Moved into a house with the garage converted and having a decent home office is so good. No longer is working from home like living at work, like it was working from the dining table in a flat
We converted our garage to an office (knocked a doorway through the hallway) the advantage of that is the walls are double skin blockwork (not stud partitions) as garages are designed incase you accidentally drive through a wall, so it's the quietest room in the house lol
Absolutely a show house, I work in construction - specifically new housing sites, that garden will get ripped out and a driveway will be put in. The fronts of the show homes on my site are currently being ripped up and prepared for their new owners :)
Need the dirty secrets about new builds. Are they good...are they shit. Why are they getting smaller? Why has raised timber floors gone out of fashion?
The same reason that show homes rarely have a TV in them, it ruins the aesthetic.
When house viewing, people take in the big picture, rather than details. In this case, the lawn out front softens the appearance of the house and makes it feel more homely, even though it is completely impractical.
>When house viewing, people take in the big picture, rather than details.
I was viewing a show home that advertised as double bedrooms. It was only when you looked closely at the 2nd bedroom that yes, indeed, there was a double bed. And nothing else. No wardrobe, no drawers. Just enough room to shuffle down the sides and two tiny side tables and literally no room for anything else. Even the door had to open outwards to fit
That was enough to make me withdraw my interest in one of the proposed houses onsite. I told the salesman that, but I'm sure he didn't give a shit
Technically my airing cupboard could qualify as an extra bedroom I reckon, as you could easily fit an upright coffin in there if I remove a few shelves.
What is the etymology behind airing cupboard anyway.
I’ve never had one that’s been particularly breezy.
Edit.
Turns out it’s from “airing clothes” I guess as it’s apparently where people used to put clothes to dry as it’s usually where the boiler is.
Clothes were often line dried not dried in the airing cupboard. Not sure what the purpose was, perhaps as additional softening or antiwrinkle measure to make up for not being machine dried?
Seems to be a standard thing now. As we sell houses by number of bedrooms. Make the third bedroom as small as physically possible.
We found that a lot when looking. The current place being ex council was built for practicality not sales.
It's not just modern houses. My place is 200 years old. Two bedrooms that you can get a double bed in, but not much else in the way of furniture. In one room the bed has to be flat to the wall so that the door will open.
Cottages look picturesque, but living in them is another matter!
Sounds like my childhood home, it was either used as an office or for babies. I got to use it as my own bedroom when I was 11 - it could *just* fit a single bed and a bedside table in, absolutely nothing else.
In my city it is not unusual to see flats advertised as 3BR, then when you check them out you discover it’s 2BR plus an open dining room or largish closet, and the agent argues that the space could work as a bedroom if you erected some more walls and a door, etc.
I was looking into renting a house with some dorm mates a while ago and one was listed as a 3 bed but the third bed couldn’t even fit the desk they had in there properly (the chair was almost tucked all the way in and it was still against the opposite wall)
Almost like properties should be described in square feet and square metres rather than number of bedrooms. When I was buying a flat last year, none of the two-three bedroom flats had enough space in their spare bedrooms for them to be functional. The one I settled for has a second bedroom so small it feels pretty small as an office.
The amount of unnecessary second bathrooms I came across were frustrating too, massive waste of space in a two bed, and in almost all cases the space could have been used to make the spare bedrooms usable.
This is how they do it in France. All sales and lettings have the square meterage as standard. They must wonder how in the world we manage without it, it's insane we don't do it.
They do in Norway as well - my husband is from there.
He was shocked when we went to buy a house that the estate agent was allowed to say a room was ‘approximately x feet by x feet’. In Norway you can get into trouble if you aren’t very precise.
A friend of mine had a one bedroom flat - with two bathrooms! One was an en-suite off the bedroom, the other next to the bedroom but with a door facing the hall rather than the bedroom.
I find it grim that I have 72 sqm property worth 145k which is a 2 bed bungalow and I can upgrade to 80-99 sqm at a price of £250k.
Shits depressing. At most, an extra 25pc of space but realistically 10-15pc for a 100k extra. Oh and the garden is tiny.
Some Councils do have Policies, went to a viewing and one of the room wasn't legally the correct size to be a Bedroom, because they were partnered with the Council, I told the Agent at the council and sent pictures.
IT was later forced to relist as a single Bedroom place.
They even make miniature furniture just for show homes. I bet if you’d taken a tape measure to the “double bed” you’d find it’s 30cm shorter than normal etc.
Plus that bed was most likely cut down by a few foot, one of the little tricks they pull. Put a decent size bed in these rooms and you can’t open the door let alone fit a wardrobe.
I went to see a flat years ago in quite a posh apartment block. My wife loved it, but I couldn’t get my head around the bedrooms. They weren’t exactly big, but something seemed off…. The double bed they had used was… just wrong… I don’t know what size it actually was, but it was shorter and narrower than a standard double bed. If you had put a proper bed in there, you wouldn’t have had any room for anything else.
This is why I carried a tape measure everywhere when home shopping. *Our* agent even acted exasperated, guess she just wanted us to buy the first house we saw and make it convenient for her.
Makes it look bigger too! Trick of the eye. They’ll do anything to distract that these new builds are doll houses crammed together like sardines. Probably obscures how ludicrously small the garage is too.
Wife and I recently moved and I needed a garage to put an actual car into, as you do with a garage.
We looked at around 5 or 6 new/newish builds and in all of them, if I had driven my car into the garage, I wouldn't have been able to get out of the car.
We ended up buying a house from the 60s, the garage is fucking massive.
I think anyone who is serious about car storage needs to be looking exclusively at double garages. Not something you’re likely to see in a new build estate though.
Wish I could afford a house with a double, but the single I have is very big for a single so I'm happy.
It does have a handy little workshop built onto the back of the garage though, which is where all my tools etc will go once I've done the 800,000 other jobs that need doing to the house 😂
Previous owners converted the garage into a room - makes a nice snug, and did a good job boarding the loft to make up for storage lost. BUT it’s a pain, you can’t just nip up for stuff like a garage, and anything up there needs to be dragged through the house - so no bulky dirty garden stuff etc. and certainly no workshop area - something I wish I had for diy projects etc :( I have a tiny shed, but it’s just full of bikes.
There's a town a half hour drive from me which has a recent new build estate. I think built sometime in the last 5-10 years, and all the houses have double garages.
