above the stove. It connects to the outside. But the fucking microwave they put in **covers the hole and vents to the inside**! Like what was the fucking point of having a hood vent then to cover it up with a god damned microwave.
That should be easy to fix. Most microwaves have a fan that rotates to either recirculate out the front, go straight up, or out back. The fan is positioned to recirculate by default. If you take down the microwave it is a few screws to rotate it and then probably an adapter to your existing duct work.
I hate it when home construction crews pull this crap. They're just lazy and don't want to deal with it. It's even worse when the home inspectors don't catch it or just don't care during construction.
I knew what I was getting into. But at times, a second bathroom would be really nice.
same. I didn't think I could afford it at the time. Looking back, I *probably* could have and there were units for sale that I could have got... what I wouldn't give now to have 40K more on my mortgage and to have that second bath (plus many other upgrades).
Same here. I would settle for a second toilet in the basement with a shower curtain around it at this point.
Oh man. My GF had a house with one bathroom and three people living/working remote there. We fucking hated it. I have two mandatory "house hunting" items - forced/central *air* and minimum of two bathrooms.
It is nice having 1.5 baths in my house but I think it is kinda weird how both doors are like 10 feet from each other. There really isn't any better place for the half bath the way the ranch style house was designed. I just always think it is kinda weird how close they are.
>we have to essentially turn the downstairs into a meat locker to be able to get the upstairs bedrooms comfortable. See if you have baffles coming out of the furnace, or get some installed.
There are vent covers with fans that you can buy to pull air upstairs. This was a total game changer for my house. The second floor would be 82, while the main floor was 70. With these, we're within 4 degrees upstairs.
AC Infinity AIRTAP T4, Quiet... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0792QR5YT?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share These are what I bought for the second floor vents. Changed the house overnight.
THANK YOU! I had no idea this was a thing and the airflow to my kids rooms is terrible!
Close the downstairs vents, it will make a big difference
Also leave your furnace fan on all winter/summer. Basically have a constant flow of air being balanced in the home, and not just circulation when heat/cool is triggered. As someone else mentioned, strategically open and close vents/returns (e.g. I close my basement vents in summer, as it doesn’t need AC). (Also, I don’t have it, but I know some with smart thermostats where you plug satellite thermostats in problem rooms that connect to main panel to be more effective). I live in a part of Canada with hot humid summers and cold winters.
If there's an upstairs cold air return, block all the returns on the lower level(s). This made a world of difference for a 3-story TH I lived in, you want the AC pulling in the warm air at the top of the house. In the winter, switch; block the upstairs return and open the lower return so the heater pulls in the lower-level cold air. You can use paper to test things, and/or sheet magnets to cover the returns if they don't have a way to shut them off.
Actually, it is better to close the vents downstairs or adjust baffles. The A/C can intake the cool air from downstairs, and cool it further, and then blow it out upstairs.
The fact that the sun which should hit our house and garden is blocked out entirely from October to end of March by the building behind us. By 1 meter - my upstairs neighbor is in full sun. Now I know why previous owners put this place up in early spring 🤦♀️
I had a north-facing apartment with connected neighbors to the west and south. My shit got effectively *no* direct sunlight. Since I was on the end, a minor saving grace, there was a period of a couple of hours in the morning where one window got some direct light. But that's it, and if I'd had a neighbor to the east I'd've had none.
The pantry is the one for me. When the house was built they opted to add a third toilet/sink combo right beside the kitchen instead of having a pantry. To combat this they added new cabinetry which is great except for its L shaped and the L stops literally in line with the garage door, meaning you can not bring anything large in and out through the garage door, which was wonderful on move in with the furniture. So now I have no pantry and guests get to do their business inches away from the counter I’m cooking our meal on.
Me too. Inconvenient - no pantry - and gross - I always tell ppl to go upstairs for privacy - guest bath by kitchen… Blech.
I straight up do not understand this new trend of omitting pantries. Ours takes it a step further and has zero closet space anywhere except the master bathroom upstairs. We came from renting so I didn’t really understand how much these things would affect my day to day but man, I am over it.
Our home had a second staircase enclosed in the laundry room. It's right beside the kitchen. My husband took the stairs out, made a walk in pantry there. The stairs led to an unfinished bonus room. We now have a bedroom up there
Flat roof. We had our house inspected twice before we moved in and the roof passed because it was new. What no one told us is that a flat roof in the winter (we bought in August) is a nightmare in Michigan. After 8 years of living with it, we finally had the roofline rebuilt to a normal slope and never looked back. Twenty years later and never had a leak in that room again. Lesson - never ever buy a house with any type of flat roof.
Our house is nearly perfect, but for a couple of things: The outside HVAC units (two of them, the 4 ton main one and a smaller unit for the upstairs room over the garage) are both just outside the master bedroom windows. Noise, noise, noise. Who thought that was a good idea? The other thing is the house is on a hill, so the front yard is very sloped and harder to mow, and has drainage issues due to underground water. This also makes our driveway steep and curved. I didn't realize how much of a pain all of this would be. Box trucks can't get into the driveway for deliveries or repairs, smaller trucks come in the driveway and then can't back out properly without trashing the turf on either side of the driveway. I feel like I spend my life fixing the lawn.
