Having watched quite a few new build tour videos, this unfortunately doesn’t surprise me now. I’ve seen it quite a few times, but I do think it’s weird.
I’m from the south of England and a house such as this will go for about £500,000-£600,000. Although there are a lot of rich people, most of us are ‘normal’ and don’t earn enough to qualify for a mortgage on a property of this size. Brick buildings are for our weather and our fire regs. Air conditioning is not a thing in the U.K.
100% agree. Flats (Condos?) are around £350k ($440k). 3 bedroom terrace houses are around £500k ($631k) and 4 bedroom detached houses (like most Americans I think would be accustomed to. You are looking at around £700k ($883k). Prices can be higher or lower. Especially higher in London.
To answer your questions as a British person with building industry experience: 1. Most houses are full brick in the UK as its better for the wet climate we have and also stronger. We are now doing a lot more timber due to cost and also as they are easier to seal up for air tightness for keeping heat in / lower bills. 2. W.C = Water closet (Room with toilet in it, no shower / bath in there) 3. Alarm not by door for security to stop people outside seeing you enter the code as you walk in. 4. Sink is fairly standard UK, yes it can be swapped round depending on layout. Big sink is often uses to soak dishes or have a washing up bowl in. The other can then be used for something like hand washing or washing veg. 5. Reason we have lots of thing like washing machine, dish washer, boiler all in the kitchen is due to making pipe runs easier. Would likely have the bathroom above it again for the same reason. 6. Yes front room / living room normally has a door due to keeping in heat and noise etc. 7. The garden / Yard is classed as quite big for a house that size here as land is so expensive this is reduced to fit more house on the land. Very rare to share a garden if you own a house as normal only see that on flats. Likely due to poor planning and design. 8. The glass shower screen is because the showers here are often over a bath so you can use either. The screen is there just to stop the water slashing out. 9. AC is rare for a domestic home as we only have small amounts of really hot days, Just use open windows and fans. The combination of brick and insulation means houses stay cooler for longer during the day and warmer for longer in the winter. Also electricity cost way more here so running one is normally a luxury. 10. Good example of a standard new family home in the UK not a starter home. These are normally 1 bedroom house or 2 bedroom flat etc. The bigger houses 4-5 would normally start giving you things like laundry rooms or even walk in closets etc as well as an office space or small bedroom. Hopefully this helps :)
As stated, this the show home and right next door is the show room. The garden space is not separated between the two. You can see from the aerial shot how the gardens look. Most seem tiny and consumed by the garages. I cycle past this development and the houses are so small and cramped because the developer is trying to maximise profit.
Garages are not permitted to open directly into houses, due to fumes, although to be fair, most people use them for storing their ‘stuff’! Many people just convert them into additional downstairs rooms (and put a door in).
Be happy, in Thailand I had a cheap hotel with a multiple kW inline water just heating next to the shower head. Every western electrician would throw his hands up in despair. 😅👍
Usually have a key pad for the home alarm by the front door and the fuse box under the stairs or in a hallway cabinet. Router for broadband is usually in the lounge.
The new build houses are very small compared to the older houses. Usually the standard older british house will have a separate kitchen and dining room and separate living room. The open plan design is definitely more of a recent thing. Also the rooms themselves are usually much bigger. They've just shrunk down over time 😅 like everything else in the UK, paying for more but getting less 😂
I live in an older house a big living room open staircase a massive separate kitchen diner and 3 double bedrooms and i would never buy a new build and all i hear from people that do live in a new build is about mould, noise from next door , and cant hang mirrors or pictures because the walls are like cardboard lol
This isn’t a starter home! It’s a modern new-build so it’s much better designed in terms of usage, but it’s huge & super-nice in comparison to your average starter home!!! The reason we have doors inside the front hallway is because it’s usually cold and wet and you want to keep your living area nice and warm, rather than let cold air, rain and snow blow directly into the living room from the front door 😀
Yea a start home only has like one bedroom maybe a very small room just big enough, to fit a baby's cot in, and right to why the door is separating hall and living space , and a starter home a lot of the time wont have a garage. I see a few Americans surprised to see a washing machine in the kitchen, i did a youtube video calling out a known youtuber, lol on that very thing.
@@reactingtomyroots this is over £480.000 / £530.000 Also it is a new build , there are no starter homes in the UK we don't call it that what we do is if you can afford rent or buying a property that is up to you and your money New builds are just there for anyone to buy or rent from the property management, big trend property management but stupid designs built for cheap sold for 2 3 times the price you would expect the quality 2 bedroom flats are now prices of homes UK at the same time as building properties need to do it in much nicer ways with decoration and more practical use , UK has narrow roads so if anything property real estate owners should start redesigning areas off practicality
When sleeping upstairs, the main reason for closing off all the rooms with doors is that it slows the progression of fire through the house and also protects your exit route. It also makes it cozier. In the early years, houses didn't have central heating, they would have an open fire to warm the living space, the door then helps keep the warmth in too. Lots of reasons I suppose.
Good video, but as someone born and lived in Britain all my life no way was this a typical starter home. Usually starter homes are one, two bed houses/flats or studios flats. Starter homes are typically terraced houses or semi-detached. I would not call what appeared to be a 3 bed detached house a starter home unless you're in the rich bracket. Enjoyed watching-always like watching house programmes. Try Homes Under The Hammer to see a selection of typical British homes across all price brackets.
totaly agree. this would never be marketed as a starter home. a beautiful new 3 bedroom detatched house like this is something you may work upto £275K minimum of 5% deposit required (£13750) then having to pass lending criteria & usualy only being able to borrow 3.5 times your salary you may get mortgage at 5.3% (typical at moment but this is changing) costing £1574 per month....(info from right move calculators) so even if you could afford the monthly mortgage then you would be having to be earning a very good wage to afford the lending criteria.........so very unlikley to be a first home
These houses are new builds, there are many older properties here in the UK with high ceilings and large gardens. My own house is 150 years old, built from Yorkshire stone and is full of character and period features. I love living here.
@@georgebarnes8163 Not if the heat pump drives water bourne heat to radiators (or even under floor pipes). Actually I have wondered if that would work at all, would cold radiators actually cool a room or just be unpleasant to touch? The only way that would work is if the heat pump drove a forced air heating system and our houses just aren't built to accommodate that. I've seen it in office spaces but never in a UK home.
Last summer was so hot at hitting nearly 40° in my mums flat, we gave in and bought a massive cooling fan that you add water and iceblocks to and I sat with ice packs on me. I've lived in very hot zones in desert and almost tropics. I know hot...but last summer was a real scorcher and I'm no longer acclimatised, having come back to England by way of Scotland!
Steve that thing you called a "water heater" in the kitchen cupboard is actually something called a combination boiler. This provides hot water on demand ( nothing stored ) for washing and bathing it also provides water to the central heating radiators again on demand.
We do some strange things in the UK, but locating consumer units in a bathroom is not one of them. Regulations limit the types and locations of electrical equipment anywhere near water. This is an example of shoddy building standards all too common in modern Britain.
You hit the nail on the head, these prices do price a lot of first time buyers out. The UK house prices are completely insane. And this house is in the middle of nowhere. Anything like this house within an hour train commute into London will be at least £750k. So about $1m.
@@neiltitmus9744 really, you must have been lucky to find something. Any 3 bed new build that is over 100m2 and has a garage, will most likely be way over half a million pounds. Within a London commute.
I agree, I’m an hour commute away by train from London. House prices where I am (small town and villages) are 300-400 k for a 3 bedroom house. They’re 500-600k 12 miles away towards London, in the nearest city to where I live.
I think you will need to check out British climate! 100 degrees is a rare heatwave, and AC is not usually needed. Also, the UK is much more densely populated than the US, so gardens, yards, and houses, tend to be smaller and more expensive.
Steve - remember the UK is at the same latitude as Canada, not the USA - and it is a relatively small island, surrounded by large amounts of water. That keeps the climate temperate. The most we need, in hot temperatures, is normally a fan, not AC; although reverse-cycle heat pumps are starting to become a thing.
@@jemmajames6719 Built to be warm yes, but the special glass in my new double glazed patio door which keeps out the draughts in the winter actually kept the room much cooler in the hot weather than the previous one did.
WC means water closet. That is what it was called around Victorian Times in the UK. The name of the room where the toilet was placed, usually inside Upper and Middle-class. Most homes for working-class people had outside toilets until around 100 years or so, when they began to be installed indoors. In the UK, what it is called depends on where you live, loo, toilet, bathroom, guest bathroom (bog). We don't say half bath here. All house developers, no matter where in the country, will say WC because it does not take up much space to write on house plans.
I heard that the "dooring off rooms" came from that every room had a fireplace and a window to warm/cool off the room. In the winter you could shut the doors and only heat the rooms that you actually use. In the summer, you can open all the doors and windows to get air circulation.
Regardless of why it started, it's now a building regs issue. Once you get to three stories, then if you want open-plan on any floor, then you need to install a sprinkler system, which will them need to be periodically checked to satisfy your insurance. ...Or you don't do open-plan and make sure every room has a fire door. So this is why modern townhouse and other three story styles need to have doors. It's also a pitfall if you already have open-plan in your two story property and want to convert the loft because suddenly the downstairs layout no longer meets regs.
The radiators that are in the bathrooms also double as heated towel racks. To warm up you towel while your in the shower or bath. And yes we also call it a galley kitchen 🇬🇧
The power switches (consumer unit) are usually under the stairs or in their own small cupboard, I assume these are in the downstairs WC because it is closest to where the power comes into the house.
@@Sophie.S.. I'm in Ireland and most power switch units are up high and the house alarms will always be in the hallways right beside the front door so you can turn the alarm off quickly. I've never seen that before. I thought the power switch being down low was strange because my 7 year old would know better than to touch it but my toddler would be all over it but then I wondered was it situated like that with disabled people in mind. For over 20 years all new builds have to be disability friendly with certain specifications like wider doorways downstairs, a toilet downstairs big enough to accommodate a wheelchair, lower doorhandles etc. It still seems like putting it in a toilet could be dangerous but what do I know about building regs?!
Lots of towns have banned wooden houses centuries ago after burning down in the middle ages because of that issue, but that's mainly limited to the original boundaries. But it certainly shaped our understanding that houses should be made from brick and stone. There is another reason though which is that wood is far cheaper in the US than Britain. We only have a small amount of forest in the UK, where we favour the environment and leisure as much as much as lumber production. Britain was deforested thousands of years ago in the Neolithic period. As a result of this most lumber has to be imported (normally from Scandinavia). Bricks in contrast are produced domestically.
Treated timber is fire resistant. If you get a fire in a brick hose it's going to lose it's floors and roof that means you're starting from scratch regardless, the house is always a write-off, so it makes no difference - insurers know what they're doing.
I find it really interesting that the '3 little pigs' tale is as well known in the US as it is in the UK but they still follow pig 2's building codes. It does make me wonder about places where wildfires seem to be a risk, are those homes still predominantly wood?
@@streaky81 They can be replaced. There are incidents of stone or brick built houses having been open to the elements for years having the insides replaced. I particularly remember one granite tenement in a terrace of them in Aberdeen being restored in the 1980s, the stone walls having been found to be in as good condition as before an incendiary bomb destroyed the walls, floors and roof during WW2. Similarly, a modern brick house in a village near me had the inside replaced after being gutted by fire.
Due to standard size of UK homes its very typical to have a washing machine in the kitchen (which in older properties is usually at the back of the house) for laundry to then be hung outside to dry, larger properties can fit utility rooms for laundry (or as part of the garage) but generally speaking its incredibly rare to have a laundry room not on the ground floor (US first floor). Also, I believe WC is actually Water Closet.
A starter home is usually anything you can get for the amount you can borrow. Often any appliances would need to be purchased separately . To have all of this for 275 is almost unbelievable. Rooms are every small in most cases although the special camerawork here stretches the floor area
Our homes are designed to keep heat, so we normally build in brick with cavity wall insulation, short cellings that finished a little above the door, the windows are double glazed, you have at least one radiator per room, you have doors on the rooms with less open plan, and you minimums the amount that opening the front door can chill the house down by having separate hallways.
I'm a postman in the UK and get to see a lot of these new builds being build from scratch while delivering, There's a couple new estates being built nearby where the only concrete used was the foundations and ground floor - the rest is 2x4's and plasterboard. These little houses go for over a quarter of a milion - they have no driveway, garage or even a garden. They are basically a large shed, It's an absolute rip-off.
You are right. My home was built in 1935. The walls are solid brick. It has a long wide hallway with 3 beds, separate dining room sitting room kitchen and two bathrooms. A veranda adjoining the main bedroom and the other end the sitting room. The walls are so solid you can't actually knock a nail in the wall...it bends. So you have to drill a hole plug it and then drive the nails in. The design is Spanish Hollywood.
We've always bought old solid properties with huge gardens . The houses that are built nowadays are like little identical boxes were 24 houses are looking into your 6ftx6ft garden at all times 😭 horrid. (Wales uk)
My thought exactly, i'm disgusted watching this video, what a bad home! They are cramming everything into every are as much as they can too, the tv placement was awful, i thought "show homes" had a certain artistique to them but they have the control panel for your electics next to the toilet, a boiler next to the sink hidden behind a cupboard door, it's just terrible, could've atleast tried to fit the boiler in under the stairs. Really dont like this, if this is how they all are now, count me out!
In my town (20 mins from London), 275k you'd be lucky to buy a small studio apartment. A house like this would be close to half a million in my town! Whereas 275k up North you probably could buy a 3 or maybe even a 4 bedroom!
A few years ago we moved to the Yorkshire coast, £155k got us a Victorian built 4 floor ex guesthouse, (9/10 bedrooms)Zoopla says £210k now and it’s a great size for a large family.
My thinking exactly. We are in a rural area 30 miles north of London and it is the sort of thing they are building as 'starter homes' but costing 4-500k. New developments are supposed to contain a proportion of 'affordable' homes but the developers ALWAYS find a way to reduce or remove that requirment. If you need something cheaper then it is going to be old, worn out, needing major refurbishment and tiny (2 bedrooms if you are really lucky), generally with NO outdoor space and probably a flat.
Same here in Berkshire - 25 minutes to Paddington on the train from where I live and that makes my town very attractive for commuters, hence the house prices!
I live in south east wales and the house building is through the roof. Because people can’t afford Bristol and Cardiff. Even had people commute to London.