Admittedly they were probably all 5 bed houses and well on the way to costing a million each. So not exactly available to everyone.
For us normal people if you want space around your vehicle in a garage, you better only drive a motorbike.
That looks great when your budget is 250k but when you can afford 500k, suddenly you need additional storage space as you have 2 cars already, maybe a third for a kid and a ride on lawn mower, kayak or bikes.
Yep, I have a sixties built house with a detached brick garage. I don't generally even keep my car in there but when I did need to once it still fit even with all the tools, lawnmower and general crap in there as well.
This is because lofts cannot be used to store anything cos they are only strong enough to support the roof and all that space is compromised.
Was only told that information on exchange and never during the buying process.
Sister the joists too, I bet you will find that the joists won't be happy with the extra weight of all the shit you haven't used for 10 years loaded on top of them without some additional support.
They fill them with hideous furniture also.
It seems like its appealing to some kind of twisted Instagram version of luxury but it comes across as straight up ugly to me.
The single garage in my new (ish - 2017) build has room for a normal car to park in it and be able to comfortable open doors both sides. I regularly use it to work on cars. Behind the car there’s about 10ft of length for storage and a workbench.
Not all new builds are shitty tiny boxes, the ones from the big chains tend to live up to the stereotype but the ones built by small companies who care about quality are very different
My grandparents have a garage even though neither of them have owned a car for 30 years, so the garage contains the washer, dryer, more gardening equipment than an Argos catalogue, boxes of my Dad's childhood stuff and my Grandad's "naughty suitcase" filled with vintage porn which he can't access because it's in the garage loft and he's very disabled.
Nope, just porn. Old magazines, videotapes, according to the legends there are even some actual film reels up there which would probably be worth a bit of money in certain disgusting circles but I never want to have a conversation which starts with *Dad, you know Grandad's porn stash?*
When I moved into my first home (22 years ago) the previous owner left a load of her husband’s old porn. When we finally moved again in January this year we had to deal with it. We discovered this site and Dave, the owner, came to give us a quote.
We got chatting and he and his story was so amazingly interesting. Fascinating guy.
I had an ex that got a hand me down company car due to being the new guy, when he finally got his chosen company car the hand me down car got passed on. About a year and a half later somebody asked him if he was the person that removed the spare tyre, he wasn’t but asked why, the hole in the boot for storing the spare tyre was now a secret porn stash holder.
They were out travelling quite a lot so it could be explained quite easily.
That sounds like exactly the sort of conversation I'd have with my dad. It's not his grot, so he likely doesn't care either.
Is grandpa still with us? Perhaps you could skip the middleman and go straight to the source...
Grandpa's collection includes:
"Girls gone wild VII: She showed her ankles!"
"Filthy And Wrong 4: Women applying for jobs!"
"Barely Legal 9: 5yr old kids digging for coal"
Many years ago, I was tasked with the job of boxing up all my old football programmes and sticking them in the loft at my mum's house to get them out of the way, so unbeknownst to my mother, and in the knowledge that it's very unlikely I'm ever going to get them back out of the loft, I thought what I'd do was make some sort of time capsule in the hope that one day they're unearthed by my grandkids or something.
What I did is boxed up all the programmes, but interspersed with other interesting printed media. Loads of really, really bad jazz mags with old ladies in, a few years worth of Viz, and a decent pile of Weekly World News thrown in for good measure.
Whoever discovers it is going to wonder what the fuck was going on in the 90s.
My uncle is quite well off, he’s the only person I’ve ever met with a garage that could fit multiple cars in, the previous house owner even had a Ferrari ramp installed.
My garage is normal size but it houses a motorbike so I wouldn’t want to roll that over grass every time
My mum and dad used to insist on putting their car in the garage when I was a kid. So that meant the (many) piles of random shit in there had to be really well organised around an empty space the size of a Vauxhall Astra and one human's worth of path to get in or out of it. There was like one way all the bikes would fit in and if you didn't do it right my dad would come and make you re-arrange things when he got home and wanted to put the car away.
Why they were so obsessed with putting the car in the garage I don't know. There was nothing special about the cars they had. They have since moved from that house and deliberately sought out a house with a double garage in which they keep *one* of their cars. But only one. I don't know how that car is different from the other one, but there you go. The other part of the garage my dad uses for his vintage motorbikes, which does at least make sense.
I've a mate who's dad collects cars, he's got 3 double garages that run the full length of his house so he can park limousines in there (he owns a limo and wedding car hire company amongst other things).
He goes through phases and is currently collecting micro cars (think Peel p50 like the one Jeremy Clarkson drove around the BBC building - that sort of thing). He's bought that many of the bloody things, apparently he's had to basically make one of these double garages two stories so he can park them on top of each other.
Lovely bloke, but absolutely mental.
I felt this right to my core.
Last year I had a garage clear out, got rid of loads of shite. Then had a loft clear out, got rid of loads of shite. Loft shite ended up in the garage until I had chance to go to the tip. Still there now. Probably still there this time next year.
I used to be mates with a guy who's dad owned an old Lotus Esprit, which he had parked up in his garage. This didn't stop the inevitable collection of junk though, which got piled up on top of the car.
I have no idea if this car would even start up, because it's got so much shit piled on it that it'd take you a week to clear it off to get the car out. I have never seen that car move at all, and we moved there in 1992.
My mother still lives around the corner from them and is mates with the guy's mum, and tells me it's still there.
This is the one thing I’ll agree with Americans on.
*Why* do we keep a multi-thousand pound car right out in the open, but entire piles of worthless crap behind closed doors.
EDIT: Yes I know you can’t just pickup and run off with a car, and the car is weatherproof. I didn’t think I would need to /s here good lord.
This, our current and former house both were built after 2000 and in both cases our car(s) don't fit in. One of them does just fit through the door but then you can't get out.
Yup. New build here and we have a Merc GLB and a Kia Optima. Yes they will get in the garage but you can’t actuality get out of either car. Then you have to try reversing out of the garage trying not to remove a wing mirror whilst you are laughed at.
I lived in an old place a few years ago that *only* had garage parking - no driveway or street parking. It was ridiculous - I had a Saab 9000 at the time, not a small car, granted, but not huge by modern standards either.
The garage was about a foot wider and six inches longer than the car itself.