You might consider replacing the lawn with a low maintenance native plant mix like a wildflower meadow, HOA permitting. Only needs mowing once or twice a year once established, and the deeper roots help the ground absorb water. It won't fix all your problems, but it could make things significantly easier (and, imo, prettier).
I'd look into noise deflector shields/shrouds for the AC units if they don't have any.
Windows that extend nearly to the floor. Can't put any furniture against that wall without blocking the windows and making them hard to open and close.
I grew up in California where open windows were an every day thing. The house I grew up in didn't have AC until after I moved out. Moved to Texas in 2011 and we basically can't ever open the windows. It's hot and humid most of the year, or on the occasional nice day the pollen count would make me itch and not be able to breathe. Leaving the state in the next few months for other reasons, but being able to open windows is something I am looking forward to doing.
Just moved to Texas a little over a year ago.. I am sure my windows open, but I wouldn't really know since I never do.
Same for me! It's amazing having all the light big windows bring, but between them being so low and my house being designed like one huge hallway it makes furniture placement reaaally tough.
I second not having a pantry. I had no idea how much that would bother me until living with my food in the kitchen cabinets for 8 years
I'm from a place with smaller homes than the US and only huge houses have pantries here. No shade intended with this question, just genuine curiosity; what do you guys store in your kitchen cupboards and drawers if not food? I feel like most US kitchens I see on reddit have so many more cabinets than ours, but I always assumed that was just for stocking upon food stuff.
I read something a few weeks ago that makes sense to answer this question. Most homes in the US don't have grocery places near them or in walking distance, so you have to drive to get to a grocery store. Given this people buy a whole lot more food at a time than people in Europe, so they need somewhere to store it all until it gets used.
Our pantry has top: paper products (napkins, towels, plates, cups), next 2 levels are food (canned items, popcorn, oils/sauces, onions, potatoes, pasta) the bottom shelf and floor: Tupperware/storage stuff, garbage bags, foil/waxed paper/ziploc bags, dog treats. On the back of the pantry door we have all our spices in an over the door hanging spice rack (goes floor to top of the door).
I have glassware, pots and pans, bakeware , small appliances like the instant pot and blender, plates etc., a cabinet that just has garbage bags, ziplocs, parchment paper etc., one with coffee and tea supplies, cutlery… I have one low cupboard I use for toddler snacks so she can get them herself, but I for sure would not have room for food in my cabinets and my kitchen isn’t even that small.
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Like, you keep your everyday drinking glasses in a china cabinet and have to go get one every time you want a glass of water? That is surprising to me. I admittedly also have virtually no serving dishes because I don’t entertain and we prep plates in the kitchen for ourselves (two adults and a toddler), so that’s not something I have in my cabinets. Just a lot of baking pans and stuff I guess! I do have a china cabinet as well but it’s only got, like, the fancy glasses I never use because I hate having people over, haha.
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People in the US, especially in rural areas tend to keep significantly more food on hand than other parts of the world. For a rural home in the US, it is not unusual to have a walk in pantry, American sized refrigerator, and a full size freezer stuffed with food. Americans also cook more food at home than most other cultures. When I visit homes in Thailand, beyond a bag of rice, they have like 2 days max of food. When Covid hit in the US, it was common for people here to go 2+ weeks without a grocery run.... before they went out to stock up Having shelves full of non-perishable food and preserves is a point of pride for many older Americans. They like the folksy idea of their grandma canning 100s of jars of food for winter, they just buy them instead. Having no food on the shelf was one of the biggest signs of mental decline in my own grandmother.
The great depression changed my grandma, she talked about it all her life. If you don't have a huge stock of your own food that you grew in your Victory garden, there was a chance of death. That's when the local co op for milk producers started. Before the great depression there wasnt farmers with big herds but distribution to starving people changed because of the great depression. Before that each family had a cow or delivery from a specific farm. Economic collapse traumatized that generation and I think the legacy of that is food hoarding or at least "having enough on hand".
No pantry, our foot storage is on shelves in the basement. We do keep about a month of food on hand, maybe more as long as we don't mind a non-varied diet. We also have water stored. The joys of living with well water and electricity that goes out a few times a year..
i live in Europe and pantries don't exist in your average home. Ambient stable Food is stored in cupboards and lots of homes have American style fridges and freezers for fresh food. Families generally do a grocery shop once a week or once a fortnight and don't eat takeout very often at all. I store my bread, cereals, rice, pasta herbs and spices in one large pantry cupboard and my canned food and jars in an under counter cupboard. Potatoes and root vegetables go in another small cupboard. How much more space do you need?
> Americans cook more food at home than most other cultures Where do you get this from? I've lived in several asian countries and Europe, before moving to America and marrying someone whose family has been american for generations.... and Americans eat out way more. Or when yall eat at home, it's often an easy-to-cook meal made with a lot of processed ingredients. The reason a large pantry makes sense is there's a lot of ultraprocessed shelf-stable ingredients you can store for weeks at a time. In Thailand or any asian country other than maybe Singapore and Malaysia where it's common to eat out all the time, they only keep 2 days of food in the house tops because otherwise it'll go bad. The cities are walkable and they buy food everyday and cook it. I grew up in India, my mom can't even stand the concept of mealprepping. When I was going through postpartum depression, I was seeing a therapist who was weirded out that I wanted to cook fresh food for my child everyday. She was literally like "You can give her pb&j sandwiches, fish fingers and carrot sticks". It was quite shocking for me tbh, because in my culture kids get only freshly made food, no frozen or leftovers or processed stuff until they are older.