A starter home in Devon would be about £300k. But a lot smaller than that one. No garage, smaller garden, smaller rooms. Crazy prices at the moment. Bricks and doors help with the cold winds. Brick walls also keep the house cooler in the summer. Though our weather fluctuates wildly! 😅
I can already tell from the thumbnail that this isn't a starter home 😂 A starter home in the UK is a grotty 1 bedroom flat with barely enough space to squeeze around your bed, and here you are showing us a large 3 bedroom detached family house!
That is the alarm control panel (we have the same one in our house) and it''s completely wireless, so depending on the sensors and siren you use the batteries can last up to seven years before being replaced. You just need to install the control panel near a plug socket to get power to the panel. To arm or disarm you use a keyfob so you don't need to physically enter the code at the panel itself, just press a button when leaving or entering the house.
That wasn't the alarm it was the electricity fuse box. I am shocked that was allowed in a bathroom. Presumably rules are different in a small WC rather than a full bathroom. Generally we don't even allow plug sockets or standard light switches in a bathroom
Just checked prices for a similar size and style new build house in my home town in Berkshire - approximately £570,000. House prices in the UK vary a lot depending on the area. You wouldn't get much in my area for £275,000, you'd only get a flat (apartment) with shared/communal outside space.
@@user-bi8ko7kc6h Jeez. £570k would get you a nice fairly rural barn conversion with a decent garden, or plot of land where I am, in the Southern Lake district......or a 4 bedroomed exec style home on a fancy development. You know they type, with a couple of hanging baskets, and a 70 reg BMW on the drive...... A friend of mine moved over to the Lakes from East Yorkshire last year. He paid £200k for a lovely semi-detached cottage in a small rural village. It's on a narrow country lane, in a slightly elevated position, and has sweeping, uninterrupted 180 degree views of the Lake District hills from the front door..... The village pub is 300 yards down the road.. Given the fact that we get Winter here in the Lakes, followed by 6 months of bad weather, he has swapped his posh Audi for a Mitsubishi L200 4WD pick up truck.......
Bear in mind that usually all the ‘extras’ such as flooring are paid on top of the basic price, so this house with the excellent finish it has would be a lot more expensive
The trip switches are usually located in a cupboard under the stairs for example. Note the gas hob and electric cooker - that is usual. The door on the sitting room is also there to keep the heat in and close off the drafty hallway. It's a tidy house espcially for a starter home, it has it's own driveway and the garage which could be converted into another room at a later stage and it's detactched. You could go cheaper but you would might get semi detached or terrace and have on street parking which is a pain. With regards to the bricks, the new houses now have a veneer of brick work on top of the main (cheaper) concrete material, this looks nice but is a cheaper way of doing it. The old house that you see are solid brick but proberbly less well insulated.
Normally you're not allowed electricity anywhere near a bathroom, maybe as this is just a loo and sink (we call this the 'downstaris loo') there's a loophole in the law, the fusebox is normally in a cupboard somewhere, often near the front door. WC = Water Closet.
You can put a consumer unit (fuse box) in a downstairs loo as long as its in the right position. If it was in the wrong place the inspector would not pass it.
I think UK homes tend to have rooms all closed off with doors for 3 main reasons 1. Privacy 2. Noise cancellation (like to watch TV as you suggested) 3. Heat insulation, to keep heat in especially from the wind draft that may come through the front and back door and also to slow down fires if you have fire doors. That’s also why our houses are usually made out of brick like another commenter mentioned. Brick is less flammable which is especially important since UK homes tend to be closer together so fire spreads from house to house quicker.
@@Londonererer haha that’s true I didn’t think of that. Though depends what they’re cooking if I wanna smell it 😅 I have mixed feelings on open plan. I think it can make things more accessible and feel more spacious. However it can also decrease things like privacy and noise cancellation. I think it’s okay in a studio apartment cause it’s just you though I’d still like a curtain or something around my bed to create a separate mental space for sleep. I think an open space between the dining area and kitchen would be good cause those two are kinda connected and I personally rarely eat at a dining table now a days, but I’d probably want a separate living area.
Doors to the living area have always been to keep down draughts. Britain is generally more cold and windy than it is hot and calm. That's why you have open plan in Australia, for example.
9:56 I find the half sink useful. It can be used for rinsing detergent residue from dishes and the plug is a bit different like a strainer to filter out the solid stuff and send it to landfill and it helps save on liquids going into in the kitchen waste bin.
Starter homes in the UK usually are one or two bedroom houses. The WC is a Water Closet which is what the first toilets were called. The electricity panel is never in a bathroom so 4hat is very unusual it is usually in a cupboard in the hallway or under the stairs. The half sink is often utilised for washing vegetables/fruit or rinsing the dishes of the soap suds.
I insisted on this when I replaced mine but it's not standard. It was fitted left handed (yes can switch) and my drainer is much bigger the same size as the sink. But I'm in a older flat, which oddly means I have a better size kitchen than the avg 3 bed house.
The first thing is that the toilet is NOT a bathroom, there is no bath in there, it's a toilet. We build with brick, wood built is VERY unusual in the UK.
In British homes it’s easier to plumb the washing machine in the kitchen. It doesn’t get that hot in the U.K. for AC in homes. We do use electrical fans though.
Lol bit of a silly thing to say: it's only easier to plumb them in the kitchen because we tend to put them in the kitchen. As others have said, the reason we tend to put them in the kitchen in the first place is that most UK homes are too small for a separate laundry room.
@@slashdisco The kitchen tends to be the place where the mains water enters the house. Putting the washing machine near the sink is best for the water pressure.
As an American watching this, it’s interesting to see how different UK homes are. The furnishings and decorations are beautiful and it looks like a nice, cozy house. The thing that really stood out to me is how much smaller everything is. Like the toilets and bathroom sinks look tiny. The refrigerator/freezer combo was half the size of a typical fridge in the US, and the kitchen sink is so much smaller. Plus the closets in the bedrooms are so tiny. How would you possibly fit all your clothes and shoes in there? I can’t even imagine, especially the one that’s a half closet. It’s also unusual not to see a basement.
The thing with these 'starter homes' is that theyre starter homes in name and nothing else. Theyre basically unaffordable for the majority of under 40s. The house builders in the UK profiteer massively on new builds and the government lets them.
A starter home where I live in the uk of £80k-100k. I just bought my first home last year and went for a nice neighbourhood with huge garden and conservatory semi detached for £140k
Indeed, can't imagine a new build starter home costing anything above £150k around here and we have good transport links. Out in the country it drops to under £100k or you can find council estates with houses cheaper even than that but they are not places you would want to buy to live in yourself if you can help it, better just to rent
@@timenchanter1983 where the fuck do you live in Manchester they sell garages literally for that sort of money .... Trust me I have seen it and am in the building game myself and everything this way is 3 to 400 grand plus for a shitty prefab or a apartment in a sky scraper where they bill you yearly for a parking spot under the building and then they bill you for having staff to work and press buttons all day to let people in
For the air conditioning you would need to take up more space on the development for substations to supply the power required, the estates are laid out to fit the land available, as the available plots are generally odd shaped, with a single point of access. So the layout is done to maximise the number of houses.
Air conditioning is called open a window or put the fans on. Central heating is fairly common, washing machine and dryer are normally in the kitchen. Along with fridge freezer, dish washer, and the kitchen sink normally comes with a draining board. And it depends on the area you live, and if you want a garden. Not all houses are designed the same. And we use brick so our house doesn't fall down if we get a gale winds rain or bad weather. So it all depends.
That wasn't a flood plain it was actually branston ash lagoon. They built the houses on the pulverised ash field that the local.power station used to dump its ash.
Wc means water closet. One of the few times british people would use the word closet. Also a strange place for electric stuff, often tucked away in a closet under the staircase in my experience.
I think the furnishings in modern show homes are smaller than the furniture in most of our homes, as it makes the rooms look bigger, but notice how short the bed in the master bedroom seems to be, I’m not tall but even for me that looks quite cramped.
Show homes use all sorts of tricks to make them look bigger. Hardly any furniture, no doors, lots of mirrors. A lot of new builds have very little storage as well, hence the rise of self storage units!
In the kitchen the idea of the smaller sink is to wash vegetables. I would have thought that sink would have been better the other way round with the larger sink next to the draining board.
A new 'town' being built near us in NW Cambridgeshire has a lot of so-called 'starter homes'. As an example, a ONE-bedroomed apartment is now £210,000, so you can imagine how much this 'jewel of a starter home' would cost hereabouts - probably around £475,000. EDIT - cost is now £230,000.
In case nobody mentioned it in a comment, WC stands for water closet. The smaller kitchen sink basin is useful for washing vegetables or cuts of meat. That way it minimises any chance of cross contamination from the larger washing up basin. Having a washing machine and/or hot water heater/boiler in the kitchen is very common here in the UK. A lot of older houses here have the kitchen at the front so they are closest to the mains water supply.
My daughter and son-in-law moved into a new build house last year - very similar to this one. They were able to choose their fixtures and fittings/kitchen equipment/cupboard fronts and flooring throughout. They had quite a lot of choose too. We live in the Southwest, so the prices are a lot higher... I don't know the exact price they paid, but I believe it was around £350+k.
I think this is a really big house! Mine is half this size, I call my back garden a yard because it’s concrete, there is no garage and the front room walks straight out onto the street. I’m not complaining, I love my house and am so lucky to have outside space ❤
The consumer unit (fuse box) is usually in the hallway here in the UK, as would the alarm panel. One thing UK homes tend not to have (unless they're very large) is a utility room large enough to house a separate washing machine and tumble dryer, hence the laundry facilities normally being found in the kitchen. The realtor also forgot to mention the 'wall-to-wall floors'! (Apologies to Leonard Bernstein.)
I live in a two bedroom and I have a utility and my house is 70+ yrs old. As does all the other houses around me. It’s for rinsing dishes most houses have them in the uk.
We don't need air conditioning for 2 reasons. 1. Brick means better heat loss in the cold but also keeps heat out in the hot. And 2. Anything over 30'c/85'f is classed as a very hot day and happens mabey 1 day a year. The brand the other American could not pronounce. Zanussi is a Italy brand manufactured by Electrolux. Za-nu-see. Also our clothes washers are ALL front loaders. What you Americans would class as a RV compact washer. Is our standard size clothes washer.
Favourite joke in the UK “I love summer, last year it was on a Tuesday” we’d use AC maybe a week. It’s the same reason we close off the hallway. When you open the front door you don’t lose all the heat. Closed hall was a dealbreaker for me when I was looking.
Hi Steve. Very odd having the electric box in the toilet area! Normally near the front or back door. Mines above my front door. In terms of house. It's fairly standard layout for a new house. Older houses are usually split into a kitchen room, a dining room and a lounge room (it's to do with being heated by open fires at the time!). Some have knocked these through to make it open plan. Having AC in any house is unusual in the UK especially a starter home as these. You might get it in high end properties and apartments. Was in an apartment i saw in London but they started at £1.2m! Generally the UK gets a few days in the 80's and the odd day in the 90's except for last year when the South of the UK had 2 weeks of high 90's and temperatures hit 100f plus!
I've never seen an electric consumer unit (fusebox) in a loo before. Not sure how that's allowed. Not unusual to have alarm control box in a cloaks cupboard. The sink is a sink and a half. Half sink ysed for rinsing, washing veg etc. You can have the whole thing the other way round.
The kitchen and living room doors closed at night is also afire safety feature,alarm goes off, it gives you a chance to get downstairs and out the fro t door whilst the fire is raging I the kitchen or living room
I wouldn't call this a starter home. Our first home had only 1 bedroom and downstairs was all open plan. Most starter homes are either 1 or 2 bedrooms and certainly not 3. The smallest bedroom would usually have just enough room for a single bed. The gardens are always small unless you move up the property ladder to a bigger home. Some modern homes don't even have a garage.
Typically, no air-con, and clothes washing in kitchen, although a separate 'utility room' is becoming more popular. One and half sinks plus drainer is common in smaller houses to save space (no garbage disposal unit though, very rare). Garage is probably just big enough for a european car to fit, but still a squeeze to get out of the driver's door once in. UK garages are usually just full of the junk that there is no room for anywhere else, and the car just lives on the drive.
Yup, the Art Deco house here was built in 1936, it's a three-bed semi-detached, they had driveways down the side of the houses and a garage in the rear garden, but back then the cars were much narrower, most people have extended their homes over this area, and the front garden and driveway has become a large driveway for three cars, plus our rear garden is South facing 130ft long x 26ft wide, we've not extended sideways as I want the access for a small trailer storage (used for logs), but we have extended the ground floor at the rear, some people build a glass extension, we decided those were too hot/bright in the Summer, and too cold in the Winter, so we had built built with a tiled roof instead, we also have a large wooden decking that we intend to cover with just a roof for shade/rain for use in the Summer. The rear garden is big enough for three sheds 20ft x 20ft, 8ft x 8ft and 6ft x 8ft, an antenna tower (Amateur Radio), a large natural stone paved patio, including an outdoor large Sun Patio with seating, tables, and a log fired Chimnea, along with a separate BBQ, four large log stores, and an Air Rifle Range up for 20/25/30 yards, and a separate Air Rifle Range for 6 yards / 10 metres. The kitchen here is slightly better equipped as the wife just had a new one fitted, along with a breakfast room, there's also a front sitting room with a log fire (although the house has Gas Central Heating & Water as well), and we are considering Solare Water Heating Tubes on the South facing roof; and the rear ground floor extension is the Lounge/TV Room, we also have the Washing Machine and Tumble Dryer under the Stairs to the First Floor, upstairs there's three bedrooms and a bathroom. We are considering converting the loft space into a 2nd Floor storage and a craft room. On Zoopla the house here in Shrewsbury is estimated at £380-£400k, but that was when I last checked a year ago. As regards Renewable Energy, we have Cooperative Society shares in a Wind Farm (Scotland), and a Solar Farm (England), that credits us energy via our Cooperative Society Utilities, although I'm planning Solar Panels on the large shed, and a small wind generator on the antenna tower, to power Amateur Radio off-grid. We currently have four cars (2x Diesel, 2x Petrol), two are classics (an air-cooled engined estate, and an untidy looking 'Sleeper' hatchback tuned for Track Days), one diesel hatchback is used by the wife for work, and the other is a large estate for towing a caravan/trailer (the twin-axle six berth caravan is stored in a secure location elsewhere). We have zero plans to change our cars, however, because we may have friends/family turn up in an EV or plug-in Hybrid, we do have a 240vAC 13A Charging Point fitted to an outside wall.