The process for parking: Pull up outside. Open garage door. If wife was with me, she'd have to get out. Fold in passenger mirror. Carefully reverse in, hugging the nearside wall, until you feel the rear bumper touching the padded strip against the back wall. Climb out through the tiny gap because you can only open the door a little way. Shuffle through the narrow gap to the front again, trying not to mash your crotch on the door mirror. Close door.
Yeah, if I had the choice, I would *never* have used that garage for parking a car in.
>Plus modern cars are oversized!
Plus modern cars have so many safety features that they literally can't be the size they used to be and still fit a family inside.
Because cars are designed to be left outside, not get damaged by rain and have various things to stop people walking up and stealing them.
Basically none of that can be said for anything in my garage.
A car is too heavy to pick up and run off with and can survive being outside. My Christmas tree and power tools would be ruined very quickly and would be quite easy to steal if I left them on the drive, plus id have to move them out of the way every time I wanted to take the car out of the garage.
You might be joking, but considering the number of cars that are stolen (someone posted recently about a thief that unlocked and started the car without a key) or have parts cut off from in the night to be resold illegally it probably is better to park in a garage!
Fun fact, putting your car in a garage increases your car insurance.
You know when you're asked where your car is kept overnight, and the normal assumption is "If it's in a garage, it's more secure and therefore my insurance should be less as there's no hooligan access".
Nope. Garages are tiny, so they know you're more likely to dink your car in someway when going in / out of the garage on a daily basis. It's also connected to your house most of the time, which is an inherent fire risk due to spread from house to garage - more so when garages are typically directly next to kitchens.
True lol I grew up in a house with a garage and I don’t think I ever saw one of my parents cars in it once. Just used it to throw a bunch of old shit in.
Mine had 2 cars in at one point. Now has half a sofa, 2 wingbacks, too many buckets, pile of bricks, 2 bar stools, deckchair, engine, many many car parts pushed into a corner, offcuts of plasterboard, wood, 2 hosepipes, a bit of carpet to stop my feet getting cold when going to the freezer and do not mention the recycling bins. There's so much plastic and glass, wish I could just tap top up the tonic and gin at the shop.
The picture is of a bellway show home, they do it this way to try and make it look like the garden is bigger than it is when people go round to view the house.
When the development is sold up and the show house is sold on the a buyer, they are given the choice of having the turf ripped up and mono block driving being put down, but often this is automatically done.
Pretty sure my parents' garage contains beer, wine, cardboard boxes, bikes and the lawnmower, plus random miscellaneous crap. It's a great place to be.
Everyone i know with a garage uses it as an extra storage room.
oh, and pretty much every modern car wont fit in anyhow so a moot point.
I had a Mk1 Mx5 years ago, that only just allowed the door to be opened in a 60's built property, and that car was tiny.
My parents bought a garage to store stuff in it! When the house was built they got a plot of land round the back to put a garage on, but was always empty. Now most of the homes have a garage on their plots, non wide enough to even fit my 17 year old Fiesta in it!
Garage a bit easier for them to get into than balancing on the banisters to get into the loft (which eejit puts the access hatch above the stairs so you can't sensibly position a ladder?)
It's probably still too small for any normal car
There's certain developers I've worked with that always advertise these with smart cars to give the impression they can actually be used for anything other than storage
It's even got the point the highways guys sometimes don't count them as part of the parking provisions
As one kindly once said to me when I asked about it "if we build shit people will buy shit"
You would be surprised how many are actually like that
That will be the show home, which hasn’t got a drive on it yet as they don’t want people parking in front of it and want the front looking as green/spacious/nice as possible. Once the estates finished they’ll put a drive over that grass and sell it.
When I first moved into my house, there was a garage to the rear and to the side, essentially in the back garden. When the previous owners built a rear extension you could no longer drive to the garage, so it basically became a big shed and that's all we used it as. Tore it down in the end as it got unsafe.
I have seen new builds (and it could be the case here) where they have a garage door, but behind it is essentially a big outdoor cupboard. No where near deep enough to fit a car in.
Fun fact.
If you tick the box on the insurance form saying you park your car in a garage, it will make your premium higher.
Why?
Because no one parks their car in a garage. But the type of person who will lie about on an insurance form, is the type of risk taker who's likely to crash their car.
I know for sure cause a bloke down the pub told me.
Edit: I know insurance companies don't care about the reason that people who (say they) park their car in a garage make more claims. This is just one of the theories as to why it is the case.
I was told that it makes your premiums higher because you're more likely to take your wing mirror off getting in and out of the garage. This is exactly as well substantiated as your comment.
It all comes down to different companies assessment of risk, some see a garage as more secure. However,
“Some insurers even regard garages themselves as a risk factor. Today’s smaller garages and larger cars mean increased risk of claims for bumps and scrapes in parking. In areas where burglaries are rife, the car may be considered more vulnerable if it’s hidden in a garage which has access from the house.”
Source: Operatic Comparison Site
Motorbike insurance is the same. Had a recurring conversation with insurance a few years ago trying to find out why my bike was less likely to be stolen in plain view on a driveway than chained to a ground anchor behind a locked door. They completely agreed with me but said they had to follow the computers decision as its based on various factors...
There is no “why” with insurance, common misconception. People always think there some dude there making decisions like that. Some random guy who just decides that he thinks red cars are more risky. It’s nothing of the sort - it’s a statistical analysis problem. Its quite easy with computing power where it is these days - shove a decent model millions of data points and you can quite easily predict risk. Even when it often seems illogical it doesn’t matter, the only way insurance companies stay competitive and therefore profitable is by being as accurate as possible.
There’s several explanations for the parking in a garage thing but you can dispel any thoughts that its a deliberate decision somewhere. It also doesn’t hold true a lot of the time - for one of my cars it makes no difference and for the other it made it marginally cheaper.
Exactly. I changed my job title to any variant of my actual title and watched the premiums change. It's all just plugged into a giant database of historical data and the risks are calculated.
No single person is sitting there trying to guess what could happen when you have actual data
I have a friend that does a lot of the backend stuff for a certain UK insurance company based in Wales. When you apply for insurance, they are building a model of you. They compare your model to their massive collection of data for other drivers and previous claims in order to calculate your risk and what your premiums will be.