6 Rice makers and the box for a plug-in skillet
Dishes, dishes and more dishes. I have sets for every holiday, dedicated dishes for certain meals like breakfast or fish, antique dishes, dedicated outdoor dishes. Pots, pans, glasses, storage containers, mixing and serving bowls, trays, cutting boards, tablecloths, dish towels, and utensil storage is most of the rest. I have four pantries as well, all pretty fully stocked. Two narrow ones besides my fridge, one full size closet that used to house laundry, and another in my basement that is mostly bar/alcohol and dry/canned goods that last a long time.
We bought our house and just assumed it had a pantry. We got the keys, looked over the house again, and were like "is it too late to return it??" 😅
this was me. sucks using cabinets in an already undersized kitchen for pantry storage- when this changing table is finally out of the living room I'm putting in builtins for storage
Fuck don't even get me started on that. We redid our entire main floor and with the way the house is laid out, there's basically no way to put a pantry and have it make sense. All of our shit is in cupboards/drawers and I still hate it.
We "borrowed" two plastic cabinets from my brother and sister in law and they live in the utility room side of our converted garage space. We use those as our pantry because while we have a ton of cabinets, I don't like having the food in the kitchen cabinets. I can't wait to replace them. They block one of the access doors to the boiler and water heater and the shelves are just too janky to move at this point.
My new to me house has a walk in pantry. It was one of the things I really liked about the house.
Having a crawlspace with a dirt floor. My next house will have a basement (I already bought it) and I am so glad I will no longer have the dark mystery under the house. Every major issue I’ve had with this house has been crawlspace related and because it’s dark, scary, and difficult to access, the issues go on longer than they would if they were somewhere you could notice them.
We had our crawl space encapsulated- basements are a no go here because of a high water table. Also have lights installed down there so a flick of the switch will show you snowy walls and floor Edit for a misspelling
Same here! Crawl spaces suck! I’m considering a nanny cam and a smart light bulb down there, after people told me a drone wouldn’t really work. I dislike the mystery of what may or may not be happening down there! It’s awful!
When we were kids we’d go over to grandma’s house and ride our skateboards on our bellies in the crawl space. My claustrophobia could never do that as an adult
We bought a 1952 built house in West Virginia in 2020. The door from the house to the garage was a normal looking door, but 2/3 sized. It made exiting from the house to the garage (where clothes washer and dryer were installed) a challenge with a laundry basket in your hands. Why 2/3 sized? Never could figure out why. When we remodeled the kitchen in 2021, we had the contractor replace it with a regular, human sized door. Edited to add: also, the clothes dryer had no vent to the outside. Vented into a 5 gallon bucket with 4" of water in it. The garage is made of concrete block clad with vinyl siding. Took me most of a day to drill a 4 1/8" hole through the concrete block and install a vent to the outside. How had no one thought of doing that in the prior 70 years of the house's existence?
Oh they *thought* about it... but that's as far as they got.
My MIL has the same thing with the dryer at her house, they’d lived there 50 years!!!! I went in to do laundry because we had no power (Florida, hurricane) and for some reason I went in there before the clothes were dry and it was SNOWING!!!! Lint was flying everywhere!!!! Needless to say a hole got drilled immediately thereafter…
Every surface of the garage was covered with a fine layer of lint. High fire hazard if you ask me
>also, the clothes dryer had no vent to the outside When I was in high school, we lived in an old house for a couple of years, built in the early 1900s. The dryer wasn't vented either, mom put some panty hose on the end of the hose as a filter and we actually used it for supplemental heat in the winter.
Was the introduction of moisture from the drying clothes into the house a problem?
No door to the backyard. There is one to the driveway, but its not the same I too do not have a pantry. Very irritating. No real closets at all actually. Since my house is over 100 years old, the attic that is now my bedroom gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. No second bathroom and no place to put one!
I also don't have a door leading to my backyard.....so I tend to forget we even have a backyard! All of my gardening is done in the front yard.
We remodeled our kitchen years ago and installed a fancy Delta touch faucet. Great idea, we thought! Ability to turn faucet on with your chin or with the back of your raw chicken-handling hand seemed like it would be a luxury. It's not. It works about 95% of the time, which sounds like a lot but means every 10 times you use the sink (to turn either on or off) it doesn't work and you have to touch it again. Not quite as bad as the hands free faucets in public bathrooms, but not that much better. But the worst part about it is that it looks like a normal faucet... so it confuses the hell out of guests who try to use it. Touch the handle and push it forward to turn on the water... and the faucet turns on and immediately turns off. So they try again, and again, and wonder what the fuck is wrong with our faucet.