Note to America in general. Staffordshire is generally pronounced "Staffordsher", as are all the counties ending in "shyer". Like Yorksher, Lancasher, Gloucestersher ("Glostersher") etc. £275+ for a starter home? JEEZ! I'd want a mansion for that kind of money. Mind you, I don't live in the South. As for doors into rooms, this is another way of slowing down the spread of fire. Even though it may be full of glass panes, it still helps to slow down the fire spreading from room to room. Also, it saves heat loss in the winter. The boiler is in the kitchen as it's a "Combi boiler" (Combination), it provides hot water and also heating for the radiators.
As others have said, this detached 3-bed house would be *significantly* more expensive it it were located either near a city or in the south. I could easily see it pushing over £500,000. Context is that we have a severe housing shortage here effecting ownership and renting. Many have been priced out of ever owning a home at all. It's sad.
I live in a very posh area in South East london, in a 3 bed bungalow with a rear garden, tiny driveway suitable for 1 car, no AC. Last had it valued 2 and a half years ago and they estimated between £500,000 - £550,000. That said the rear garden is very long but narrow and divided into two sections, a smaller seating area and patio with a passageway that leads down the grassy larger area at the back where the shed is, table and chairs etc. There's probably just as much space outdoors, if not more, than there is indoors.
I don’t know if it’s the same in the states, but show houses often have show furniture which is all slightly smaller then standard so that the rooms look larger than they are - cheeky I know. This in the south is not a starter home, we often start off in apartments and one or two bedroom houses. Don’t forget land is at a premium so newer estates (sub divisions?) use weird angles and small gardens (yards) to make the most of the space. Older homes usually have bigger gardens (Victorian’s often have yards/walled courtyards). About 20 years ago friends of ours sold their 3 bedroom terraced home in Telford, UK and bought a 4 bedroom home with basement, walk in wardrobe and en-suite, double garage and about 10 acres of land in Kentucky.
Also there is a requirement in our codes for two doors between a water closet and any food preparation areas, which is one of the reasons for that door, the other is that you can close off the lounge and not let all the heat into the stairwell, reducing heating costs.
@@ChelleKT1however fire regulations, I believe, still require a door between the kitchen and stairs/main escape route in homes with more than one floor.
In 1666 when London birth down most the houses were wooden. There was a change of thinking after that and rules regarding buildings were introduced. I think it's a lot of money for a 'starter home'. I enjoyed the post
Until recently gas powered boiler’s have been used to warm water. This pumped is then around the house to radiators in each room. It’s a wise idea to have thermosetting taps on radiators. This allows each radiator to hold the temp in each room, or if one is not being used to turn it off to save energy. The radiator in the bathroom apart from keeping the room warm is used as a towel rail, who doesn’t like a hot fluffy towel when you get out of the bath. Note that for electrical safety reasons there are no conventional light switches in a UK bathroom, water and 240v don’t mix well. We are a small country and land, they don't make anymore, is expensive. the garage tends to be used for storage, quit often for a clothes tumble drier. when I was young every house had a long clothes line. Typical wash day was a Monday so the neighbourhood was covered in lines of washing drying in the breeze. Air Con in the UK is very rare.
England must be the only country in the world where you can't have switches and power points in the bathroom and toilet. I have never heard of a person getting water out of the toilet onto the light switch. like every one else Here in Australia we have a light switch and 3 power plugs in both our bathrooms.
Hi. New builds are normally much smaller, in my experience, than older homes and older homes are normally much cheaper. Depending on the area, an older home would be about £120,000. The closer to london the higher it gets, about 3 to 4 times that. Most houses have a door separating the outside door from the rest of the house to keep the heat in. It gets cold here more than hot, so we aim to heat rather than chill but when it's hot, we feel it in summer time. Which is why we complain about weather soooo much 😅
House prices vary massively on area. For a bit of perspective- I just bought a shell of a ground floor one bed flat in London (Belsize Park) for £880k. It needs a kitchen, bathroom, completely re-wiring and re-plumbing as it’s not liveable currently. Once it’s done it’ll be on the market for £1.6-£1.8m.. that money up north would buy you a village.
We live in a bungalow (single storey) on the South Coast of England, by the sea. We have a wrap around garden and a garage. We moved here about eight years ago and paid much less than the cost of that show home! However, it was built in the 1950s! We will both be retired next year and look forward to relaxing and taking in the sea air. 😊
We don't do air conditioning here in the UK! Gardens of new builds are very small. If you want larger, it's best to buy an older property. £275,000 IS a lot of money, but here in Sussex a three-bedroomed house like this would be in excess of £400,000 to £500,000. That is why buying is out of the question for so many young people in the UK. Even in the north, prices are still out of reach for many. So sad.
I live in a 3 bed bungalow in south east London. valued 2 and half years ago at £500k-£550k. Small drive with enough space for one car, large rear garden divided into two parts (probably more space in the garden than is in the house itself). Renting the cheapest house on my road would set you back £1,700 a month. A small 1 bed flat with a tiny lounge and bathroom in a block of flats about 1/4 of a mile from my house is still £1,300+ a month to rent. They aren't particularly modern flats either and the block was built around 20-30 years ago.
That thing where you have a different coloured wall is called a "feature wall". Very popular. The driveway is probably block paving or imprint patterned concrete.
It's not usual in the UK to have a breaker box in the toilet or the alarm unit in a cupboard.. its usually breaker box in the cupboard and alarm in the hallway near the door ..
Normally in the UK, our fuse box, is situated in some sort of small cupboard near the front door, and more now, cupboards at the front of the houses are getting converted into WC's, Water Closet.
There are quite a few builders who build timber framed homes. If you are close to a wood, forest or tree line then the house has to be made from brick for fire prevention purposes. On my son’s housing estate the outer ring of homes are close to trees and are totally made from brick, the inner homes are timber framed in general.
Very few houses have AC. Apart from the occasional heatwave the weather is tolerable. Although last summer was a bit of a nightmare. - pushing 40C (100+F)
*STEVE* Brick versus wood... Pretty much all of our houses are brick, two walls, one inner and one outer with around 4"-6" inches between the two, and filled with insulation in between. Yes there are some converted barns and that sort of thing, and of course a lot of original Tudor wood framed houses are still around. But then in the Tudor period, they didn't use wood so much as practically the whole tree trunk in each of the beams! 😁 You love our architecture right? Our history yes? How much of it would still be around if we used wood? They learnt their lesson during the various big fires in London's history, wood houses built close together are soon wiped out in a fire. If you don't want the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and blowing The Three Little Pigs house down, you use brick! That's how history is made.....and preserved! 😘😘😘
I'm a retired structural carpenter, and I built a timber framed, timber clad house for myself about 30 years ago (in which I still live). I've watched by neighbours in their Victorian terraces dealing with massive cracks in their masonry walls, shell out huge sums to have their founds underpinned, brickwork re-pointed, deal with rising damp and mold etc., whilst I've been enjoying my trouble-free, very well insulated house. When "history is made", it doesn't necessarily go in the right direction - I'm sure you're aware we're currently witnessing the demise of the internal combustion engine. Producing brick, cinder blocks and cement cause untold environmental damage. On the other hand, using timber as a building material creates a minimal carbon footprint, as it takes little more than sun and rain to produce fast growing timber with which we can build houses. Over the last 20-30 years, I've seen a significant movement back to using timber framing in otherwise conventional house building. Timber is easy to use, flexible, and should any structural part fail, it can be replaced with little drama. unlike masonry.
@@DougBrown-h1n I didn't say it doesn't have it's uses. And when I say brick, I meant more in the lines of "stone" type materials. The fact remains however that brick is far more longer lasting, and a lot of problems in older brick houses are not the bricks themselves, nor the quality of building. The Victorians had a strange habit of building over disused wells and shafts, resulting in lots of sinkholes even today. The integrity of a building is only as good as the foundation it is built on, and the ground itself is what compromises most older buildings, not the structure of materials used. Their windows were not as sealed, resulting in moisture entering framework, not just around the windows, but doorways, skirting boards, roof framing, joists etc. Ventilation was not adequate resulting in moisture build up from the inside. The heating was open fires which are open to the elements, birds nesting, debris build up. Trees were planted around properties, and 100+ years later those roots are still cracking underground pipes and sewage lines resulting in waterlogging in the ground. Early Victorian houses had no plumbing, nor central heating, and weren't built big enough for today's living standards. People had only a couple of sets of clothes, there were no fridges, freezers, washing machines, tumble dryers, chest freezers, power tools, showers, pools, garages, electrical appliances, technological gadgets and machines, toys, bikes, or boisterous children bombing round the house. Since then, those same houses have sacrificed a bedroom or two to convert into bathrooms, had driveways added, extensions built on, lofts converted and conservatories added on. Windows have been replaced,and replaced again,. Fireplaces have been knocked out or boarded over. Walls have been removed. Period features ripped out. Staircases flipped round, moved or added. Pollution affects the building materials. So much traffic vibration affects the ground stability. Major groundworks around the properties have upgraded drains, sewers, electric cabling, gas pipes, water mains, telecom wiring, streetlights, resurfaced roads, burst pipes, traffic collisions. There's only so much pneumatic drilling that can be done before you start shattering structures nearby. Extensions or conservatories don't require as much foundation, but the problem is, they are built onto the side of a house and if they start sinking, they can pull the house sideways along the way. If you keep knocking out window frames, redrilling brickwork to add wiring for additional appliances, upgrading boilers and replacing old lead pipes, then of course bricks are gonna get cracked along the way. That doesn't mean the bricks themselves are not a strong and reliable building material. A lot of building problems come down to neglect, most of which isn't intentional. Lack of money may push repairs back but a lot of necessary repairs aren't even obvious until you've got water pouring through the ceiling or find your drains overflowing sewage along your garden. So whilst you say it's easier to replace a piece of wood here and there, that's all very well, providing you can see it and know it needs replacing, but more repairs aren't known to us until something breaks. Most Victorian homes that need underpinning or stabilising in some way, it's not the bricks that were the issue. It's the foundation, the ground becoming wetter and less compacted, or the WOODEN framework of the house or roof that gave way. It's underground tree roots, abandoned wells, climbing plants, repeated alterations, insufficient foundations, moisture levels, rot, mould, neglect or roof damage. Even today people go to salvage yards to buy bricks that are 100-200 years old, that are a little worse for wear cosmetically but still as structurally sound as the day they were made. The bricks are not the problem. And just to finish, there are some fabulous craftsmen in America whose cabinetry or flooring or plasterwork etc are second to none. But on the whole, their building methods OVERALL are STILL not as good as even ours was back in Victorian times. I watch house upgrades, renovations, or property searches more than any other type of TV programme. Whether it's tiny homes, waterworks conversions, renovating a windmill to live in, or buying a home abroad, I watch them all. A lot of them are American. I've seen huge houses being built in America where the foundations are just a series of trenches of concrete, for the outer walls to stand on, not an entire foundation to bear the weight of the entire home. I've seen American homes bought for upgrading, where they've gone into the crawl space beneath, and the only thing holding up the house are wooden posts that have split or are sinking into the ground. Absolute insanity! I've seen better integrity in a pop up tent than a lot of their homes! And finally, the main reason I mentioned American wooden homes are not as reliable as ours...TERMITES!!! Yes we get them here too of course, but their insect population collectively is off the charts compared to a few gnats and ants over here! When they strike over there a wooden house can soon become sawdust, so from an environmental perspective, they could avoid a lot of those potential issues by using brick. 😊😊😊
@@DougBrown-h1n HAH! Coincidence or what? What's the chances of this.....one of the other RUclipsrs I watch, who's also American and does (mostly) UK reaction videos, is RYAN WUZER...... and he's JUST posted a video on his channel explaining WHY American homes are flimsy compared to ours! 😂 You couldn't make this up! Just as I posted my reply to you, he's put that video up! Well done on building your own home, BUT there is no way to future proof any home. There will always be new and improved boilers, heating, appliances, gadgets, must-have fads, better windows etc etc. Years ago my daughter lived in a small block of flats before she had children. One of the previous tenants in the block had put up a satellite dish outside, and when they moved, they took it with them. Fast forward a year or so after that tenant had left, and ALL the tenants had to move out temporarily to a Premier Inn, that the landlord paid for, because the whole block has an issue with black mould which is dangerous! My daughter's flat particularly was badly affected and she was getting through bottles of bleach like water, but all the flats had some issue with it. It was all because of a few small holes in the brickwork from the satellite dish being put up a bit sloppily by former tenants. Whenever it rained it drove water into the hole that was soaking up into the insulation throughout the whole cavity between inner and outer walls. Everyone had mould inside from that side of the building. That's what I mean....the bricks themselves are fine, it's all the subsequent upgrades and DIY that causes future problems. Incidentally, I'm sure you know who Sarah Beenie is? Building and interior design expert....Yes? On one of her shows she was with a couple whose outer wall needed anchoring as the bricks were starting to look a bit higgledy-piggledy. They were still in place but looked like someone with hand tremors had laid them and had never heard of, let alone used a spirit level. 🙄 Anyhoo, this couple were in a state of panic and dread, thinking the worst, so she took them to the building and engineering institute, I think that's what it was called..or some place called something similar. Basically it's like a scientific testing and teaching place, specifically related to building work. So she showed them a demo of a brick wall that was still upright, but most if not all the cement was missing, and these bricks were still standing on no more than a whim and a prayer holding them upright! Then they were told to push out a brick here and there, a bit like a giant Jenga wall, and whilst the rest of the bricks may have leaned a little on one end in response, the wall still didn't fall down. They took out more a more bricks, and the rest of them kind of shuffled and redistributed the weight bearing. It took the removal of a LOT of bricks, before the wall finally fell, and even then not all of it fell. Back at their house they had a man outside the wall, level with the upstairs floor, who had the biggest drill and threaded bolt you've ever seen. He drilled through a brick, right through into the home and inside the end of one of the floor joists. Then a decorative metal emblem went on the outside of the brick, and the threaded bolt went through that, through the wall, and right inside a decent length of this joist. As it got tighter it pulled this decorative brace thing closer and tighter to the home, which pulled in the whole wall until it was perfectly level, and secured it to the inside floor. The wall was fixed, and it also raised up the slight sag of the bedroom floor making that level again. As Sarah explained, it's not just that bricks are strong and durable in themselves, but that the placement of laying a brick wall, each layer overlapping the ends of each brick in the row beneath itself, is where the real integrity of a brick wall lies. The overlapping holds a wall together more than the cement does and even with no cement at all! She's said time and time again, that what threatens Victorian houses the most, is the ground, that is full of huge tree roots either zapping out ALL underground moisture making the ground crack and sink, or the roots damaging pipes and causing a water build up underneath. That and, roof damage, because rain gets into the wooden rafters and works that moisture all along into wooden joists, framing, stud walls and skirting boards etc. It is RARELY, if EVER, a fault with the bricks themselves! 😘😘😘 Right, let's go watch Ryan's video to see American flimsy building! 😜
This is a show home (or showhouse). Builders usually make the first house on a new development the biggest type available on the development & furnish it. They are usually the last home to sell & the only houses on the development to come with furniture. Every other house they sell will be bare walls, usually with a choice of colour finish. There will be a fitted kitchen, also with a choice of colour & worktop/cupboard doors. It's very unlikely that there will be any curtains or blinds & probably no carpet either. This way of showing off new developments works very well though, I know because we bought a house on our estate the same style of the show home. As others have pointed out though, this is not a starter home. Starter homes are tiny & very unlikely to be detached. They usually come with little or no garden & the only outside space is probably a single car parking space on a shared driveway. The last time I saw a new home for one or two people, it was basically 1 room downstairs, split into a kitchen/diner area & living room area with a tiny toilet under the stairs. Upstairs was 1 bedroom & a bathroom.