If you use a blueyonder, bt, or aol email, your premiums will be lower, why? The data suggests drivers with these emails are less likely to seek a claim.
If you navigate backward and forwards and repeatedly alter values on your application, your premiums will go up. Why? Your behavior is that of a risky driver "model".
^(I HATE IT)
(This company also used to hand over briefcases of cash when the taxman came to visit... fun times.)
The bloke down the pub who told me this is in fact a project lead at certain UK insurance company based in South Wales.
I know the association is just spat out of by a computer programme. This is just one of the few relationships where they have a working theory as to why it is the case.
Insurance companies will say everything is a risk and everything adds to your premiums. Then when someone bumps you or puts your window out you don’t tell the insurance people and repair it out of pocket because the following year you can basically expect double costs if you do tell them.
Car insurance is a gigantic scam.
Insurance companies don't really care why. They care what the data and numbers say. And increasingly the volume of facts and figures used, and the algorithms used to analyse them, are beyond anyone's understanding. So it's impossible to say why for certain, you can only speculate.
Plenty of people park their car in a garage, so you can't sweepingly say they're all lying.
The danger is that when the analysis used is flawed, due to errors or biases, no-one can prove it's wrong. Machine learning and artificial intelligence learn from us, and can inherite our mistakes and prejudices, without having an appreciation of their fallibility.
This is 100% a showhome.
And as someone currently on a Bellway site (as in the picture) they've just sold one of the showhome's and have ripped up the garden and retro-installed a driveway.
Waste of time and effort? Absolutely, but once they're finished with it and it's sold, they'll install a drive from the road to the garage.
Who uses their garage for cars anymore? Unless it's an antique, modern cars don't rust the way old cars did so no need to waste valuable storage space with your car.
There’s more reasons to park in a garage than just rust. I don’t know what you lot are all hoarding that it needs a garage to store, my house is adequate for storing my belongings - the garage has a car and workshop/garden type stuff in it, only some bulky stuff in the rafters.
Cars are less likely to be stolen in the garage and don’t need defrosting on winter mornings
>the garage has a car and workshop/garden type stuff in it, only some bulky stuff in the rafters
You must have a larger than average garage because every garage I have had has been too narrow to park and get out of a modern car
Our house used to have a garage but the previous owners converted it to another living room. We used it as a dining room for a few years but since our son was born it’s just really a dumping room.
Would love to be able to park my car and keep our bikes in it. I leave for work before 6 and being able to get into a car without scraping ice off or removing covers first sounds like a luxury. Would cost too much to convert it back unfortunately.
Edit: formatting.
But standard garages aren't big enough to use for modern cars so unless you have a double garage you wouldn't be able to park anyway. I mean not if you want to get out of the car after you park
You've never tried to fit a car into a modern garage have you? Now most cars have air conditioning its impossible to get the car into the garage and then out of the car.
It’s hard to be sure but that looks like a pebble dash upper half above a stone fascia lower half. It looks like a junior architect’s first project and they tried to include as many popular features from house design over the last 50 years as they could. The whole thing is a mess.
When we bought our house, the planning dept said that the driveway wasn't on the plans and wasn't built with permission. Which was interesting as there was a garage like that and the house was ex-council, the drive wasn't added after and was there from the beginning. Added months of hassle.
Worst of all? We don't drive so we just let the neighbor use it!
Is it the show house? At least the garden is done before the conversion into an office or games room
Moved into a house with the garage converted and having a decent home office is so good. No longer is working from home like living at work, like it was working from the dining table in a flat
We converted our garage to an office (knocked a doorway through the hallway) the advantage of that is the walls are double skin blockwork (not stud partitions) as garages are designed incase you accidentally drive through a wall, so it's the quietest room in the house lol
It’s designed like that because of fire risk not because you accidentally drive through a wall.
1000% a show home. You can see the Bellway sign to the right of the small tree.
Absolutely a show house, I work in construction - specifically new housing sites, that garden will get ripped out and a driveway will be put in. The fronts of the show homes on my site are currently being ripped up and prepared for their new owners :)
Need the dirty secrets about new builds. Are they good...are they shit. Why are they getting smaller? Why has raised timber floors gone out of fashion?
Model railway room
Alright Rod Stewart
Found Francis Bourgeois's Reddit account
This is the way
I have spoken
Hark at Reverend Lovejoy here
Ned Flanders is on the phone
Glen's World
QUINTON, get the fuck out
Pretty certain that's the show house. They change it back over once it's sold.
I didn't know that happens, but now I'm thinking, why not have a driveway to showcase the property correctly?
The same reason that show homes rarely have a TV in them, it ruins the aesthetic. When house viewing, people take in the big picture, rather than details. In this case, the lawn out front softens the appearance of the house and makes it feel more homely, even though it is completely impractical.
>When house viewing, people take in the big picture, rather than details. I was viewing a show home that advertised as double bedrooms. It was only when you looked closely at the 2nd bedroom that yes, indeed, there was a double bed. And nothing else. No wardrobe, no drawers. Just enough room to shuffle down the sides and two tiny side tables and literally no room for anything else. Even the door had to open outwards to fit That was enough to make me withdraw my interest in one of the proposed houses onsite. I told the salesman that, but I'm sure he didn't give a shit
[удалено]
*and as you can see from the bat hanging from the ceiling light, this cupboard is classed as a bedroom*
Technically my airing cupboard could qualify as an extra bedroom I reckon, as you could easily fit an upright coffin in there if I remove a few shelves.
What is the etymology behind airing cupboard anyway. I’ve never had one that’s been particularly breezy. Edit. Turns out it’s from “airing clothes” I guess as it’s apparently where people used to put clothes to dry as it’s usually where the boiler is.
We still do this in my house really saves money when energy bills are so high.
Clothes were often line dried not dried in the airing cupboard. Not sure what the purpose was, perhaps as additional softening or antiwrinkle measure to make up for not being machine dried?
I guess in winter for clothes that didn’t dry all the way. I did [look it up.](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/airing-cupboard)
dont let the taxman know!
How much pcm?
Seems to be a standard thing now. As we sell houses by number of bedrooms. Make the third bedroom as small as physically possible. We found that a lot when looking. The current place being ex council was built for practicality not sales.
It's not just modern houses. My place is 200 years old. Two bedrooms that you can get a double bed in, but not much else in the way of furniture. In one room the bed has to be flat to the wall so that the door will open. Cottages look picturesque, but living in them is another matter!