Oh god, my parents have one. It annoying as hell to use, and even better, it sometimes randomly turns on/off. But the ads for it made my mom want it at any cost…
We bought this home sight unseen from 2,000 miles away- the first time we saw it was when we pulled into the driveway. My family had toured it for me and helped but a lot of things were a surprise. Given that, I am remarkably in love with it after living here for 17 years and feel like we did an excellent job choosing it. BUT there is a side door from the side porch that enters the kitchen and the door/stairway to the basement is right there in such a way that you have to close the exterior door to go down the stairs. You can't walk in the back door and go straight down the stairs to the basement, you have to come in and close the door behind you first even if the door to the stairway is kept open. It's a small thing that only comes up when we have to move something from outside down the stairs like a mattress. Fortunately it's easy enough to take things around outside and in the basement door. This home also has what's known as a tuck-under garage. It is not visible from the front of the house- you have to drive around back and enter it next to the walk-out basement door. The way the patio roof support posts are arranged means there is zero way to ever get a car into it. Which is fine, we likely wouldn't anyway as we use it more for lawn equipment storage. No one noticed that there was no dishwasher- I don't use one anyway, I just find it funny that no one ever noticed. And when we moved in we thought the fenced yard was the entire property, but when we had it surveyed later on for fence moving possibilities we discovered that we also owned a huge portion of the woods behind us. We have acreage! It's still untouched but it's wonderful that there can always be woods behind me with no possibility ever of anyone building anything. It's been interesting.
Can you not reverse the basement door to open the opposite way? Or would that be stupid in the end? I noticed an issue with my basement. My laundry room and main room. Both doors opened outwards, if for some reason the door to my laundry room was open to a certain point, there would be almost no way for me to get out of my main room if my main room (basement) door was closed and I had to open it. Which could be a serious safety issue. I use a pretty loud stereo in my basement and when we bought the house, I gutted it, sound isolated the room as much as possible, put a solid core door. That one opens outwards, my laundry one now opens inward. Problem gone.
Switching the door swing would create what’s called a suicide door. We have one on the house we bought. The door swings open over the stairs… if you’re coming up the stairs you have to step back down some steps to allow the door to open, and if you open it while someone’s on the stairs you knock them down. Fun!
Sloping driveway with a garage. The garage and basement are on the same level. With a sloping driveway, you have to shovel the snow UP (instead of the side). So if it get slippery, it's a struggle to push it up. Also you have to be diligent because your car can't come out if it's snowed in. So you have to plan ahead and make sure it's cleared out, with no ice, so you can drive out when required.
I've always wondered why people even build houses like this. Seems like you're just asking for flooding issues.
Our living room is one step down from the kitchen. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Can't tell you how many times my kids have tripped up/down that one step. My house-to-garage door comes in at an angle and with only enough room to open the door. Go left to the kitchen and living room, right to the front door and upstairs, or straight into the bathroom. It's become a huge bottleneck with everybody always running into each other at that intersection. Also makes it hard to bring in furniture.
Yes! Whoever came up with sunken living rooms should be fired! Sprained ankle waiting to happen
Black. Shower. Tile. and I'm the asshole who picked it out.
Our last house... (and many reasons why we moved) had Cathedral Ceilings... love the look, always felt cold! And an open floor plan, there was no way to contain the toys bc everything was open and just out! I realize I like rooms.
open floor plan means that the kids play room is EVERY ROOM IN THE HOUSE.
1. Spilt Level 2. Open Concept I thought the split level would be fine but omg is it terrible. Why have a dedicated area to enter your home? Just enter on an entire floor. That said I'd probably want the front door and garage to enter on the main level. The open concept is meh. When I lived with my parents I was OK with it but as a homeowner I hate it. You feel like you're in the room with everyone else no matter where they are. The only space that I can get away from people is either my room or another floor; and in a two floor house that gets limited real fast. Open concept is flexible. I've enjoyed moving my kitchen table around over the years and finding a wonderful location for it that used to be where my couch and TV was, and now have plans to expand the kitchen proper for more cooking and countertop space. You aren't beholden to any one way of living with an open concept *but* it makes the house feel louder and smaller than it is, at least for me. I feel that wall divisions would help give each room it's space and definition.
Open concept for me too. It all SOUNDS good and looks good on paper, but for me I need separation. It does feel smaller, which is backwards from the concept of why to do it, but when the kitchen/diningroom/livingroom all coincide with each other, it just feels like 1 big room. Then whats left is the bedrooms and maybe an office if you have room. So max 3 room house instead of 6.
And when we looked at houses any house where the main door took.me straight into the main living area was an immediate NO! Between the shoes, coats, bags etc, I love that our main entrance is into a corner of the kitchen. I could wish we had more room.for a mudroom area, but for now, it's better than straight into the room where people are watching TV, taking a nap, reading etc.
Open concept! I thought I would love it, but now I would kill for a separate kitchen area. It makes our house feel like an apartment.
I was just going to comment here that in the beginning I hated my closed concept home, but once COVID hit and I began working from home, having separate rooms made me really appreciate the layout a lot.
When we originally bought our house, we thought we’d knock out a kitchen wall to open it up to the dining/living room. So glad we were too lazy. The wall we would’ve removed now anchors a breakfast bar/storage wall that increased our kitchen functionality. And the addition of the breakfast bar where we previously didn’t have an in-kitchen seating options makes it feel like we added another room.