Regarding the position on the planet of the UK versus the USA, I remember Alastair Cooke pointing out in a “Letter from America“ once that British people tend to think that travelling from (the original) York over the Atlantic to New York involves merely a westward journey of 3000 miles or so. He said that we never take into account the fact that it also requires a 1000 mile journey to the south.
That garden space seemed quite generous - typically the show home in the development has a larger garden and better parking provision. The recent developments near where I live (30 miles north of London) have much smaller gardens which are also typically overlooked, and quite often suffer from a lot of shading. I think that for many large gardens are not desirable. We recently managed to extend our rear garden - the estate agent we ran the idea past did express the opinion that this was unlikely to add to our property value.
Large gardens are time consuming, although they can be enjoyable. My rear garden is 120’ x 40’, and the front garden is approx 40’ x 30’ with a 15’ x 50’ drive. As I’v gotten older, I’m considering selling up to buy something much smaller.
Adding robot lawnmowers to our front and rear gardens has significantly reduced the time we have to spend on ours. One big advantage of having the extra space is adding distance between neighbours :) We're experimenting this year with letting 1/2 of the rear garden go wild (in a controlled fashion). There's near constant development in the area we live in, leading to reducing habitat for insects, birds and bats. Quite often new build owners will pave/fake turf over the thin smear of top soil the developers have used.
In the UK, we always have washing machines in our kitchens, also you'll find that absolutely 0 houses in the UK have basements, that's a very American exclusive thing. Oh, and walk in wardrobes are only a thing in the much more expensive houses, you won't see them in average houses. The garden you see in this house is very big compared to the average UK garden too. My 'garden' in my old house was basically an alleyway. It'd be very interesting to see you react to an average UK council house for example - which is basically the most average UK house there is, which majority of people have. You'll notice the difference in size, the house in this video is certainly on the upper end of UK houses. Also, about AC - it's just not a thing in the UK. In Summer here, often it'll be raining, overcast miserable weather. We'll get a couple days decently hot but the weather here changes so drastically so quickly. I live in the North East of England, so it's a lot colder compared to down south - e.g London.
The reason that there is a door in the hallway is to block the kitchen from the bedrooms. Building regs require two fire doors between the kitchen and any bedrooms for fire safety.
The land is probably the most expensive part of a new build and large gardens need more maintenance than smaller ones. Most people don't seem to have the time or inclination to upkeep their gardens. Locally a lot of people opt to put in artificial lawns and use plants in large pots. Also I looked up what a local new build three bedroom house would be and probably not detached and it's £424,995 so somewhat more expensive and possibly smaller than the one you see in your video. There is also a lot of land you can't build on. Redevelopment of old land (Industrial or old sections of towns etc) is preferred for granting planning permission over using previously unbuilt land. Also for most first time buyers, their salaries will not cover that type of expense without a substantial deposit. Younger people are just being priced out of being able to buy anywhere to live local to where they work. The amount of people living with parents well into their late twenties, early thirties is definitely on the rise locally. Your example you watched is not typical of what is happening local to me. There are housing developments similar to what you see locally to me but these are normally linked to housing association developments where people rent to buy if they can. More young people locally are forced to rent now than ever before. It is a huge problem for those wishing to buy into the property ladder.
That looks huge for a starter home! My parents starter house has 2 moderate sized bedrooms and a closet which they laughably called a bedroom although it was my sister’s bedroom so they made it work. Our Living room was half the size of the one in that house and our kitchen is not big enough to accommodate 2 people at the same time. I’m not sure why they call it a starter home though I don’t think moving to a bigger house after is a viable option for normal people.
I’ve been watching ‘International Carl’ for a few years now and find his US perspective on mainly new homes in the English Midlands quite interesting, and some of the other aspects of UK life he covers (Pub Quizzes etc) 👍.
@@jonathanbarnes7981Don’t mock. It’s neither clever nor funny. I personally know two people who died of it and several others who caught it and recovered. Count yourself very lucky indeed if it passed you by. 😡
I live in a UK new build. Mine is smaller than this as it is only 2 bedrooms. Its tiny, absolutely miniscule and we do not have a garage. Houses in the UK are always lined up close like this, every house I've ever lived in is the same whether it's old or new. In fact some older houses have 0 land on the front, the houses literally are attached to the path outside. Not nearly enough space in any house unless youre super rich but we make do lol.
w/c is a water closet, toilet and sink only and the electrics panel is in there or utility room simply because its a downstairs room, if you have a cellar chances are its in there. alarm systems tend to be in the hall / hall closet and washing machines tend to be in the kitchen / utility room because of water supply. boiler is kitchen / utility room with the hot water tank in an airing closet up stairs. The front door and hall are closed off from rest of house because nobody wants a draft while you bring the shopping inside during winter (plus you can keep kids and pets inside too)
This house is actually quite small for a new build. I would expect a separate dining room and larger kitchen for £275K but I'm based in Scotland and for that price you could buy a castle with acres of land. 1) W/C is Water Closet you were close. 2) very odd seeing a "breaker box" in a toilet especially at that height I assume it was just convenient to put it there and moving it costs money (concerning that its so Close to water through). 3) Normal for UK homes to have the washing machine for clothes in the kitchen as typically this is where all the plumbing is, in continental Europe it's quite normal for the washer to be in the bathroom too. The half sink could be used to drain things when washing or washing veg etc. Also No garbage disposal they just aren't the Norm here and we are advised not to drain food waste into our drains. We use composting bins and food waste bins. 4) Boiler - Yes that was a gas boiler which feeds all the radiators in the rooms Including all the hot taps. We don't typically have the old tanks that are normal in US homes because space is expensive. 4) it's quite a luxury to have build in closets in all bedrooms. it's also quite a luxury to have your master bedroom to have an en-suite too. although these things are becoming more standard. 5) air-con is just not needed, typically the UK is quite cool with some hot spots in summer for about a week between the rain storms. although we are looking to move away from Gas boilers to HVAC & Ground Source heating Which means moving back to having a Large Tank - This is to be more green and to Decarbonize the housing sector. We don't have fly screens on windows. We just don't get the bugs you get in the US so if it's too hot we will typically open a few windows and/or turn a fan on. 6) houses are brick clad in the UK because of longevity, our weather and wood is expensive. Wood clad shacks would find it difficult to be insured & mortgaged in the UK. saying that there are a good few historic buildings which are wooden based/clad so its not always a strict rule - high end buildings also might differ like a Barn conversion or a Huf house (German flat-Pack house). Generally though these type of homes have been getting built all over the UK and they are built for 1 thing in mind MAXIMUM PROFIT. if they can squeeze another bedroom or bathroom in they will try to they can charge an extra £10k, £20K or £30k we didn't get to see the garage although I assume from the picture it's very very small and you would be lucky to get a average size car inside it with room for both sides to open the doors. Gardens are small & houses are close to milk the money out of the development. why build 50 homes with large gardens when you could build 100 with small gardens and make triple the money.
I don’t know where in Scotland you live but it’s obviously nowhere near a big city. If you ever see a castle with acres of land going for that price let me know 😂😂😂
Wood has not ben a popular material to build houses in the UK since the great fire of London in 1666. Also most of the UK's forests were put to use building up the navy in the age of sail so there was not that much excess wood supply. Also this home being shown would be a family home rather than a starter home. Most peoples first houses are basic 2 bedroom terraced houses (which typically can be bought for £60,000 + depending on the area), simply because they are the most common and cheapest houses available because they don't take up much land space (the land cost being the biggest part of the cost in many cases when buying a house). You are bang on about people being priced out of the market because that is a common issue for the last few generations with many people not being able to leave home until they are in their 30's. Those sink is pretty standard with the idea that you would wash in the larger tub and rinse with the smaller one which is also handy for preparing food (as in somewhere to peel your potato's and carrots) with the large catch plug to stop the peel from going down the drain. That garden would be classed as a large one if attached to a single house. Split it in half and you have a more normal size for the UK. WC stands for Water Closet. It's just a euphemism for a toilet. And the area this house is in (I think you called it a sub-division) is called a housing estate in the UK.
How far north are you that you're buying a 2 bedroom house for £60,000? I live in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, and most 2 bed terraces are more than £200,000!
£60k for a 2 bed house - where on earth do you live. I'm just outside Oxford and 2 beds are a minimum of £300k , more expensive the closer you get to London - this is why people are now often in their 30's before they can afford to buy.
In my area there is a mountain on one side, 2 mountain ranges on 2 sides and the fourth side is facing the bloody Irish Sea and across from this sea is Scotland itself. So yeah, as the summer temp here rarely goes above 25 degrees Celsius, A/C is overkill. Central heating is more important to be fair. 😜
Branston, UK? That left me in a bit of a pickle!!!
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very clever lol
With lots of cheesy
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Clever! 😂😂
As a brit, that was WEIRD seeing the electricity box in the downstairs toilet....never ever seen this.
Agreed, looks like it shouldn’t pass building regs
Having watched quite a few new build tour videos, this unfortunately doesn’t surprise me now. I’ve seen it quite a few times, but I do think it’s weird.
I thought the same. The cupboard under the stairs, yes, but not in a toilet. I don't see how having the electrics in a room with water is a good idea.
@𝚑𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚕𝚢 ??? 🤣
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I’m from the south of England and a house such as this will go for about £500,000-£600,000. Although there are a lot of rich people, most of us are ‘normal’ and don’t earn enough to qualify for a mortgage on a property of this size.
Brick buildings are for our weather and our fire regs. Air conditioning is not a thing in the U.K.
Exactly! I'm in the southeast & looking at 1-2 bedroom flats at £350k 😅
Yes agree with this
100% agree. Flats (Condos?) are around £350k ($440k). 3 bedroom terrace houses are around £500k ($631k) and 4 bedroom detached houses (like most Americans I think would be accustomed to. You are looking at around £700k ($883k).
Prices can be higher or lower. Especially higher in London.
I live about 10 miles from this place. Price seems a little cheaper than I would expect this to be around £300k
Yeah I was going to say the cheapest 1 bed flat near me is about 140k, 3 bed new build down the road is going for 550k
To answer your questions as a British person with building industry experience:
1. Most houses are full brick in the UK as its better for the wet climate we have and also stronger. We are now doing a lot more timber due to cost and also as they are easier to seal up for air tightness for keeping heat in / lower bills.
2. W.C = Water closet (Room with toilet in it, no shower / bath in there)
3. Alarm not by door for security to stop people outside seeing you enter the code as you walk in.
4. Sink is fairly standard UK, yes it can be swapped round depending on layout. Big sink is often uses to soak dishes or have a washing up bowl in. The other can then be used for something like hand washing or washing veg.
5. Reason we have lots of thing like washing machine, dish washer, boiler all in the kitchen is due to making pipe runs easier. Would likely have the bathroom above it again for the same reason.
6. Yes front room / living room normally has a door due to keeping in heat and noise etc.
7. The garden / Yard is classed as quite big for a house that size here as land is so expensive this is reduced to fit more house on the land. Very rare to share a garden if you own a house as normal only see that on flats. Likely due to poor planning and design.
8. The glass shower screen is because the showers here are often over a bath so you can use either. The screen is there just to stop the water slashing out.
9. AC is rare for a domestic home as we only have small amounts of really hot days, Just use open windows and fans. The combination of brick and insulation means houses stay cooler for longer during the day and warmer for longer in the winter. Also electricity cost way more here so running one is normally a luxury.
10. Good example of a standard new family home in the UK not a starter home. These are normally 1 bedroom house or 2 bedroom flat etc. The bigger houses 4-5 would normally start giving you things like laundry rooms or even walk in closets etc as well as an office space or small bedroom.
Hopefully this helps :)
Totally agree with this. Only thing I would add is the shared garden is a show home thing. It won't get sold that way.
@@rengibson never knew that. Always learn something new 😁
As stated, this the show home and right next door is the show room. The garden space is not separated between the two. You can see from the aerial shot how the gardens look. Most seem tiny and consumed by the garages. I cycle past this development and the houses are so small and cramped because the developer is trying to maximise profit.
@@RichHaynes2012 The garages are built into the houses; what you are seeing in the back gardens (yards) are garden sheds.
Garages are not permitted to open directly into houses, due to fumes, although to be fair, most people use them for storing their ‘stuff’! Many people just convert them into additional downstairs rooms (and put a door in).
As an Englishman, I have to say. Seeing the power switches in the downstairs bathroom, the internet and alarm in a closet is definitely not normal.
It's a toilet not a bathroom are you shore your English?and my house has a Fuse box in the toilet.
Be happy, in Thailand I had a cheap hotel with a multiple kW inline water just heating next to the shower head. Every western electrician would throw his hands up in despair. 😅👍
Shore? Are you sure?
Usually have a key pad for the home alarm by the front door and the fuse box under the stairs or in a hallway cabinet. Router for broadband is usually in the lounge.
It's actually called Downstairs toilet, not a bathroom because it hasn't got a bath in!!!
The new build houses are very small compared to the older houses. Usually the standard older british house will have a separate kitchen and dining room and separate living room. The open plan design is definitely more of a recent thing. Also the rooms themselves are usually much bigger. They've just shrunk down over time 😅 like everything else in the UK, paying for more but getting less 😂
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Most new houses in the UK are too small, due to the greed of builders wanting a high density of housing on available land.