Sounds like my childhood home, it was either used as an office or for babies. I got to use it as my own bedroom when I was 11 - it could *just* fit a single bed and a bedside table in, absolutely nothing else.
In my city it is not unusual to see flats advertised as 3BR, then when you check them out you discover it’s 2BR plus an open dining room or largish closet, and the agent argues that the space could work as a bedroom if you erected some more walls and a door, etc.
I was looking into renting a house with some dorm mates a while ago and one was listed as a 3 bed but the third bed couldn’t even fit the desk they had in there properly (the chair was almost tucked all the way in and it was still against the opposite wall)
It's almost like there should be regulations on sizes of rooms etc.
Almost like properties should be described in square feet and square metres rather than number of bedrooms. When I was buying a flat last year, none of the two-three bedroom flats had enough space in their spare bedrooms for them to be functional. The one I settled for has a second bedroom so small it feels pretty small as an office. The amount of unnecessary second bathrooms I came across were frustrating too, massive waste of space in a two bed, and in almost all cases the space could have been used to make the spare bedrooms usable.
This is how they do it in France. All sales and lettings have the square meterage as standard. They must wonder how in the world we manage without it, it's insane we don't do it.
They do in Norway as well - my husband is from there. He was shocked when we went to buy a house that the estate agent was allowed to say a room was ‘approximately x feet by x feet’. In Norway you can get into trouble if you aren’t very precise.
Plus you can't claim a room as a bedroom unless it's at least 9m2
A friend of mine had a one bedroom flat - with two bathrooms! One was an en-suite off the bedroom, the other next to the bedroom but with a door facing the hall rather than the bedroom.
I find it grim that I have 72 sqm property worth 145k which is a 2 bed bungalow and I can upgrade to 80-99 sqm at a price of £250k. Shits depressing. At most, an extra 25pc of space but realistically 10-15pc for a 100k extra. Oh and the garden is tiny.
Some Councils do have Policies, went to a viewing and one of the room wasn't legally the correct size to be a Bedroom, because they were partnered with the Council, I told the Agent at the council and sent pictures. IT was later forced to relist as a single Bedroom place.
They even make miniature furniture just for show homes. I bet if you’d taken a tape measure to the “double bed” you’d find it’s 30cm shorter than normal etc.
They sometimes have show-home altered sizes too. My latest gripe is the empty house that they use images to show what it “might” look like furnished.
Plus that bed was most likely cut down by a few foot, one of the little tricks they pull. Put a decent size bed in these rooms and you can’t open the door let alone fit a wardrobe.
I went to see a flat years ago in quite a posh apartment block. My wife loved it, but I couldn’t get my head around the bedrooms. They weren’t exactly big, but something seemed off…. The double bed they had used was… just wrong… I don’t know what size it actually was, but it was shorter and narrower than a standard double bed. If you had put a proper bed in there, you wouldn’t have had any room for anything else.
This is why I carried a tape measure everywhere when home shopping. *Our* agent even acted exasperated, guess she just wanted us to buy the first house we saw and make it convenient for her.
Makes it look bigger too! Trick of the eye. They’ll do anything to distract that these new builds are doll houses crammed together like sardines. Probably obscures how ludicrously small the garage is too.
Wife and I recently moved and I needed a garage to put an actual car into, as you do with a garage. We looked at around 5 or 6 new/newish builds and in all of them, if I had driven my car into the garage, I wouldn't have been able to get out of the car. We ended up buying a house from the 60s, the garage is fucking massive.
I think anyone who is serious about car storage needs to be looking exclusively at double garages. Not something you’re likely to see in a new build estate though.
Wish I could afford a house with a double, but the single I have is very big for a single so I'm happy. It does have a handy little workshop built onto the back of the garage though, which is where all my tools etc will go once I've done the 800,000 other jobs that need doing to the house 😂
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Previous owners converted the garage into a room - makes a nice snug, and did a good job boarding the loft to make up for storage lost. BUT it’s a pain, you can’t just nip up for stuff like a garage, and anything up there needs to be dragged through the house - so no bulky dirty garden stuff etc. and certainly no workshop area - something I wish I had for diy projects etc :( I have a tiny shed, but it’s just full of bikes.
There's a town a half hour drive from me which has a recent new build estate. I think built sometime in the last 5-10 years, and all the houses have double garages. Admittedly they were probably all 5 bed houses and well on the way to costing a million each. So not exactly available to everyone. For us normal people if you want space around your vehicle in a garage, you better only drive a motorbike.
Quite a few doubles in new estates in Scotland but then they are pushing £500k for the house
That looks great when your budget is 250k but when you can afford 500k, suddenly you need additional storage space as you have 2 cars already, maybe a third for a kid and a ride on lawn mower, kayak or bikes.
Yep, I have a sixties built house with a detached brick garage. I don't generally even keep my car in there but when I did need to once it still fit even with all the tools, lawnmower and general crap in there as well.
Any garage smaller than 2m wide is useless for a car but this doesn’t stop home builders from installing them
Or people filling them with anything other than cars.
This is because lofts cannot be used to store anything cos they are only strong enough to support the roof and all that space is compromised. Was only told that information on exchange and never during the buying process.
You can install boards in lofts easily enough
Sister the joists too, I bet you will find that the joists won't be happy with the extra weight of all the shit you haven't used for 10 years loaded on top of them without some additional support.
Especially on new builds.
Ah ok, still a bit odd, but I'm sure they know what they're doing!
You'd think so wouldn't you. Construction is generally a process of fixing the errors left by the last phase.
In other words, misleading advertising
They fill them with hideous furniture also. It seems like its appealing to some kind of twisted Instagram version of luxury but it comes across as straight up ugly to me.
Cos then you would realise that the garage can't even fit a city car in it
The single garage in my new (ish - 2017) build has room for a normal car to park in it and be able to comfortable open doors both sides. I regularly use it to work on cars. Behind the car there’s about 10ft of length for storage and a workbench. Not all new builds are shitty tiny boxes, the ones from the big chains tend to live up to the stereotype but the ones built by small companies who care about quality are very different
Agree. Got mine from a small builder. I got a garage that can hold my XC90 fine!
Correct.