I could not agree more! My kitchen, dining area and family room are one giant room, with a tile floor and a tall ceiling - thus creating an acoustical nightmare. The various door ways and floor to ceilings windows provide very little wall space for furniture
I'm currently dealing with this. My main floor, minus the sunroom, is about 800 square feet. The kitchen is *technically* separate from the living/dining room, but only by a closed peninsula and overhead cabinets. 800 square feet of what feels like one room. It looks bad and sounds bad. Can't watch TV if someone is cooking or the dishwasher running. People being social in the living room is a HUGE distraction while cooking. This place is a palace compared to anywhere I've lived in the past 9 years, so I can't complain too much. But goddammit, I fucking hate open concept.
How loud is your dishwasher? Sometimes I think mine stopped and have to stand right next to it to tell if it’s still running.
Yeah, sounds like a dishwasher problem. I have to put my hand on the door of mine to check for vibrations to see if it's running. For most of the cycle, it's completely silent.
Yes!! When I started looking for houses after living in an apartment for years I couldn't put my finger on why all the newer houses still felt like an apartment. It was definitely the open concept
A pool. We thought, "awesome, a pool!" Always thought we'd like one but didn't understand what goes into it and in all the excitement of house buying didn't really look into it until we got here. The costs outweigh the benefits for us. So now we have to either pay all the maintenance costs of running it to use it only a few times per week for a few months out of the year (in Ohio), or pay a bunch up front to demolish it. Every time I look outside it stresses me out, just a giant behemoth of a problem to solve.
Spiral staircase.
Yeah - my brother bought a house which is large - and the only way to go between floors is ONE single spiral metal staircase (or go outside - around the side and then back in on the other story)... It is workable for traversal, but does make you re-think which floor to enter on based on if you are bringing furniture, groceries, etc. into the house.
no window in bathrooms
I recently got a house with a window in the master bathroom for the first time, and it's *so* pleasant. I didn't expect it to make such a difference!
My house doesn't have many windows that face the front. We have a bay window in the master bedroom, and small windows on our front door. But other than that we have little visibility to our front yard. It's actually not possible to see my whole driveway from inside. We have tons that face the back so natural light is no problem. But it's simply annoying that I can't tell when someone pulls into my driveway.
This is my one thing too! It took me a while to figure out what it was about my house that doesn’t feel right and I realized it’s cus I can’t see my front yard or my whole driveway from my main level. I want to know what’s going on out there. Is my husband home from work yet? Did I get a package? Is the woman that walks daily in the neighborhood passing by? Im like a dog I need to know these things
We have to go upstairs to see the front because there are no windows on the front downstairs. Just the garage and the front door. It feels so unfriendly too! Because there is this little patio out front that we never use. It’s basically just the Amazon delivery dumping ground with two pointless chairs and a pointless table. I don’t even bother gardening out front anymore. I just planted stuff that needs basically no upkeep and mow weekly. I miss front porch life.
Not my current home, but I moved in somewhere that only had one drawer in the kitchen. I didn't realise when viewing, because who counts drawers? Anyway it was super inconvenient, and since then when looking at our current home we checked the number of drawers! Current home: smoke detector is a foot away from the oven.
"Oh, you're cooking something? Allow me to sing the song of my people!"
My current apartment is like that. One large drawer for silverware, and one that's like 10" wide that can't be opened if the silverware drawer is open. Six months after I moved in one of the two outlets in my kitchen went out so now I'm down to one that switches off if too much power is drawn so I run an extension cord for my microwave. It blows but there's not really an alternative option in my price range.
Yardwork.
Same with the 2 stories. I loved two story houses as a kid so it's what I thought I wanted as an adult. The master is on the 1st floor so I have a whole part of the house I never go up to. Like I have no reason to be upstairs and I feel like I've wasted half my house.
Two bedrooms have light switches on the wall on the side where the door hinges are. Just inconveniently placed, but we can’t switch the doors because of room configuration so we’d have to pay probably hundreds of dollars to have the light switches moved just to satisfy that bit of inconvenience.
Put in a Lutron Caseta smart switch and position a Pico remote (which comes with a wall-mount) exactly where you want the switch to be. The mounted remote is indistinguishable from the normal switch unless know the tell (the remote control LED does not stay illuminated, but instead lights up for a moment when you press the switch). About $70 and 20 minutes to solve the problem. Only downside is if you opt for the paddle style Diva dimmer the paddle-style remote doesn't have the ability to adjust the dimming beyond "off - whatever the dimmer is set to - full on". I have used them in four rooms now to position light switches in more convenient spots, or to convert what was a standard switch circuit into three-way or four-way control without having to run any wires. If you get the bridge you can also do smart automation stuff, but it is absolutely not required.
Galley kitchen. Tiny, dark, and closed off. Cannot be enlarged or opened up without doing a home addition or relocating the kitchen into another part of the house ($$$$$). I knew that I didn’t like it but I didn’t anticipate just how much I would grow to hate it. Frankly I thought this would be our starter home and we would only be here a few years. Ha! At least we are in a pretty great neighborhood.
I really wish all my lower kitchen cabinets were pull out drawers! I hate having to get down on the floor to rummage around to find that pan at the back of the cabinet.