I live in an older house a big living room open staircase a massive separate kitchen diner and 3 double bedrooms and i would never buy a new build and all i hear from people that do live in a new build is about mould, noise from next door , and cant hang mirrors or pictures because the walls are like cardboard lol
@@partridge9698why I hate new builds and they are ruining victorian house by turning them into flats for this exact reason xo
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I have a large, automatic air conditioning unit, called the North Sea, near me.
yes I Can see how that would work well, we still using hot water bottles,
😂😂😂😂
Coming from Lossiemouth I can appreciate that sentiment. Very very funny 🤣🤣🤣🤣
British wit, love it😂😂
I see your North Sea and raise you the North Atlantic Ocean :)
This isn’t a starter home! It’s a modern new-build so it’s much better designed in terms of usage, but it’s huge & super-nice in comparison to your average starter home!!!
The reason we have doors inside the front hallway is because it’s usually cold and wet and you want to keep your living area nice and warm, rather than let cold air, rain and snow blow directly into the living room from the front door 😀
I was thinking that price point seemed a bit steep for a starter home.
@@reactingtomyroots the price is about right for a starter home in a good area, although this one is super nice, the prices are insane right now!!
Yea a start home only has like one bedroom maybe a very small room just big enough, to fit a baby's cot in, and right to why the door is separating hall and living space , and a starter home a lot of the time wont have a garage. I see a few Americans surprised to see a washing machine in the kitchen, i did a youtube video calling out a known youtuber, lol on that very thing.
@@djfargis3728 Why on earth would you make a video to call out a RUclipsr for that? Utterly ridiculous!
@@reactingtomyroots this is over £480.000 / £530.000
Also it is a new build , there are no starter homes in the UK we don't call it that what we do is if you can afford rent or buying a property that is up to you and your money
New builds are just there for anyone to buy or rent from the property management, big trend property management but stupid designs built for cheap sold for 2 3 times the price you would expect the quality
2 bedroom flats are now prices of homes
UK at the same time as building properties need to do it in much nicer ways with decoration and more practical use , UK has narrow roads so if anything property real estate owners should start redesigning areas off practicality
When sleeping upstairs, the main reason for closing off all the rooms with doors is that it slows the progression of fire through the house and also protects your exit route. It also makes it cozier. In the early years, houses didn't have central heating, they would have an open fire to warm the living space, the door then helps keep the warmth in too. Lots of reasons I suppose.
The main reason is nothing to do with fire. It's heat and privacy.
@@RustyVaperGameplay As I said, Lots of reasons I suppose, all a matter of perspective.
Good video, but as someone born and lived in Britain all my life no way was this a typical starter home. Usually starter homes are one, two bed houses/flats or studios flats. Starter homes are typically terraced houses or semi-detached. I would not call what appeared to be a 3 bed detached house a starter home unless you're in the rich bracket. Enjoyed watching-always like watching house programmes. Try Homes Under The Hammer to see a selection of typical British homes across all price brackets.
totaly agree. this would never be marketed as a starter home. a beautiful new 3 bedroom detatched house like this is something you may work upto £275K minimum of 5% deposit required (£13750) then having to pass lending criteria & usualy only being able to borrow 3.5 times your salary you may get mortgage at 5.3% (typical at moment but this is changing) costing £1574 per month....(info from right move calculators) so even if you could afford the monthly mortgage then you would be having to be earning a very good wage to afford the lending criteria.........so very unlikley to be a first home
These houses are new builds, there are many older properties here in the UK with high ceilings and large gardens. My own house is 150 years old, built from Yorkshire stone and is full of character and period features. I love living here.
Jealous!
That garden is big!! Believe me LOLS.
Ditto, Yorkshire stone, built 1890s.
That location for the main fuse box is highly unusual and I am very surprised it meets regulations being in a toilet room
Yes, and it seems ironic for a reaction video that is usually along the lines of "you don't have sockets in your bathrooms?".
Just checked it meets regulations with regard distance from sink etc
It's because it's a display home.
@@Westcountrynordic yes - the regs are relaxing as RCD technology improves. My downstairs “bathroom” has a standard wall mounted light switch inside.
At least if the lights trip when you are on the toilet, you can reset them.
If we want air conditioning in the UK, we just open a window.
or reverse your air source heat pump, works a treat.
@@georgebarnes8163 Not if the heat pump drives water bourne heat to radiators (or even under floor pipes). Actually I have wondered if that would work at all, would cold radiators actually cool a room or just be unpleasant to touch? The only way that would work is if the heat pump drove a forced air heating system and our houses just aren't built to accommodate that. I've seen it in office spaces but never in a UK home.
@@andyjdhurley my air source pump heats and cools air via ducting and ceiling vents within the building which is sealed.
10:52
Last summer was so hot at hitting nearly 40° in my mums flat, we gave in and bought a massive cooling fan that you add water and iceblocks to and I sat with ice packs on me. I've lived in very hot zones in desert and almost tropics. I know hot...but last summer was a real scorcher and I'm no longer acclimatised, having come back to England by way of Scotland!
Steve that thing you called a "water heater" in the kitchen cupboard is actually something called a combination boiler.
This provides hot water on demand ( nothing stored ) for washing and bathing it also provides water to the central heating radiators again on demand.
We do some strange things in the UK, but locating consumer units in a bathroom is not one of them. Regulations limit the types and locations of electrical equipment anywhere near water. This is an example of shoddy building standards all too common in modern Britain.
yes that cupboard under the stairs would have been a more logical place
You hit the nail on the head, these prices do price a lot of first time buyers out. The UK house prices are completely insane. And this house is in the middle of nowhere. Anything like this house within an hour train commute into London will be at least £750k. So about $1m.
Not necessarily
@@neiltitmus9744 really, you must have been lucky to find something. Any 3 bed new build that is over 100m2 and has a garage, will most likely be way over half a million pounds. Within a London commute.
Depends where you are. The commute from my city takes about an hour into Liverpool Street and an average 3 bed house here is in the region of £400k.
I agree, I’m an hour commute away by train from London. House prices where I am (small town and villages) are 300-400 k for a 3 bedroom house. They’re 500-600k 12 miles away towards London, in the nearest city to where I live.
@@lawli56 Not really even here in N.I flat prices absolutely ridiculous.
I think you will need to check out British climate! 100 degrees is a rare heatwave, and AC is not usually needed. Also, the UK is much more densely populated than the US, so gardens, yards, and houses, tend to be smaller and more expensive.
Yeah, when it's hot we just open a window.
@@Otacatapetl Painful, but true!
My wife would disagree with the AC comment.
😂😂
Yeah we have mild seasons in the UK
Steve - remember the UK is at the same latitude as Canada, not the USA - and it is a relatively small island, surrounded by large amounts of water. That keeps the climate temperate. The most we need, in hot temperatures, is normally a fan, not AC; although reverse-cycle heat pumps are starting to become a thing.
Yes, London UK is the same latitude as Calgary Alberta. The north of mainland Scotland corresponds with Juneau, Alaska.
There’s quite a few times I could have done with AC, remember last year?😊Don’t forget it gets very humid here too and our houses are built to be warm.
@@jemmajames6719 Try paying for AC. A fan is much less expensive - and greener. A heat pump even more so.
Even the south of England shares a latitude with southern Alaska. The UK as a whole is on the same latitude as Labrador.
@@jemmajames6719 Built to be warm yes, but the special glass in my new double glazed patio door which keeps out the draughts in the winter actually kept the room much cooler in the hot weather than the previous one did.
WC means water closet. That is what it was called around Victorian Times in the UK. The name of the room where the toilet was placed, usually inside Upper and Middle-class. Most homes for working-class people had outside toilets until around 100 years or so, when they began to be installed indoors.
In the UK, what it is called depends on where you live, loo, toilet, bathroom, guest bathroom (bog). We don't say half bath here. All house developers, no matter where in the country, will say WC because it does not take up much space to write on house plans.
100 years? 😂 try 30-40 years. My nan still had an outdoor toilet as a kid in her houses as well as alot of houses
They weren't being built without inside loos 30-40 years ago! The 100 years specified would be about right for building age.
I heard that the "dooring off rooms" came from that every room had a fireplace and a window to warm/cool off the room. In the winter you could shut the doors and only heat the rooms that you actually use. In the summer, you can open all the doors and windows to get air circulation.
Regardless of why it started, it's now a building regs issue.
Once you get to three stories, then if you want open-plan on any floor, then you need to install a sprinkler system, which will them need to be periodically checked to satisfy your insurance. ...Or you don't do open-plan and make sure every room has a fire door.
So this is why modern townhouse and other three story styles need to have doors. It's also a pitfall if you already have open-plan in your two story property and want to convert the loft because suddenly the downstairs layout no longer meets regs.
Water closet WC
The radiators that are in the bathrooms also double as heated towel racks. To warm up you towel while your in the shower or bath. And yes we also call it a galley kitchen 🇬🇧
That’s crazy! I have NEVER seen the power switches in the downstairs loo like that! It doesn’t seem safe 🤷🏼♀️
Totally agree, especially if you have young children.
Nothing crazy or dangerous and they are very commonly installed in WC’s
The power switches (consumer unit) are usually under the stairs or in their own small cupboard, I assume these are in the downstairs WC because it is closest to where the power comes into the house.
@@Sophie.S.. I'm in Ireland and most power switch units are up high and the house alarms will always be in the hallways right beside the front door so you can turn the alarm off quickly. I've never seen that before. I thought the power switch being down low was strange because my 7 year old would know better than to touch it but my toddler would be all over it but then I wondered was it situated like that with disabled people in mind. For over 20 years all new builds have to be disability friendly with certain specifications like wider doorways downstairs, a toilet downstairs big enough to accommodate a wheelchair, lower doorhandles etc. It still seems like putting it in a toilet could be dangerous but what do I know about building regs?!
We have a new build and it’s in the cloakroom
Our houses tend to be close together, so a house-fire spreads more easily in wooden homes. Brick is fire-resistant.
Lots of towns have banned wooden houses centuries ago after burning down in the middle ages because of that issue, but that's mainly limited to the original boundaries. But it certainly shaped our understanding that houses should be made from brick and stone.
There is another reason though which is that wood is far cheaper in the US than Britain. We only have a small amount of forest in the UK, where we favour the environment and leisure as much as much as lumber production. Britain was deforested thousands of years ago in the Neolithic period. As a result of this most lumber has to be imported (normally from Scandinavia). Bricks in contrast are produced domestically.
Treated timber is fire resistant. If you get a fire in a brick hose it's going to lose it's floors and roof that means you're starting from scratch regardless, the house is always a write-off, so it makes no difference - insurers know what they're doing.
I find it really interesting that the '3 little pigs' tale is as well known in the US as it is in the UK but they still follow pig 2's building codes. It does make me wonder about places where wildfires seem to be a risk, are those homes still predominantly wood?
@@streaky81 yeah but most people have neighbours on the other side of the wall...
@@streaky81 They can be replaced. There are incidents of stone or brick built houses having been open to the elements for years having the insides replaced. I particularly remember one granite tenement in a terrace of them in Aberdeen being restored in the 1980s, the stone walls having been found to be in as good condition as before an incendiary bomb destroyed the walls, floors and roof during WW2. Similarly, a modern brick house in a village near me had the inside replaced after being gutted by fire.
Due to standard size of UK homes its very typical to have a washing machine in the kitchen (which in older properties is usually at the back of the house) for laundry to then be hung outside to dry, larger properties can fit utility rooms for laundry (or as part of the garage) but generally speaking its incredibly rare to have a laundry room not on the ground floor (US first floor). Also, I believe WC is actually Water Closet.
A starter home is usually anything you can get for the amount you can borrow. Often any appliances would need to be purchased separately . To have all of this for 275 is almost unbelievable. Rooms are every small in most cases although the special camerawork here stretches the floor area
Our homes are designed to keep heat, so we normally build in brick with cavity wall insulation, short cellings that finished a little above the door, the windows are double glazed, you have at least one radiator per room, you have doors on the rooms with less open plan, and you minimums the amount that opening the front door can chill the house down by having separate hallways.
I'm a postman in the UK and get to see a lot of these new builds being build from scratch while delivering,
There's a couple new estates being built nearby where the only concrete used was the foundations and ground floor - the rest is 2x4's and plasterboard.
These little houses go for over a quarter of a milion - they have no driveway, garage or even a garden.
They are basically a large shed, It's an absolute rip-off.
You are right. My home was built in 1935. The walls are solid brick. It has a long wide hallway with 3 beds, separate dining room sitting room kitchen and two bathrooms. A veranda adjoining the main bedroom and the other end the sitting room. The walls are so solid you can't actually knock a nail in the wall...it bends. So you have to drill a hole plug it and then drive the nails in. The design is Spanish Hollywood.
Older houses are best, with proper gardens and reasonable size rooms, plus a bit of character compered to the modern lego houses they throw up now.
I wish to live on one of these though, it would mean I dont have to share with other people. ;(
We've always bought old solid properties with huge gardens . The houses that are built nowadays are like little identical boxes were 24 houses are looking into your 6ftx6ft garden at all times 😭 horrid. (Wales uk)
My thought exactly, i'm disgusted watching this video, what a bad home! They are cramming everything into every are as much as they can too, the tv placement was awful, i thought "show homes" had a certain artistique to them but they have the control panel for your electics next to the toilet, a boiler next to the sink hidden behind a cupboard door, it's just terrible, could've atleast tried to fit the boiler in under the stairs. Really dont like this, if this is how they all are now, count me out!
In my town (20 mins from London), 275k you'd be lucky to buy a small studio apartment. A house like this would be close to half a million in my town! Whereas 275k up North you probably could buy a 3 or maybe even a 4 bedroom!
A few years ago we moved to the Yorkshire coast, £155k got us a Victorian built 4 floor ex guesthouse, (9/10 bedrooms)Zoopla says £210k now and it’s a great size for a large family.
My thinking exactly. We are in a rural area 30 miles north of London and it is the sort of thing they are building as 'starter homes' but costing 4-500k. New developments are supposed to contain a proportion of 'affordable' homes but the developers ALWAYS find a way to reduce or remove that requirment. If you need something cheaper then it is going to be old, worn out, needing major refurbishment and tiny (2 bedrooms if you are really lucky), generally with NO outdoor space and probably a flat.
I live in Buckinghamshire and yeh it would cost far more for a place like this
Same here in Berkshire - 25 minutes to Paddington on the train from where I live and that makes my town very attractive for commuters, hence the house prices!
I live in south east wales and the house building is through the roof. Because people can’t afford Bristol and Cardiff. Even had people commute to London.