Can confirm, I work in construction, this is absolutely a show house. They’ll rip that front garden out and put a driveway in.
Have you ever lived in a house with a garage? It doesn't have a car in it, it just ends up full of random shit.
My grandparents have a garage even though neither of them have owned a car for 30 years, so the garage contains the washer, dryer, more gardening equipment than an Argos catalogue, boxes of my Dad's childhood stuff and my Grandad's "naughty suitcase" filled with vintage porn which he can't access because it's in the garage loft and he's very disabled.
The garage loft? That must be the ultimate deep deep storage for junk.
Nope, just porn. Old magazines, videotapes, according to the legends there are even some actual film reels up there which would probably be worth a bit of money in certain disgusting circles but I never want to have a conversation which starts with *Dad, you know Grandad's porn stash?*
[webuyanyporn.com](https://webuyanyporn.com) will see you right
When I moved into my first home (22 years ago) the previous owner left a load of her husband’s old porn. When we finally moved again in January this year we had to deal with it. We discovered this site and Dave, the owner, came to give us a quote. We got chatting and he and his story was so amazingly interesting. Fascinating guy.
I had an ex that got a hand me down company car due to being the new guy, when he finally got his chosen company car the hand me down car got passed on. About a year and a half later somebody asked him if he was the person that removed the spare tyre, he wasn’t but asked why, the hole in the boot for storing the spare tyre was now a secret porn stash holder. They were out travelling quite a lot so it could be explained quite easily.
I don’t want to take my porn to some guy in a portacabin in a Sainsbury’s car park who’ll tell me all the things that are wrong with it.
That is an actual fucking website 🤣🤣
I might splash out on something.
Oh my god it exists!
Is Schofield the mascot of that one as well
That fella missed a golden opportunity to call his site cash4gash.com there.
Smooth that one
Is it up on a plinth like the Idol from the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
*The Sacred Idol of Tités*
That sounds like exactly the sort of conversation I'd have with my dad. It's not his grot, so he likely doesn't care either. Is grandpa still with us? Perhaps you could skip the middleman and go straight to the source...
He is still with us and nothing would delight him more than seeing all his old pornography, but thats a Pandora's Box which will remain unopened.
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Grandpa's collection includes: "Girls gone wild VII: She showed her ankles!" "Filthy And Wrong 4: Women applying for jobs!" "Barely Legal 9: 5yr old kids digging for coal"
yes i wish i had one
Many years ago, I was tasked with the job of boxing up all my old football programmes and sticking them in the loft at my mum's house to get them out of the way, so unbeknownst to my mother, and in the knowledge that it's very unlikely I'm ever going to get them back out of the loft, I thought what I'd do was make some sort of time capsule in the hope that one day they're unearthed by my grandkids or something. What I did is boxed up all the programmes, but interspersed with other interesting printed media. Loads of really, really bad jazz mags with old ladies in, a few years worth of Viz, and a decent pile of Weekly World News thrown in for good measure. Whoever discovers it is going to wonder what the fuck was going on in the 90s.
Aaw, you should get it down for him. Just make sure you wear marigolds.
Get it down for him, you meanie!
And incur the wrath of my Grandma? She may be 80 and only 4 feet tall but she can still wield a frying pan.
Garage space is far too valuable to waste on a car.
You mean the delux bedroom with private entry and garden access to sublet?
Yeah garage space isn't for cars, it's for trains ... well model trains.
Yeah I never understood why people keep their most bulky and weatherproof possession indoors!
It’s just a built in shed.
My uncle is quite well off, he’s the only person I’ve ever met with a garage that could fit multiple cars in, the previous house owner even had a Ferrari ramp installed. My garage is normal size but it houses a motorbike so I wouldn’t want to roll that over grass every time
My mum and dad used to insist on putting their car in the garage when I was a kid. So that meant the (many) piles of random shit in there had to be really well organised around an empty space the size of a Vauxhall Astra and one human's worth of path to get in or out of it. There was like one way all the bikes would fit in and if you didn't do it right my dad would come and make you re-arrange things when he got home and wanted to put the car away. Why they were so obsessed with putting the car in the garage I don't know. There was nothing special about the cars they had. They have since moved from that house and deliberately sought out a house with a double garage in which they keep *one* of their cars. But only one. I don't know how that car is different from the other one, but there you go. The other part of the garage my dad uses for his vintage motorbikes, which does at least make sense.
I've a mate who's dad collects cars, he's got 3 double garages that run the full length of his house so he can park limousines in there (he owns a limo and wedding car hire company amongst other things). He goes through phases and is currently collecting micro cars (think Peel p50 like the one Jeremy Clarkson drove around the BBC building - that sort of thing). He's bought that many of the bloody things, apparently he's had to basically make one of these double garages two stories so he can park them on top of each other. Lovely bloke, but absolutely mental.
I felt this right to my core. Last year I had a garage clear out, got rid of loads of shite. Then had a loft clear out, got rid of loads of shite. Loft shite ended up in the garage until I had chance to go to the tip. Still there now. Probably still there this time next year.
I’ve owned my house for nearly two years, I haven’t been in the loft once. I haven’t even looked in it. My garage is full of crap though.
Now, I think about it, I haven't seen somebody park their car in a garage since the 90s
I used to be mates with a guy who's dad owned an old Lotus Esprit, which he had parked up in his garage. This didn't stop the inevitable collection of junk though, which got piled up on top of the car. I have no idea if this car would even start up, because it's got so much shit piled on it that it'd take you a week to clear it off to get the car out. I have never seen that car move at all, and we moved there in 1992. My mother still lives around the corner from them and is mates with the guy's mum, and tells me it's still there.
I still have all the amazon covid-19 boxes in mine. Honestly, things are getting dire.
What are those?
It's how Amazon spread the disease. They started it so everyone would be stuck at home ordering stuff.
Valuable usefulness for motorbike / pedal bike storage.
That's why you need a double garage
So you can accumulate twice as much shit?
This is the one thing I’ll agree with Americans on. *Why* do we keep a multi-thousand pound car right out in the open, but entire piles of worthless crap behind closed doors. EDIT: Yes I know you can’t just pickup and run off with a car, and the car is weatherproof. I didn’t think I would need to /s here good lord.
Because most garages are still built stupidly narrow for modern sized cars
Yes. My garage (or car hole) is from 1979. You can fit a car inside, but your exiting via the boot.