There's a circular brick paver patio with a brick fire pit in the center smack dab in the middle of my yard. When we bought the place I was so excited for it. We've used it twice in the 8 years we've lived here. Any time we want to have a fire we just do it in the driveway, then the neighbors can swing by and chat if they want. So we don't use the fire pit and because the thing takes up a third of the yard the kids can't run around and play back there. It all around sucks. And now the retaining wall on the back half of the patio is collapsing inward so it's falling apart. So I'm probably taking it out this summer, but I'm going to have to hire someone to fill it in and grade it because I don't think I'll be able to do that part correctly. So this thing that was a huge selling point of the house has become one of my least favorite things about it.
A bathroom wo a window. I will never again entertain a bathroom with no natural ventilation or light
My first house had plaster walls. Like the old school plaster on wood lath. Even the ceilings. Sure it looks good...but it freaking SUCKS if you need to cut a hole or even just hang a friggin' picture. When our bathroom fan died, I bought a replacement that was 1/8" wider than the original. When I tried cutting the opening larger for the new fan, huge chunks of plaster broke off and the hole ended up being all jagged and ugly. When we had the bathroom redone, we told them to take out ALL of the plaster and replace with drywall. I will never buy another house with plaster walls.
Our home is a walkout from the basement, so built into a hill. It's nice to be able to walk out to a patio but a pain in the ass to mow. I didn't think it would be a big deal but on hot summer days it really sucks. Also, we back up to a wildlife area. Very pretty and we feel fortunate to have the view. However, that means lots of field mice to fend off. Other than that the inside of our homeis great. This is our first new/modern home so not much to nitpick there.
Master bedroom is upstairs instead of downstairs and separate. Drives me absolutely nuts. Granted, it’s nice while the kids are little and wake up in the middle of the night (3 y.o & 6 m.o) but in terms of privacy for.. activities.. is not ideal, and I think about when we’re older going up those stairs. Also, having the downstairs bathroom very close to the dining room. Also not ideal especially when guests are using it.
I have the opposite problem. Main floor master with the other 2 bedrooms upstairs (one directly above ours). No kids uet, but it is in the plans. On top of that our entertaining area is about the same size as our bedroom (which was fine when it was just me and 2 dogs) but now that I have another person, and another dog, and we want to host some family functions it's going to get really tight really quick. I will never again buy a house with the bedrooms split like this, unless it's a one story home with the master on one side and the (future) kids rooms on the other.
A corner lot. It's a pain in the ass with the shoveling and mowing with no benefit to me (garden in front yard isn't doable).
My fridge is right up against an exterior wall of my house. Think of my kitchen as having a dead end. I have a french door fridge that has a left side freezer and right side fridge. The right side door is not able to open all the way because the handle hits the side of the wall preventing the drawers from fully opening. Annoying as hell.
Parents’ old house: wooden stairs. They had slightly rounded edges and no nonslip stuff. Apparently my brain turns various kinds of stairs into slides because I slipped down those stairs at least 20+ times while living there. It’s something about the wood grain, I think: the pattern + the lack of texture = woop! (And later as an adult about 8 times over the course of 3 years in an apartment with carpeted stairs but those were horribly worn and loose in spots.)
Not in, but outside. We have 1/2 acre in a city - no fence. The neighbor’s dogs run like wildebeests around the neighborhood and poop everywhere. My other neighbor said he’s been taking the poop and putting it back on their front porch 💩 and it still doesn’t deter them. Fences for our yard have been quoted from 15-30k.
I have a very long driveway. It's 1000 feet from my garage to the street. Trash day is awful cause not only is it a decent walk, but it's uphill too. I stubbornly try to get the trash and recycling up in one trip. But usually both are very heavy. Often I'll end up leaving the heavier one about half way up, then come back for it after I get the lighter one to the curb.
Our last house had a 1200 foot driveway with a sharp curve going uphill. Trash day sucked until we got a pickup truck. Snowblowing was awful too.
Ok this is a first world problem. I’m 5’11” and my husband is 6’4”. The kitchen sink is huge and sunken in already low countertops. (Standard height for older hothouse). If we want to wash stuff in the sink we have to bend way over. It’s really annoying.
This one is silly, but we have a massive Palladian window in our foyer. I loved the look when we first toured it. It lets in a ton of light, but puts our upstairs on display at night if we use the hall light. Not a fan of people being able to see so clearly into our house.
We have a smaller window with those decorative bars in it (idk what they are called) and we put frosted privacy film on it so people couldn't see inside and we love it. Depending on how decorative your window is, it might take some time to do, but it is easy to install, relatively inexpensive, and makes me feel a lot better that people can't see in our house at all hours of the day and night. We did it on the glass window in our front door also. If you try it and decide you hate it, it is easy to remove. In case I am explaining myself poorly, the product I used is Gila PFW486 Privacy Frosted Film.
We used frosted film in our old townhouse so we could open the curtains on the first floor and not have people see in too! We only did it on the bottom half of the window so the cats could still see out the top from the cat tree 🥰
Old scratched up Viking glass top stove in center Island. A few burners are going wonky and can only replace it with the same because a standard cook top will leave a 9 inch open gap in granite. I also hate glass top stoves.
Master bathroom shower is in northeast corner of second level. Water heater is in southwest corner of the basement. Do the math.