A starter home in Devon would be about £300k. But a lot smaller than that one. No garage, smaller garden, smaller rooms. Crazy prices at the moment. Bricks and doors help with the cold winds. Brick walls also keep the house cooler in the summer. Though our weather fluctuates wildly! 😅
What!😮
You mean you don't have a 3 bedroom house as a starter home?
Ridiculous! Where do you keep the boat?
And where do the staff sleep?🤭
I can already tell from the thumbnail that this isn't a starter home 😂
A starter home in the UK is a grotty 1 bedroom flat with barely enough space to squeeze around your bed, and here you are showing us a large 3 bedroom detached family house!
Is there even such a thing as a "starter home" anymore? Pretty sure that the younger generations have been priced out.
Alarm boxes aren’t usually ‘in a closet’! They are right by the front door or back door depending on where the residents enter the house.
I can't help thinking that was the heating thermostat and not the alam? I can' imagine that a alarm would come as standard?
That is the alarm control panel (we have the same one in our house) and it''s completely wireless, so depending on the sensors and siren you use the batteries can last up to seven years before being replaced. You just need to install the control panel near a plug socket to get power to the panel. To arm or disarm you use a keyfob so you don't need to physically enter the code at the panel itself, just press a button when leaving or entering the house.
Ours is in the hall. My sisters has it just inside the hall cupboard (under the stairs)
That wasn't the alarm it was the electricity fuse box. I am shocked that was allowed in a bathroom. Presumably rules are different in a small WC rather than a full bathroom. Generally we don't even allow plug sockets or standard light switches in a bathroom
@@primeprover Yes that was the fuse box, the alarm was in the cupboard in the living room.
Just checked prices for a similar size and style new build house in my home town in Berkshire - approximately £570,000. House prices in the UK vary a lot depending on the area. You wouldn't get much in my area for £275,000, you'd only get a flat (apartment) with shared/communal outside space.
This is a new build housing estate built due to population increasing, it's not a village it's a commuter development
570k can only get a 2 bedrooms flat (tiny one) in where I live (outer London) 10 years ago.
@@user-bi8ko7kc6h Jeez. £570k would get you a nice fairly rural barn conversion with a decent garden, or plot of land where I am, in the Southern Lake district......or a 4 bedroomed exec style home on a fancy development. You know they type, with a couple of hanging baskets, and a 70 reg BMW on the drive...... A friend of mine moved over to the Lakes from East Yorkshire last year. He paid £200k for a lovely semi-detached cottage in a small rural village. It's on a narrow country lane, in a slightly elevated position, and has sweeping, uninterrupted 180 degree views of the Lake District hills from the front door..... The village pub is 300 yards down the road.. Given the fact that we get Winter here in the Lakes, followed by 6 months of bad weather, he has swapped his posh Audi for a Mitsubishi L200 4WD pick up truck.......
£275k would get you a very nice big house where I live
£275k would get you an old small terraced house, 1ba 2br, tiny garden, and road parking no driveway.
A house like this, looking at £750k minimum.
Bear in mind that usually all the ‘extras’ such as flooring are paid on top of the basic price, so this house with the excellent finish it has would be a lot more expensive
The trip switches are usually located in a cupboard under the stairs for example. Note the gas hob and electric cooker - that is usual. The door on the sitting room is also there to keep the heat in and close off the drafty hallway. It's a tidy house espcially for a starter home, it has it's own driveway and the garage which could be converted into another room at a later stage and it's detactched. You could go cheaper but you would might get semi detached or terrace and have on street parking which is a pain. With regards to the bricks, the new houses now have a veneer of brick work on top of the main (cheaper) concrete material, this looks nice but is a cheaper way of doing it. The old house that you see are solid brick but proberbly less well insulated.
5:10 no its usually under the stairs or in a cupboard in the hallway.
Normally you're not allowed electricity anywhere near a bathroom, maybe as this is just a loo and sink (we call this the 'downstaris loo') there's a loophole in the law, the fusebox is normally in a cupboard somewhere, often near the front door. WC = Water Closet.
Agreed, never ever seen a fusebox in a bathroom, little sketchy imo
You can put a consumer unit (fuse box) in a downstairs loo as long as its in the right position. If it was in the wrong place the inspector would not pass it.
@@Westcountrynordiceven so it looked out of place so low down on the wall.
@@neilwilliams2409 That's down to the architect. I would have put the loo under the stairs and the cupboard where the loo is but that's me
Loo isn't a word used so much by younger people in the UK. Downstairs toilet is what I call it. Only my grandparents still use the word loo.
I think UK homes tend to have rooms all closed off with doors for 3 main reasons
1. Privacy
2. Noise cancellation (like to watch TV as you suggested)
3. Heat insulation, to keep heat in especially from the wind draft that may come through the front and back door
and also to slow down fires if you have fire doors. That’s also why our houses are usually made out of brick like another commenter mentioned. Brick is less flammable which is especially important since UK homes tend to be closer together so fire spreads from house to house quicker.
Also, cooking smell stays just in the kitchen. I am not keen on open plan
@@Londonererer haha that’s true I didn’t think of that. Though depends what they’re cooking if I wanna smell it 😅
I have mixed feelings on open plan. I think it can make things more accessible and feel more spacious. However it can also decrease things like privacy and noise cancellation. I think it’s okay in a studio apartment cause it’s just you though I’d still like a curtain or something around my bed to create a separate mental space for sleep. I think an open space between the dining area and kitchen would be good cause those two are kinda connected and I personally rarely eat at a dining table now a days, but I’d probably want a separate living area.
Doors to the living area have always been to keep down draughts. Britain is generally more cold and windy than it is hot and calm. That's why you have open plan in Australia, for example.
I have a double basin sink,so I wash the dishes in one side then rinse in the other.
I'm from the UK and listen to you pronounce Staffordshire amuses me!
9:56 I find the half sink useful. It can be used for rinsing detergent residue from dishes and the plug is a bit different like a strainer to filter
out the solid stuff and send it to landfill and it helps save on liquids going into in the kitchen waste bin.
I hate them people always seem to chuck teabags in them Iike a, nice bid single sink.
Starter homes in the UK usually are one or two bedroom houses. The WC is a Water Closet which is what the first toilets were called. The electricity panel is never in a bathroom so 4hat is very unusual it is usually in a cupboard in the hallway or under the stairs. The half sink is often utilised for washing vegetables/fruit or rinsing the dishes of the soap suds.
I insisted on this when I replaced mine but it's not standard.
It was fitted left handed (yes can switch) and my drainer is much bigger the same size as the sink.
But I'm in a older flat, which oddly means I have a better size kitchen than the avg 3 bed house.
The first thing is that the toilet is NOT a bathroom, there is no bath in there, it's a toilet.
We build with brick, wood built is VERY unusual in the UK.
It would be classed as a half bathroom in states ... water closet here .
Cloakroom!
In British homes it’s easier to plumb the washing machine in the kitchen.
It doesn’t get that hot in the U.K. for AC in homes. We do use electrical fans though.
Most British houses are too small to include a laundry room.
Lol bit of a silly thing to say: it's only easier to plumb them in the kitchen because we tend to put them in the kitchen. As others have said, the reason we tend to put them in the kitchen in the first place is that most UK homes are too small for a separate laundry room.
@@slashdisco The kitchen tends to be the place where the mains water enters the house. Putting the washing machine near the sink is best for the water pressure.
The fuse box here in ireland is in the hall never seen it in the bathroom before
As an American watching this, it’s interesting to see how different UK homes are. The furnishings and decorations are beautiful and it looks like a nice, cozy house. The thing that really stood out to me is how much smaller everything is. Like the toilets and bathroom sinks look tiny. The refrigerator/freezer combo was half the size of a typical fridge in the US, and the kitchen sink is so much smaller. Plus the closets in the bedrooms are so tiny. How would you possibly fit all your clothes and shoes in there? I can’t even imagine, especially the one that’s a half closet. It’s also unusual not to see a basement.
The thing with these 'starter homes' is that theyre starter homes in name and nothing else. Theyre basically unaffordable for the majority of under 40s. The house builders in the UK profiteer massively on new builds and the government lets them.
A starter home where I live in the uk of £80k-100k.
I just bought my first home last year and went for a nice neighbourhood with huge garden and conservatory semi detached for £140k
Same where I live, we got our beautiful 1800s 3 bed cottage for 90k. I’m bewildered by the prices in the south tbh 😂
Indeed, can't imagine a new build starter home costing anything above £150k around here and we have good transport links. Out in the country it drops to under £100k or you can find council estates with houses cheaper even than that but they are not places you would want to buy to live in yourself if you can help it, better just to rent
@@timenchanter1983 where the fuck do you live in Manchester they sell garages literally for that sort of money .... Trust me I have seen it and am in the building game myself and everything this way is 3 to 400 grand plus for a shitty prefab or a apartment in a sky scraper where they bill you yearly for a parking spot under the building and then they bill you for having staff to work and press buttons all day to let people in
@@robertknight2556 I’m from up north, no way would it be that cheap in many many areas.
For the air conditioning you would need to take up more space on the development for substations to supply the power required, the estates are laid out to fit the land available, as the available plots are generally odd shaped, with a single point of access. So the layout is done to maximise the number of houses.
Air conditioning is called open a window or put the fans on. Central heating is fairly common, washing machine and dryer are normally in the kitchen. Along with fridge freezer, dish washer, and the kitchen sink normally comes with a draining board. And it depends on the area you live, and if you want a garden. Not all houses are designed the same. And we use brick so our house doesn't fall down if we get a gale winds rain or bad weather. So it all depends.
My first reaction to the aerial view was “oh look they’ve built on a flood plain”
That wasn't a flood plain it was actually branston ash lagoon. They built the houses on the pulverised ash field that the local.power station used to dump its ash.
@@kirstyhughes5554that does not sound good
Wc means water closet. One of the few times british people would use the word closet. Also a strange place for electric stuff, often tucked away in a closet under the staircase in my experience.
I think the furnishings in modern show homes are smaller than the furniture in most of our homes, as it makes the rooms look bigger, but notice how short the bed in the master bedroom seems to be, I’m not tall but even for me that looks quite cramped.
Yes! I remember reading that somewhere and it does appear to be the case in this show home.
Show homes use all sorts of tricks to make them look bigger. Hardly any furniture, no doors, lots of mirrors. A lot of new builds have very little storage as well, hence the rise of self storage units!
I would love to live in an old victorian house.
yes we got a super king in our bedroom put that in and the door would not open,
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 ahhhhh people are wising up after all the years of getting bummed from massive building firms 🤣
In the kitchen the idea of the smaller sink is to wash vegetables. I would have thought that sink would have been better the other way round with the larger sink next to the draining board.
A new 'town' being built near us in NW Cambridgeshire has a lot of so-called 'starter homes'. As an example, a ONE-bedroomed apartment is now £210,000, so you can imagine how much this 'jewel of a starter home' would cost hereabouts - probably around £475,000. EDIT - cost is now £230,000.
In case nobody mentioned it in a comment, WC stands for water closet. The smaller kitchen sink basin is useful for washing vegetables or cuts of meat. That way it minimises any chance of cross contamination from the larger washing up basin. Having a washing machine and/or hot water heater/boiler in the kitchen is very common here in the UK. A lot of older houses here have the kitchen at the front so they are closest to the mains water supply.
My daughter and son-in-law moved into a new build house last year - very similar to this one. They were able to choose their fixtures and fittings/kitchen equipment/cupboard fronts and flooring throughout. They had quite a lot of choose too. We live in the Southwest, so the prices are a lot higher... I don't know the exact price they paid, but I believe it was around £350+k.
I think this is a really big house! Mine is half this size, I call my back garden a yard because it’s concrete, there is no garage and the front room walks straight out onto the street. I’m not complaining, I love my house and am so lucky to have outside space ❤
The consumer unit (fuse box) is usually in the hallway here in the UK, as would the alarm panel. One thing UK homes tend not to have (unless they're very large) is a utility room large enough to house a separate washing machine and tumble dryer, hence the laundry facilities normally being found in the kitchen. The realtor also forgot to mention the 'wall-to-wall floors'! (Apologies to Leonard Bernstein.)
I live in a two bedroom and I have a utility and my house is 70+ yrs old. As does all the other houses around me. It’s for rinsing dishes most houses have them in the uk.
Our fuse box is under the stairs
We don't need air conditioning for 2 reasons. 1. Brick means better heat loss in the cold but also keeps heat out in the hot. And 2. Anything over 30'c/85'f is classed as a very hot day and happens mabey 1 day a year.
The brand the other American could not pronounce. Zanussi is a Italy brand manufactured by Electrolux.
Za-nu-see.
Also our clothes washers are ALL front loaders. What you Americans would class as a RV compact washer. Is our standard size clothes washer.
Favourite joke in the UK “I love summer, last year it was on a Tuesday” we’d use AC maybe a week. It’s the same reason we close off the hallway. When you open the front door you don’t lose all the heat. Closed hall was a dealbreaker for me when I was looking.
Hi Steve. Very odd having the electric box in the toilet area! Normally near the front or back door. Mines above my front door.
In terms of house. It's fairly standard layout for a new house. Older houses are usually split into a kitchen room, a dining room and a lounge room (it's to do with being heated by open fires at the time!). Some have knocked these through to make it open plan.
Having AC in any house is unusual in the UK especially a starter home as these. You might get it in high end properties and apartments. Was in an apartment i saw in London but they started at £1.2m! Generally the UK gets a few days in the 80's and the odd day in the 90's except for last year when the South of the UK had 2 weeks of high 90's and temperatures hit 100f plus!
It looks a very small house for the price. Agree about TVs in the bedroom its not a great idea.
It's massive for the money. In the London area you'd by lucky to get a 1 bedroom flat for that much.
I've never seen an electric consumer unit (fusebox) in a loo before. Not sure how that's allowed.
Not unusual to have alarm control box in a cloaks cupboard.
The sink is a sink and a half. Half sink ysed for rinsing, washing veg etc. You can have the whole thing the other way round.
i suspect that consumer unit location is for the show house only and it does meet current building/IEE regulations.
The kitchen and living room doors closed at night is also afire safety feature,alarm goes off, it gives you a chance to get downstairs and out the fro t door whilst the fire is raging I the kitchen or living room
I wouldn't call this a starter home. Our first home had only 1 bedroom and downstairs was all open plan. Most starter homes are either 1 or 2 bedrooms and certainly not 3. The smallest bedroom would usually have just enough room for a single bed. The gardens are always small unless you move up the property ladder to a bigger home. Some modern homes don't even have a garage.