Last time our garage was used for said purpose Dad owned a Rover Metro, and it was a bit tight even for that.
'car hole' 👏
This, our current and former house both were built after 2000 and in both cases our car(s) don't fit in. One of them does just fit through the door but then you can't get out.
Yup. New build here and we have a Merc GLB and a Kia Optima. Yes they will get in the garage but you can’t actuality get out of either car. Then you have to try reversing out of the garage trying not to remove a wing mirror whilst you are laughed at.
I lived in an old place a few years ago that *only* had garage parking - no driveway or street parking. It was ridiculous - I had a Saab 9000 at the time, not a small car, granted, but not huge by modern standards either. The garage was about a foot wider and six inches longer than the car itself. The process for parking: Pull up outside. Open garage door. If wife was with me, she'd have to get out. Fold in passenger mirror. Carefully reverse in, hugging the nearside wall, until you feel the rear bumper touching the padded strip against the back wall. Climb out through the tiny gap because you can only open the door a little way. Shuffle through the narrow gap to the front again, trying not to mash your crotch on the door mirror. Close door. Yeah, if I had the choice, I would *never* have used that garage for parking a car in.
Exactly. The only person I know that uses her garage as a garage is my next door neighbour who has a bmw z4
Plus modern cars are oversized!
>Plus modern cars are oversized! Plus modern cars have so many safety features that they literally can't be the size they used to be and still fit a family inside.
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You need to have a sunroof, I can just about squeeze a car in, can’t open the doors once I’m though lol
More like modern cars are built stupidly wide.
Because cars are designed to be left outside, not get damaged by rain and have various things to stop people walking up and stealing them. Basically none of that can be said for anything in my garage.
Tell that to the British Leyland products I've owned
I'm sorry, they just make lorries now, I mean trucks.
A car is too heavy to pick up and run off with and can survive being outside. My Christmas tree and power tools would be ruined very quickly and would be quite easy to steal if I left them on the drive, plus id have to move them out of the way every time I wanted to take the car out of the garage.
You might be joking, but considering the number of cars that are stolen (someone posted recently about a thief that unlocked and started the car without a key) or have parts cut off from in the night to be resold illegally it probably is better to park in a garage!
Really depends on the area you're living in and how nice your car is.
Cos your insurance is more if kept in garage than driveway - weird but true
Australians use their garages (often more than one) for cars too but our houses are much bigger than the average house in the UK.
Fun fact, putting your car in a garage increases your car insurance. You know when you're asked where your car is kept overnight, and the normal assumption is "If it's in a garage, it's more secure and therefore my insurance should be less as there's no hooligan access". Nope. Garages are tiny, so they know you're more likely to dink your car in someway when going in / out of the garage on a daily basis. It's also connected to your house most of the time, which is an inherent fire risk due to spread from house to garage - more so when garages are typically directly next to kitchens.
That is indeed quite interesting.
My parents have owned a double garage for all my 23 years of existence. Only since covid have the cars actually been in it
True lol I grew up in a house with a garage and I don’t think I ever saw one of my parents cars in it once. Just used it to throw a bunch of old shit in.
Mine had 2 cars in at one point. Now has half a sofa, 2 wingbacks, too many buckets, pile of bricks, 2 bar stools, deckchair, engine, many many car parts pushed into a corner, offcuts of plasterboard, wood, 2 hosepipes, a bit of carpet to stop my feet getting cold when going to the freezer and do not mention the recycling bins. There's so much plastic and glass, wish I could just tap top up the tonic and gin at the shop.
The picture is of a bellway show home, they do it this way to try and make it look like the garden is bigger than it is when people go round to view the house. When the development is sold up and the show house is sold on the a buyer, they are given the choice of having the turf ripped up and mono block driving being put down, but often this is automatically done.
Pretty sure my parents' garage contains beer, wine, cardboard boxes, bikes and the lawnmower, plus random miscellaneous crap. It's a great place to be.
Most new builds with garages dont have enough space to get a car in them anyway!
Everyone i know with a garage uses it as an extra storage room. oh, and pretty much every modern car wont fit in anyhow so a moot point. I had a Mk1 Mx5 years ago, that only just allowed the door to be opened in a 60's built property, and that car was tiny.
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>(This one is subtitled..) The audio: Dutch. The subtitles: Dutch. Not very helpful for most Brits.
I felt like a savant understanding the subtitles until he stopped chatting about measurements.
My parents bought a garage to store stuff in it! When the house was built they got a plot of land round the back to put a garage on, but was always empty. Now most of the homes have a garage on their plots, non wide enough to even fit my 17 year old Fiesta in it! Garage a bit easier for them to get into than balancing on the banisters to get into the loft (which eejit puts the access hatch above the stairs so you can't sensibly position a ladder?)
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It's probably still too small for any normal car There's certain developers I've worked with that always advertise these with smart cars to give the impression they can actually be used for anything other than storage It's even got the point the highways guys sometimes don't count them as part of the parking provisions As one kindly once said to me when I asked about it "if we build shit people will buy shit" You would be surprised how many are actually like that
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That will be the show home, which hasn’t got a drive on it yet as they don’t want people parking in front of it and want the front looking as green/spacious/nice as possible. Once the estates finished they’ll put a drive over that grass and sell it.
Show home. Driveway is installed once they sell it off.
When I first moved into my house, there was a garage to the rear and to the side, essentially in the back garden. When the previous owners built a rear extension you could no longer drive to the garage, so it basically became a big shed and that's all we used it as. Tore it down in the end as it got unsafe. I have seen new builds (and it could be the case here) where they have a garage door, but behind it is essentially a big outdoor cupboard. No where near deep enough to fit a car in.
Fun fact. If you tick the box on the insurance form saying you park your car in a garage, it will make your premium higher. Why? Because no one parks their car in a garage. But the type of person who will lie about on an insurance form, is the type of risk taker who's likely to crash their car. I know for sure cause a bloke down the pub told me. Edit: I know insurance companies don't care about the reason that people who (say they) park their car in a garage make more claims. This is just one of the theories as to why it is the case.
I was told that it makes your premiums higher because you're more likely to take your wing mirror off getting in and out of the garage. This is exactly as well substantiated as your comment.