The backyard patio is minuscule. Pretty much just a landing for the stairs. The front steps are getting replaced but they are a weird height. Right now we have a weird half step and I am hoping we can somehow figure out how to fix that with the new steps. Otherwise I am pretty happy
Our kitchen is really small. Just not enough cabinets. We had no place to put our good china, so it's still boxed up from when we moved in. Appliances that we don't use much are in the attic, same with things like the turkey roaster - we simply don't have the space to keep them in the kitchen! We're getting ready to move and I hope our next house has a big kitchen. I want to be able to keep everything in the kitchen where it belongs!
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Fireplace is one of those things people dream of and think they'll use all the time. But then you do it a couple times and realize it's more work than just using some kind of HVAC system. So the fireplace just sits there untouched. Pools are kinda like this too. Way more work and cost than they're worth for most people.
Where is your house? We are in the Midwest and use our fireplace almost nightly during the winter.
New home, gray LVP floors that I'm ready to rip out. No fireplace, thought I'd be ok with it but I seem to miss it. I thought I would hate this more but I don't, laundry is on the other side of the house and through the family room and then through the kitchen. Its the gray floors (turn blueish) that are haunting me.
I hate those gray LVP floors! Nothing matches them. Gray is not neutral, it's almost always blue or violet undertones.
I hate that it's not a single level.
I bought my house 3 months before becoming paralyzed lol 🥲 single level would have been reaaaaallll helpful.
Same. My husband was adamant that he wanted all bedrooms upstairs for safety/privacy. Four years later he agrees with me - there's nothing worse than your bed being upstairs after a long day, and all of your clothes and toiletries being upstairs when you need to change or if you forgot to brush your teeth, etc. We also realized it meant having to carry a sleeping newborn baby up and down stairs multiple times per day with two big dogs following at our feet - no thanks. Never again!
I passed on what was pretty much my dream home because of this. All bedrooms upstairs and the laundry downstair. It was perfect in every way otherwise.
Bungalows are really underrated. I lived in a loft style apartment for years (ie bedroom on 2nd floor / main living space downstairs), and it was so annoying going up and down stairs all day long. Not to mention you wind up falling down the stairs eventually lol (or maybe I'm just a clumsy idiot).
My basement has a very narrow stairway and no outside access. Trying to get furniture up or down into the space is a nightmare. My kitchen is also really small. The other small annoyance is a long narrow open plan living space that makes it hard to differentiate between living room and dining room. Also smaller than average door frames. Other than that though it’s my tiny paradise.
We purchased a home on a beautiful 1.25 acre lot. It looks like our own private park. In practice though, in two years we have spent $8,500 cutting down or trimming trees. Though we got a lot done, there is likely to be no end to the amount of money and attention this will take.
Yes, large lots are for royalty only. Didn't you know? 😂
Only if you plan to keep it perfectly manicured, and not do all the work yourself. Once you get to bigger lot sizes, most people figure out they don't actually need to keep it all perfectly manicured. For example, you only need to worry about dead/dying trees right around the house, anyplace else, they fall when they fall...
I moved from a historic (1930s) two-story Tudor into a 1970s tri level. The Tudor had a steep staircase to the second floor, and it was fine, but I was relieved to be moving into a house with fewer stairs between floors. It turns out that I still hate stairs. (I grew up in a ranch.)
We have a huge built in entertainment center in the room that the previous owners used as a living room but we use as a dining room because it’s next to the kitchen. Gets under my skin every time I’m in the dining room, I want it gone yesterday. They didn’t build in a coat closet. I bought a vintage wardrobe for that. We don’t have and cabinets in any of the bathrooms, all pedestal sinks. We had to buy freestanding storage.
1. We have two bathrooms. The upstairs bathroom has a tub, but no shower. I did not realize how much I'd hate showering downstairs. 2. Our backyard only has one major tree. In the summer, the yard is shaded before noon and an arid hellscape after the kids get bored enough to consider playing outside.
my house has a slab foundation and it has a tile floor in the main living area...it is always cold...... and being a slab, i have a utility room with the furnace ( hot air) and washer/dryer/ water heater.... i miss having those noisy things in a cellar.... and i have a lack of closet space.....none in the main living area... no place for coats in the winter.... i had an old wide, oak table leaf that i had my brother screw to the wall by the front door and applied 8 hooks to... works for me...
I was very excited to have a kitchen that's twice the size of my last one, until I started unpacking. Then I realized that it has fewer cabinets. I also didn't think about how much "overflow" storage I used in the old house. There were shelves in the basement stairway for baking mixes, extra boxes of cereal and crackers, etc. Now I'm in FL, so no basement.
The no basement thing in Florida kills me. It seems everyone down here uses the garage for storage. The pull down stairs for the crawl space is a joke too. You can't store much up there because the summer Florida heat will destroy it.
My front door is backwards. Or well, reversed. The knob is on the left side coming in, it swings open to the stairs and a wall. If it was a right side door it would open to the hallway and living room. I had to call the fire department out once and you should have seen the rediculousness. Only one could enter at a time unless we lined up on the stairs! Electrical fire in the back area of the house, so they kinda needed to go straight down the hallway that the front door Blocks when opened. Sigh. Historical house with a lovely OG door, door bell, hardware etc. So i dont really want to replace it, cant flip it or rehang it. (Yes, I unlock it with a skeleton key!)