Think Zanussi is or was Italian. Think it's now owned by a Swedish company. However, Zanussi white goods are usually pretty decent.
Typically, no air-con, and clothes washing in kitchen, although a separate 'utility room' is becoming more popular. One and half sinks plus drainer is common in smaller houses to save space (no garbage disposal unit though, very rare). Garage is probably just big enough for a european car to fit, but still a squeeze to get out of the driver's door once in. UK garages are usually just full of the junk that there is no room for anywhere else, and the car just lives on the drive.
Yup, the Art Deco house here was built in 1936, it's a three-bed semi-detached, they had driveways down the side of the houses and a garage in the rear garden, but back then the cars were much narrower, most people have extended their homes over this area, and the front garden and driveway has become a large driveway for three cars, plus our rear garden is South facing 130ft long x 26ft wide, we've not extended sideways as I want the access for a small trailer storage (used for logs), but we have extended the ground floor at the rear, some people build a glass extension, we decided those were too hot/bright in the Summer, and too cold in the Winter, so we had built built with a tiled roof instead, we also have a large wooden decking that we intend to cover with just a roof for shade/rain for use in the Summer.
The rear garden is big enough for three sheds 20ft x 20ft, 8ft x 8ft and 6ft x 8ft, an antenna tower (Amateur Radio), a large natural stone paved patio, including an outdoor large Sun Patio with seating, tables, and a log fired Chimnea, along with a separate BBQ, four large log stores, and an Air Rifle Range up for 20/25/30 yards, and a separate Air Rifle Range for 6 yards / 10 metres.
The kitchen here is slightly better equipped as the wife just had a new one fitted, along with a breakfast room, there's also a front sitting room with a log fire (although the house has Gas Central Heating & Water as well), and we are considering Solare Water Heating Tubes on the South facing roof; and the rear ground floor extension is the Lounge/TV Room, we also have the Washing Machine and Tumble Dryer under the Stairs to the First Floor, upstairs there's three bedrooms and a bathroom. We are considering converting the loft space into a 2nd Floor storage and a craft room.
On Zoopla the house here in Shrewsbury is estimated at £380-£400k, but that was when I last checked a year ago.
As regards Renewable Energy, we have Cooperative Society shares in a Wind Farm (Scotland), and a Solar Farm (England), that credits us energy via our Cooperative Society Utilities, although I'm planning Solar Panels on the large shed, and a small wind generator on the antenna tower, to power Amateur Radio off-grid.
We currently have four cars (2x Diesel, 2x Petrol), two are classics (an air-cooled engined estate, and an untidy looking 'Sleeper' hatchback tuned for Track Days), one diesel hatchback is used by the wife for work, and the other is a large estate for towing a caravan/trailer (the twin-axle six berth caravan is stored in a secure location elsewhere). We have zero plans to change our cars, however, because we may have friends/family turn up in an EV or plug-in Hybrid, we do have a 240vAC 13A Charging Point fitted to an outside wall.
@@brianbrotherston5940
All of them? or just the one above you? Or the guy talking?
We've never been able to get ANY car we've owned into the typical garage - going back to 1974.......................
Note to America in general. Staffordshire is generally pronounced "Staffordsher", as are all the counties ending in "shyer". Like Yorksher, Lancasher, Gloucestersher ("Glostersher") etc.
£275+ for a starter home? JEEZ! I'd want a mansion for that kind of money. Mind you, I don't live in the South. As for doors into rooms, this is another way of slowing down the spread of fire. Even though it may be full of glass panes, it still helps to slow down the fire spreading from room to room. Also, it saves heat loss in the winter.
The boiler is in the kitchen as it's a "Combi boiler" (Combination), it provides hot water and also heating for the radiators.
I would say Staffordsheer!
@@janewilson8676 There are going to be variations, depending on a persons location and regional accent. I was just generalising.
As others have said, this detached 3-bed house would be *significantly* more expensive it it were located either near a city or in the south. I could easily see it pushing over £500,000.
Context is that we have a severe housing shortage here effecting ownership and renting. Many have been priced out of ever owning a home at all. It's sad.
around £600k in the south east, and the garden would be way smaller, probably just enough for a small patio and a patch of fake grass.
I live in a very posh area in South East london, in a 3 bed bungalow with a rear garden, tiny driveway suitable for 1 car, no AC. Last had it valued 2 and a half years ago and they estimated between £500,000 - £550,000. That said the rear garden is very long but narrow and divided into two sections, a smaller seating area and patio with a passageway that leads down the grassy larger area at the back where the shed is, table and chairs etc. There's probably just as much space outdoors, if not more, than there is indoors.
I don’t know if it’s the same in the states, but show houses often have show furniture which is all slightly smaller then standard so that the rooms look larger than they are - cheeky I know. This in the south is not a starter home, we often start off in apartments and one or two bedroom houses. Don’t forget land is at a premium so newer estates (sub divisions?) use weird angles and small gardens (yards) to make the most of the space. Older homes usually have bigger gardens (Victorian’s often have yards/walled courtyards).
About 20 years ago friends of ours sold their 3 bedroom terraced home in Telford, UK and bought a 4 bedroom home with basement, walk in wardrobe and en-suite, double garage and about 10 acres of land in Kentucky.
Also there is a requirement in our codes for two doors between a water closet and any food preparation areas, which is one of the reasons for that door, the other is that you can close off the lounge and not let all the heat into the stairwell, reducing heating costs.
Not so anymore, the law changed
@@ChelleKT1however fire regulations, I believe, still require a door between the kitchen and stairs/main escape route in homes with more than one floor.
In 1666 when London birth down most the houses were wooden. There was a change of thinking after that and rules regarding buildings were introduced.
I think it's a lot of money for a 'starter home'.
I enjoyed the post
'burnt' down.
@@celticgold4028
Yes burnt.
Until recently gas powered boiler’s have been used to warm water. This pumped is then around the house to radiators in each room. It’s a wise idea to have thermosetting taps on radiators. This allows each radiator to hold the temp in each room, or if one is not being used to turn it off to save energy. The radiator in the bathroom apart from keeping the room warm is used as a towel rail, who doesn’t like a hot fluffy towel when you get out of the bath.
Note that for electrical safety reasons there are no conventional light switches in a UK bathroom, water and 240v don’t mix well.
We are a small country and land, they don't make anymore, is expensive. the garage tends to be used for storage, quit often for a clothes tumble drier. when I was young every house had a long clothes line. Typical wash day was a Monday so the neighbourhood was covered in lines of washing drying in the breeze.
Air Con in the UK is very rare.
England must be the only country in the world where you can't have switches and power points in the bathroom and toilet. I have never heard of a person getting water out of the toilet onto the light switch. like every one else Here in Australia we have a light switch and 3 power plugs in both our bathrooms.
@@kenpage1107 British Safety Standards is why. The only outlets and switches allowed in a bathroom are shower pulls and shaver sockets.
Hi. New builds are normally much smaller, in my experience, than older homes and older homes are normally much cheaper. Depending on the area, an older home would be about £120,000. The closer to london the higher it gets, about 3 to 4 times that. Most houses have a door separating the outside door from the rest of the house to keep the heat in. It gets cold here more than hot, so we aim to heat rather than chill but when it's hot, we feel it in summer time. Which is why we complain about weather soooo much 😅
House prices vary massively on area. For a bit of perspective- I just bought a shell of a ground floor one bed flat in London (Belsize Park) for £880k. It needs a kitchen, bathroom, completely re-wiring and re-plumbing as it’s not liveable currently. Once it’s done it’ll be on the market for £1.6-£1.8m.. that money up north would buy you a village.
We live in a bungalow (single storey) on the South Coast of England, by the sea. We have a wrap around garden and a garage. We moved here about eight years ago and paid much less than the cost of that show home! However, it was built in the 1950s! We will both be retired next year and look forward to relaxing and taking in the sea air. 😊
We don't do air conditioning here in the UK! Gardens of new builds are very small. If you want larger, it's best to buy an older property. £275,000 IS a lot of money, but here in Sussex a three-bedroomed house like this would be in excess of £400,000 to £500,000. That is why buying is out of the question for so many young people in the UK. Even in the north, prices are still out of reach for many. So sad.
I live in a 3 bed bungalow in south east London. valued 2 and half years ago at £500k-£550k. Small drive with enough space for one car, large rear garden divided into two parts (probably more space in the garden than is in the house itself). Renting the cheapest house on my road would set you back £1,700 a month.
A small 1 bed flat with a tiny lounge and bathroom in a block of flats about 1/4 of a mile from my house is still £1,300+ a month to rent. They aren't particularly modern flats either and the block was built around 20-30 years ago.
That thing where you have a different coloured wall is called a "feature wall". Very popular.
The driveway is probably block paving or imprint patterned concrete.
It's not usual in the UK to have a breaker box in the toilet or the alarm unit in a cupboard.. its usually breaker box in the cupboard and alarm in the hallway near the door ..
Normally in the UK, our fuse box, is situated in some sort of small cupboard near the front door, and more now, cupboards at the front of the houses are getting converted into WC's, Water Closet.
There are quite a few builders who build timber framed homes. If you are close to a wood, forest or tree line then the house has to be made from brick for fire prevention purposes. On my son’s housing estate the outer ring of homes are close to trees and are totally made from brick, the inner homes are timber framed in general.
Very few houses have AC. Apart from the occasional heatwave the weather is tolerable. Although last summer was a bit of a nightmare. - pushing 40C (100+F)
*STEVE*
Brick versus wood...
Pretty much all of our houses are brick, two walls, one inner and one outer with around 4"-6" inches between the two, and filled with insulation in between. Yes there are some converted barns and that sort of thing, and of course a lot of original Tudor wood framed houses are still around. But then in the Tudor period, they didn't use wood so much as practically the whole tree trunk in each of the beams! 😁
You love our architecture right? Our history yes? How much of it would still be around if we used wood? They learnt their lesson during the various big fires in London's history, wood houses built close together are soon wiped out in a fire.
If you don't want the big bad wolf huffing and puffing and blowing The Three Little Pigs house down, you use brick! That's how history is made.....and preserved! 😘😘😘
I'm a retired structural carpenter, and I built a timber framed, timber clad house for myself about 30 years ago (in which I still live). I've watched by neighbours in their Victorian terraces dealing with massive cracks in their masonry walls, shell out huge sums to have their founds underpinned, brickwork re-pointed, deal with rising damp and mold etc., whilst I've been enjoying my trouble-free, very well insulated house.
When "history is made", it doesn't necessarily go in the right direction - I'm sure you're aware we're currently witnessing the demise of the internal combustion engine. Producing brick, cinder blocks and cement cause untold environmental damage. On the other hand, using timber as a building material creates a minimal carbon footprint, as it takes little more than sun and rain to produce fast growing timber with which we can build houses.
Over the last 20-30 years, I've seen a significant movement back to using timber framing in otherwise conventional house building. Timber is easy to use, flexible, and should any structural part fail, it can be replaced with little drama. unlike masonry.
@@DougBrown-h1nevery house built like yours? Would again be a fire hazard.
@@DougBrown-h1n I didn't say it doesn't have it's uses. And when I say brick, I meant more in the lines of "stone" type materials. The fact remains however that brick is far more longer lasting, and a lot of problems in older brick houses are not the bricks themselves, nor the quality of building. The Victorians had a strange habit of building over disused wells and shafts, resulting in lots of sinkholes even today. The integrity of a building is only as good as the foundation it is built on, and the ground itself is what compromises most older buildings, not the structure of materials used. Their windows were not as sealed, resulting in moisture entering framework, not just around the windows, but doorways, skirting boards, roof framing, joists etc. Ventilation was not adequate resulting in moisture build up from the inside. The heating was open fires which are open to the elements, birds nesting, debris build up. Trees were planted around properties, and 100+ years later those roots are still cracking underground pipes and sewage lines resulting in waterlogging in the ground. Early Victorian houses had no plumbing, nor central heating, and weren't built big enough for today's living standards. People had only a couple of sets of clothes, there were no fridges, freezers, washing machines, tumble dryers, chest freezers, power tools, showers, pools, garages, electrical appliances, technological gadgets and machines, toys, bikes, or boisterous children bombing round the house. Since then, those same houses have sacrificed a bedroom or two to convert into bathrooms, had driveways added, extensions built on, lofts converted and conservatories added on. Windows have been replaced,and replaced again,. Fireplaces have been knocked out or boarded over. Walls have been removed. Period features ripped out. Staircases flipped round, moved or added. Pollution affects the building materials. So much traffic vibration affects the ground stability. Major groundworks around the properties have upgraded drains, sewers, electric cabling, gas pipes, water mains, telecom wiring, streetlights, resurfaced roads, burst pipes, traffic collisions. There's only so much pneumatic drilling that can be done before you start shattering structures nearby. Extensions or conservatories don't require as much foundation, but the problem is, they are built onto the side of a house and if they start sinking, they can pull the house sideways along the way. If you keep knocking out window frames, redrilling brickwork to add wiring for additional appliances, upgrading boilers and replacing old lead pipes, then of course bricks are gonna get cracked along the way. That doesn't mean the bricks themselves are not a strong and reliable building material. A lot of building problems come down to neglect, most of which isn't intentional. Lack of money may push repairs back but a lot of necessary repairs aren't even obvious until you've got water pouring through the ceiling or find your drains overflowing sewage along your garden. So whilst you say it's easier to replace a piece of wood here and there, that's all very well, providing you can see it and know it needs replacing, but more repairs aren't known to us until something breaks. Most Victorian homes that need underpinning or stabilising in some way, it's not the bricks that were the issue. It's the foundation, the ground becoming wetter and less compacted, or the WOODEN framework of the house or roof that gave way. It's underground tree roots, abandoned wells, climbing plants, repeated alterations, insufficient foundations, moisture levels, rot, mould, neglect or roof damage. Even today people go to salvage yards to buy bricks that are 100-200 years old, that are a little worse for wear cosmetically but still as structurally sound as the day they were made. The bricks are not the problem. And just to finish, there are some fabulous craftsmen in America whose cabinetry or flooring or plasterwork etc are second to none. But on the whole, their building methods OVERALL are STILL not as good as even ours was back in Victorian times. I watch house upgrades, renovations, or property searches more than any other type of TV programme. Whether it's tiny homes, waterworks conversions, renovating a windmill to live in, or buying a home abroad, I watch them all. A lot of them are American. I've seen huge houses being built in America where the foundations are just a series of trenches of concrete, for the outer walls to stand on, not an entire foundation to bear the weight of the entire home. I've seen American homes bought for upgrading, where they've gone into the crawl space beneath, and the only thing holding up the house are wooden posts that have split or are sinking into the ground. Absolute insanity! I've seen better integrity in a pop up tent than a lot of their homes! And finally, the main reason I mentioned American wooden homes are not as reliable as ours...TERMITES!!! Yes we get them here too of course, but their insect population collectively is off the charts compared to a few gnats and ants over here! When they strike over there a wooden house can soon become sawdust, so from an environmental perspective, they could avoid a lot of those potential issues by using brick. 😊😊😊
@@DougBrown-h1n HAH! Coincidence or what? What's the chances of this.....one of the other RUclipsrs I watch, who's also American and does (mostly) UK reaction videos, is RYAN WUZER...... and he's JUST posted a video on his channel explaining WHY American homes are flimsy compared to ours! 😂 You couldn't make this up! Just as I posted my reply to you, he's put that video up!