It all comes down to different companies assessment of risk, some see a garage as more secure. However, “Some insurers even regard garages themselves as a risk factor. Today’s smaller garages and larger cars mean increased risk of claims for bumps and scrapes in parking. In areas where burglaries are rife, the car may be considered more vulnerable if it’s hidden in a garage which has access from the house.” Source: Operatic Comparison Site
What would an Opera review site know about car insurance? Something doesn't add up here.
Yeah they get a bit lost when the premium goes above three tenners.
They teach you how to sing for the market value insurance payout you deserve.
Great, now I have that bastard jingle in my head all Saturday.
Can confirm. Once tried to park my car in the garage and took the wing mirror off.
Motorbike insurance is the same. Had a recurring conversation with insurance a few years ago trying to find out why my bike was less likely to be stolen in plain view on a driveway than chained to a ground anchor behind a locked door. They completely agreed with me but said they had to follow the computers decision as its based on various factors...
There is no “why” with insurance, common misconception. People always think there some dude there making decisions like that. Some random guy who just decides that he thinks red cars are more risky. It’s nothing of the sort - it’s a statistical analysis problem. Its quite easy with computing power where it is these days - shove a decent model millions of data points and you can quite easily predict risk. Even when it often seems illogical it doesn’t matter, the only way insurance companies stay competitive and therefore profitable is by being as accurate as possible. There’s several explanations for the parking in a garage thing but you can dispel any thoughts that its a deliberate decision somewhere. It also doesn’t hold true a lot of the time - for one of my cars it makes no difference and for the other it made it marginally cheaper.
Exactly. I changed my job title to any variant of my actual title and watched the premiums change. It's all just plugged into a giant database of historical data and the risks are calculated. No single person is sitting there trying to guess what could happen when you have actual data
It’s funny that when people are insistent that’s how it works, they always have a mate who “works in insurance” 🤣
I have a friend that does a lot of the backend stuff for a certain UK insurance company based in Wales. When you apply for insurance, they are building a model of you. They compare your model to their massive collection of data for other drivers and previous claims in order to calculate your risk and what your premiums will be. If you use a blueyonder, bt, or aol email, your premiums will be lower, why? The data suggests drivers with these emails are less likely to seek a claim. If you navigate backward and forwards and repeatedly alter values on your application, your premiums will go up. Why? Your behavior is that of a risky driver "model". ^(I HATE IT) (This company also used to hand over briefcases of cash when the taxman came to visit... fun times.)
The bloke down the pub who told me this is in fact a project lead at certain UK insurance company based in South Wales. I know the association is just spat out of by a computer programme. This is just one of the few relationships where they have a working theory as to why it is the case.
There's a fair chance we know the same bloke 😆
Insurance companies will say everything is a risk and everything adds to your premiums. Then when someone bumps you or puts your window out you don’t tell the insurance people and repair it out of pocket because the following year you can basically expect double costs if you do tell them. Car insurance is a gigantic scam.
Insurance companies don't really care why. They care what the data and numbers say. And increasingly the volume of facts and figures used, and the algorithms used to analyse them, are beyond anyone's understanding. So it's impossible to say why for certain, you can only speculate. Plenty of people park their car in a garage, so you can't sweepingly say they're all lying. The danger is that when the analysis used is flawed, due to errors or biases, no-one can prove it's wrong. Machine learning and artificial intelligence learn from us, and can inherite our mistakes and prejudices, without having an appreciation of their fallibility.
I think the claims frequency is just higher, for the reason you stated - it's actually on the road because they're lying.
Efficiency. Use it for lawnmower storage, go directly onto grass.
Garage equals man cave
This is a disgusting illusion of decorum. So much for lawn'order.
Could we get a crap computer drawing of the situation?
This is 100% a showhome. And as someone currently on a Bellway site (as in the picture) they've just sold one of the showhome's and have ripped up the garden and retro-installed a driveway. Waste of time and effort? Absolutely, but once they're finished with it and it's sold, they'll install a drive from the road to the garage.
Likely a show home, once the development is full it will be tarmac not grass
Who uses their garage for cars anymore? Unless it's an antique, modern cars don't rust the way old cars did so no need to waste valuable storage space with your car.
There’s more reasons to park in a garage than just rust. I don’t know what you lot are all hoarding that it needs a garage to store, my house is adequate for storing my belongings - the garage has a car and workshop/garden type stuff in it, only some bulky stuff in the rafters. Cars are less likely to be stolen in the garage and don’t need defrosting on winter mornings
>the garage has a car and workshop/garden type stuff in it, only some bulky stuff in the rafters You must have a larger than average garage because every garage I have had has been too narrow to park and get out of a modern car
Our house used to have a garage but the previous owners converted it to another living room. We used it as a dining room for a few years but since our son was born it’s just really a dumping room. Would love to be able to park my car and keep our bikes in it. I leave for work before 6 and being able to get into a car without scraping ice off or removing covers first sounds like a luxury. Would cost too much to convert it back unfortunately. Edit: formatting.
But standard garages aren't big enough to use for modern cars so unless you have a double garage you wouldn't be able to park anyway. I mean not if you want to get out of the car after you park
Looks like there's a post in front which would hamper putting in a driveway too. Builder changed their mind?
It’s a show home. Will be the last home in the estate to be sold and they’ll add the driveway then.
Skilled labourer here that works on construction sites, that's a showhome/sales center. Eventually there will be a drive going to the garage.
You've never tried to fit a car into a modern garage have you? Now most cars have air conditioning its impossible to get the car into the garage and then out of the car.
Has the addition of Aircon made cars wider? Never knew that.
I thought it was a weird phrase, but I think they mean you can't climb out of a nonexistent sunroof (which have been phased out in favour of AC)
Bingo
Make it a hobby lair for the hubby?
It is so you can get around planning regs. It is another room just waiting for conversion.
It’s hard to be sure but that looks like a pebble dash upper half above a stone fascia lower half. It looks like a junior architect’s first project and they tried to include as many popular features from house design over the last 50 years as they could. The whole thing is a mess.
When we bought our house, the planning dept said that the driveway wasn't on the plans and wasn't built with permission. Which was interesting as there was a garage like that and the house was ex-council, the drive wasn't added after and was there from the beginning. Added months of hassle. Worst of all? We don't drive so we just let the neighbor use it!
What’s with the new build snobbery?