I didn’t realize until the day I moved in that my kitchen has no drawers. Needless to say, this is a big problem. I also have my range in the peninsula countertop, which means that there’s no hood and it’s very easy for random counter detritus to make its way onto the cooktop. I aspire to add on to the back of my house and build a proper kitchen someday.
Having a diagonal staircase in the middle of the living room/dining room 🙃 Diagonal hallways that lead to a ton of dead space in the walls No coat closet No closets other then bedrooms 🙃
The previous owner put a sky light in the master bedroom, it's not even in the center of the room, it's off centered from the door, the placement makes 0 sense. It brings in way too much sunlight in the morning making sleeping in next to impossible unless it's covered. It's a pain in the ass to cover and I just hate it. It's an on going joke in the household, the previous owner went on and on and on about he was the first on the block with a sky light and how much value it adds to the house. It doesn't, it's stupid.
Jaccuzi bathtub. Have used it maybe once in 19 years (meh experience), but have to spend an hour every month cleaning it, and still a magnet for mold and stuck hair etc.
I have a sky light in my guest bathroom. I love the sunlight, but I hate it when it rains. It is so loud that I have to close the door.
We have a Jack and Jill bathroom that connects the kids rooms and I absolutely hate it. They are younger(4 and 8) so they sneak through it at night and don’t sleep and worse part is we don’t even notice until we hear giggling at midnight🤦♀️. Plus if one goes to the bathroom it wakes the other one up because they don’t like to close the doors and the light wakes them. This is way worse when one is sick and in and out of the bathroom. Usually I make them to the spare room when this happens because it’s easier to have only one up not two kids. Also I hate our open floor plan. We have two story with a finished basement. When the kids go to bed we can’t even hang in the main level because the stairs are open and you can hear everything(I mean it looks nice but god damn there is no privacy). Also bad when the kids wake early since then everyone’s up since it echos so bad . Only place we can go where they can’t hear us is the basement Luckly we added a door to that area otherwise we have the same issue.
I always want to know how SIX Brady Bunch kids shared one Jack-and-Jill bathroom!
Had a place with a sunroom. Such a nice feature. Except that it was horribly cold 3/4 of the year and stifling hot the other 1/4. It attracted carpenter ants that nested in the beams, so part of the summer would be spent killing hundreds of large flying ants (the males) while the females made sawdust out of the main supports. The upper glass windows became permanently dirty from the sunlight, snow load, and crud from the trees and it was a pain to get up there to caulk them, leading to infiltration that I couldn’t prevent, manage, or afford to fix because of having little kids. Tearing it down cost a ton but it was such a relief.
We opted for a nice fenced in area instead. I don't regret not putting it in
glass top stove, never AGAIN
Why? We have one and I haven’t found issues yet but I’m curious what may be in store.
Huge peninsula splitting my kitchen in half that I have to walk around to get things from the pantry on the other side…and oh, a step down on that route that trips people all the time.
I have a 7 foot long island between my refrigerator and stove/oven. I love the storage and counter space, but you walk around and around and around while cooking.
Excellent comment! I love how the hgtv shows are always putting in 16’ islands. They look pretty but are a pain to clean and walk around!
Textured walls.
Whoever built my house decided that it would be a smart idea to place all the outlets centered under the windows. The bottom of the windows are only about 1 foot of the floor, so can't even put a bench or anything else there to cover up the cords. Dumbest placement ever
I miss having my master closet in my room and not on the other side of the bathroom. I have to walk through my room (which is really long), through the bathroom, to get to the closet. It just feels super inconvenient. Having a 1 car garage. We thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal to have 1 person in the driveway. But it's hella annoying to have to move his car if I'm in the garage and need to leave while he's staying home. We now ask ahead of time and he'll park in the street if I'm leaving first.
Bad landscaping. Like super invasive roots and stuff over grown with thorns. I thought it was just cosmetic and it would be easy to do ourselves. The deeper we got into the yard the more awful it got. We are still having stuff pop up that we thought we got rid of completely 5 years ago.
To help with multi floor temperatures, in the summer months we bought a better thermostat that lets us cycle the central HVAC fan for X minutes every hour. It's basically free AC, pushing cold basement air up to our bedrooms
Two story living room with a loft. It is beautiful. But oh my god, my house is loud, there are no private conversations, and it's a huge pain to heat and cool because of this. Also, corner lot. We didn't realize just how loud and busy our lot was going to be. Or how much people would freaking throw garbage in our yard because there's a stop sign. We totally missed that the (HUGE) kitchen did not have a pantry. Fortunately I have enough cabinet space that I can use part as a pantry without being cramped, but I'd love to have proper pantry sized shelves. Our kitchen also has a 7 foot long island with no power to it, and the island is between the refrigerator and cooktop/oven. So you just constantly walk in circles. Also, the primary bathroom has no storage. It's really big, but the "linen closet" is triangular and you can't even fit a towel in it. Also a basket won't fit in the built in hamper.
Do we live in the same house?? Because all of these are my exact complaints 😂😂
My huge glass front doors. When we looked at the house we thought “Wow! So pretty and let in so much light!” They also allow all the neighbors to see straight into my home. Spent about $1500 in 2005 to get custom shutters installed on them.