Well done on building your own home, BUT there is no way to future proof any home. There will always be new and improved boilers, heating, appliances, gadgets, must-have fads, better windows etc etc. Years ago my daughter lived in a small block of flats before she had children. One of the previous tenants in the block had put up a satellite dish outside, and when they moved, they took it with them. Fast forward a year or so after that tenant had left, and ALL the tenants had to move out temporarily to a Premier Inn, that the landlord paid for, because the whole block has an issue with black mould which is dangerous! My daughter's flat particularly was badly affected and she was getting through bottles of bleach like water, but all the flats had some issue with it. It was all because of a few small holes in the brickwork from the satellite dish being put up a bit sloppily by former tenants. Whenever it rained it drove water into the hole that was soaking up into the insulation throughout the whole cavity between inner and outer walls. Everyone had mould inside from that side of the building. That's what I mean....the bricks themselves are fine, it's all the subsequent upgrades and DIY that causes future problems.
Incidentally, I'm sure you know who Sarah Beenie is? Building and interior design expert....Yes? On one of her shows she was with a couple whose outer wall needed anchoring as the bricks were starting to look a bit higgledy-piggledy. They were still in place but looked like someone with hand tremors had laid them and had never heard of, let alone used a spirit level. 🙄
Anyhoo, this couple were in a state of panic and dread, thinking the worst, so she took them to the building and engineering institute, I think that's what it was called..or some place called something similar. Basically it's like a scientific testing and teaching place, specifically related to building work. So she showed them a demo of a brick wall that was still upright, but most if not all the cement was missing, and these bricks were still standing on no more than a whim and a prayer holding them upright!
Then they were told to push out a brick here and there, a bit like a giant Jenga wall, and whilst the rest of the bricks may have leaned a little on one end in response, the wall still didn't fall down. They took out more a more bricks, and the rest of them kind of shuffled and redistributed the weight bearing. It took the removal of a LOT of bricks, before the wall finally fell, and even then not all of it fell.
Back at their house they had a man outside the wall, level with the upstairs floor, who had the biggest drill and threaded bolt you've ever seen. He drilled through a brick, right through into the home and inside the end of one of the floor joists. Then a decorative metal emblem went on the outside of the brick, and the threaded bolt went through that, through the wall, and right inside a decent length of this joist. As it got tighter it pulled this decorative brace thing closer and tighter to the home, which pulled in the whole wall until it was perfectly level, and secured it to the inside floor. The wall was fixed, and it also raised up the slight sag of the bedroom floor making that level again.
As Sarah explained, it's not just that bricks are strong and durable in themselves, but that the placement of laying a brick wall, each layer overlapping the ends of each brick in the row beneath itself, is where the real integrity of a brick wall lies. The overlapping holds a wall together more than the cement does and even with no cement at all! She's said time and time again, that what threatens Victorian houses the most, is the ground, that is full of huge tree roots either zapping out ALL underground moisture making the ground crack and sink, or the roots damaging pipes and causing a water build up underneath. That and, roof damage, because rain gets into the wooden rafters and works that moisture all along into wooden joists, framing, stud walls and skirting boards etc.
It is RARELY, if EVER, a fault with the bricks themselves! 😘😘😘
Right, let's go watch Ryan's video to see American flimsy building! 😜
The Scandinavians use wood just fine. Wood is pretty study if you employ advanced techniques
This is a show home (or showhouse). Builders usually make the first house on a new development the biggest type available on the development & furnish it. They are usually the last home to sell & the only houses on the development to come with furniture. Every other house they sell will be bare walls, usually with a choice of colour finish. There will be a fitted kitchen, also with a choice of colour & worktop/cupboard doors. It's very unlikely that there will be any curtains or blinds & probably no carpet either.
This way of showing off new developments works very well though, I know because we bought a house on our estate the same style of the show home.
As others have pointed out though, this is not a starter home. Starter homes are tiny & very unlikely to be detached. They usually come with little or no garden & the only outside space is probably a single car parking space on a shared driveway. The last time I saw a new home for one or two people, it was basically 1 room downstairs, split into a kitchen/diner area & living room area with a tiny toilet under the stairs. Upstairs was 1 bedroom & a bathroom.
No, it's not usual to have a consumer unit in the bathroom. Our building regulations don't allow for electrical outlets or switches in bathrooms.
Regarding the position on the planet of the UK versus the USA, I remember Alastair Cooke pointing out in a “Letter from America“ once that British people tend to think that travelling from (the original) York over the Atlantic to New York involves merely a westward journey of 3000 miles or so. He said that we never take into account the fact that it also requires a 1000 mile journey to the south.
Yup, London is situated 600 miles NORTH of Chicago - even north of Edmonton AB.
That garden space seemed quite generous - typically the show home in the development has a larger garden and better parking provision. The recent developments near where I live (30 miles north of London) have much smaller gardens which are also typically overlooked, and quite often suffer from a lot of shading. I think that for many large gardens are not desirable. We recently managed to extend our rear garden - the estate agent we ran the idea past did express the opinion that this was unlikely to add to our property value.
Large gardens are time consuming, although they can be enjoyable.
My rear garden is 120’ x 40’, and the front garden is approx 40’ x 30’ with a 15’ x 50’ drive.
As I’v gotten older, I’m considering selling up to buy something much smaller.
Adding robot lawnmowers to our front and rear gardens has significantly reduced the time we have to spend on ours. One big advantage of having the extra space is adding distance between neighbours :) We're experimenting this year with letting 1/2 of the rear garden go wild (in a controlled fashion). There's near constant development in the area we live in, leading to reducing habitat for insects, birds and bats. Quite often new build owners will pave/fake turf over the thin smear of top soil the developers have used.
In the UK, we always have washing machines in our kitchens, also you'll find that absolutely 0 houses in the UK have basements, that's a very American exclusive thing. Oh, and walk in wardrobes are only a thing in the much more expensive houses, you won't see them in average houses. The garden you see in this house is very big compared to the average UK garden too. My 'garden' in my old house was basically an alleyway. It'd be very interesting to see you react to an average UK council house for example - which is basically the most average UK house there is, which majority of people have. You'll notice the difference in size, the house in this video is certainly on the upper end of UK houses. Also, about AC - it's just not a thing in the UK. In Summer here, often it'll be raining, overcast miserable weather. We'll get a couple days decently hot but the weather here changes so drastically so quickly. I live in the North East of England, so it's a lot colder compared to down south - e.g London.
We generally don't generally have waste disposal. It's very normal for people to hang their washing outside in the summer
The reason that there is a door in the hallway is to block the kitchen from the bedrooms. Building regs require two fire doors between the kitchen and any bedrooms for fire safety.
The land is probably the most expensive part of a new build and large gardens need more maintenance than smaller ones. Most people don't seem to have the time or inclination to upkeep their gardens. Locally a lot of people opt to put in artificial lawns and use plants in large pots. Also I looked up what a local new build three bedroom house would be and probably not detached and it's £424,995 so somewhat more expensive and possibly smaller than the one you see in your video. There is also a lot of land you can't build on. Redevelopment of old land (Industrial or old sections of towns etc) is preferred for granting planning permission over using previously unbuilt land. Also for most first time buyers, their salaries will not cover that type of expense without a substantial deposit. Younger people are just being priced out of being able to buy anywhere to live local to where they work. The amount of people living with parents well into their late twenties, early thirties is definitely on the rise locally. Your example you watched is not typical of what is happening local to me. There are housing developments similar to what you see locally to me but these are normally linked to housing association developments where people rent to buy if they can. More young people locally are forced to rent now than ever before. It is a huge problem for those wishing to buy into the property ladder.
That looks huge for a starter home! My parents starter house has 2 moderate sized bedrooms and a closet which they laughably called a bedroom although it was my sister’s bedroom so they made it work. Our Living room was half the size of the one in that house and our kitchen is not big enough to accommodate 2 people at the same time. I’m not sure why they call it a starter home though I don’t think moving to a bigger house after is a viable option for normal people.
I’ve been watching ‘International Carl’ for a few years now and find his US perspective on mainly new homes in the English Midlands quite interesting, and some of the other aspects of UK life he covers (Pub Quizzes etc) 👍.
Ooooooo the covid monster 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@jonathanbarnes7981Don’t mock. It’s neither clever nor funny. I personally know two people who died of it and several others who caught it and recovered. Count yourself very lucky indeed if it passed you by. 😡
@@chixma7011 I will do what the fuck I want r kid 🤭 ooooooo covid monster
I live in a UK new build. Mine is smaller than this as it is only 2 bedrooms. Its tiny, absolutely miniscule and we do not have a garage.
Houses in the UK are always lined up close like this, every house I've ever lived in is the same whether it's old or new. In fact some older houses have 0 land on the front, the houses literally are attached to the path outside. Not nearly enough space in any house unless youre super rich but we make do lol.
w/c is a water closet, toilet and sink only and the electrics panel is in there or utility room simply because its a downstairs room, if you have a cellar chances are its in there. alarm systems tend to be in the hall / hall closet and washing machines tend to be in the kitchen / utility room because of water supply. boiler is kitchen / utility room with the hot water tank in an airing closet up stairs. The front door and hall are closed off from rest of house because nobody wants a draft while you bring the shopping inside during winter (plus you can keep kids and pets inside too)
This house is actually quite small for a new build. I would expect a separate dining room and larger kitchen for £275K but I'm based in Scotland and for that price you could buy a castle with acres of land.
1) W/C is Water Closet you were close.
2) very odd seeing a "breaker box" in a toilet especially at that height I assume it was just convenient to put it there and moving it costs money (concerning that its so Close to water through).
3) Normal for UK homes to have the washing machine for clothes in the kitchen as typically this is where all the plumbing is, in continental Europe it's quite normal for the washer to be in the bathroom too. The half sink could be used to drain things when washing or washing veg etc. Also No garbage disposal they just aren't the Norm here and we are advised not to drain food waste into our drains. We use composting bins and food waste bins.
4) Boiler - Yes that was a gas boiler which feeds all the radiators in the rooms Including all the hot taps. We don't typically have the old tanks that are normal in US homes because space is expensive.
4) it's quite a luxury to have build in closets in all bedrooms. it's also quite a luxury to have your master bedroom to have an en-suite too. although these things are becoming more standard.
5) air-con is just not needed, typically the UK is quite cool with some hot spots in summer for about a week between the rain storms. although we are looking to move away from Gas boilers to HVAC & Ground Source heating Which means moving back to having a Large Tank - This is to be more green and to Decarbonize the housing sector. We don't have fly screens on windows. We just don't get the bugs you get in the US so if it's too hot we will typically open a few windows and/or turn a fan on.
6) houses are brick clad in the UK because of longevity, our weather and wood is expensive. Wood clad shacks would find it difficult to be insured & mortgaged in the UK. saying that there are a good few historic buildings which are wooden based/clad so its not always a strict rule - high end buildings also might differ like a Barn conversion or a Huf house (German flat-Pack house).
Generally though these type of homes have been getting built all over the UK and they are built for 1 thing in mind MAXIMUM PROFIT. if they can squeeze another bedroom or bathroom in they will try to they can charge an extra £10k, £20K or £30k we didn't get to see the garage although I assume from the picture it's very very small and you would be lucky to get a average size car inside it with room for both sides to open the doors. Gardens are small & houses are close to milk the money out of the development. why build 50 homes with large gardens when you could build 100 with small gardens and make triple the money.
I don’t know where in Scotland you live but it’s obviously nowhere near a big city. If you ever see a castle with acres of land going for that price let me know 😂😂😂
Wood has not ben a popular material to build houses in the UK since the great fire of London in 1666. Also most of the UK's forests were put to use building up the navy in the age of sail so there was not that much excess wood supply. Also this home being shown would be a family home rather than a starter home. Most peoples first houses are basic 2 bedroom terraced houses (which typically can be bought for £60,000 + depending on the area), simply because they are the most common and cheapest houses available because they don't take up much land space (the land cost being the biggest part of the cost in many cases when buying a house). You are bang on about people being priced out of the market because that is a common issue for the last few generations with many people not being able to leave home until they are in their 30's.
Those sink is pretty standard with the idea that you would wash in the larger tub and rinse with the smaller one which is also handy for preparing food (as in somewhere to peel your potato's and carrots) with the large catch plug to stop the peel from going down the drain. That garden would be classed as a large one if attached to a single house. Split it in half and you have a more normal size for the UK. WC stands for Water Closet. It's just a euphemism for a toilet. And the area this house is in (I think you called it a sub-division) is called a housing estate in the UK.
How far north are you that you're buying a 2 bedroom house for £60,000? I live in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, and most 2 bed terraces are more than £200,000!
@@ShaneWalta My reaction to James’ comment exactly! My area a two-bed terrace is more like over £400,000…
£60k? A damp old terrace in an old pit village maybe.
£60k for a 2 bed house - where on earth do you live. I'm just outside Oxford and 2 beds are a minimum of £300k , more expensive the closer you get to London - this is why people are now often in their 30's before they can afford to buy.
James, I’m gasping to know where you live. I’d love to snap up some property at that price!
WC = WATER CLOSET and kitchen sink is very common. Water is very calcified and British like to rinse their dishes of soap in a second sink.
Plenty of soft water areas in the UK.
In my area there is a mountain on one side, 2 mountain ranges on 2 sides and the fourth side is facing the bloody Irish Sea and across from this sea is Scotland itself. So yeah, as the summer temp here rarely goes above 25 degrees Celsius, A/C is overkill. Central heating is more important to be fair. 😜
That almost sounds like Campbeltown area.😅😊
Yep radiator heating common, turn key is very unusual, but some will sell the show home with the furniture at the end of the development build.