I HATE HATE HATE MY HOUSE!!!!!!!!

Thought that would get your attention.

Before you tell me I should be in the rant section this is actually a positive post. We are presently living in a rental while our house gets renovated and extended. It’s the house we are in that’s the subject of my wrath.

It optimizes everything that is wrong with some new builds today and vindicates most of our design and building decisions in our place. So what’s so wrong with it????
Where to start?

It’s a newish build, about 7 years old, a cute looking house which has a bit of wow factor when you 1st walk in. it has 3 bedrooms or 2 plus study the master is a fair size, ensuite walk in robe bathroom sep laundry and an open plan kitchen dining lounge. It also has a separate sitting/lounge at the front of the house, i've drawn a crude mud map.

http://i1101.photobucket.com/albums/g436/sceen7/house.jpg

So what’s wrong?

First of all the build quality is awful, from the subfloor to the cornicing its woe full. It needs restumping….yes a new house needs restumping. The windows leak when it rains the roof makes some really unnerving sounds in the wind, and when the kids next door run up and down THEIR hallway you would swear the house is haunted.
The main shower leaks and it’s clear that the water damage is in the subfloor. None of the basins drain properly, the tap ware is appalling, the toilets sound like jet engines when the cisterns are refilling, the tiling was either done by a 1st years apprentice…on his 1st day, or Salvador Dali on his best day!

The Kitchen…. Oh here is where I was inspired to write this tonight. It must have been created by the people who brought us Myki (ask a Victorian). It is horrible. It has one tiny set of drawers a couple of cupboards in an island bench, a few more on the oven side and some overheads. No pantry to speak of a fairly small fridge. The dishwasher is useless, the oven is worse, and you can’t open both at the same time because the doors will hit each other. Which is astonishing enough until you realize that the island bench was originally CLOSER to the oven bench. How do I know this? Because there is a cut line in the floorboards giving away just where the thing was originally placed. I mean it’s such a ** patch job! Oh and only three burners work on the stovetop…it’s a six burner.
While on the floorboards, it’s dangerous to shuffle around in bare feet as some of them sit proud, more evidence that the subfloor is shot.

I may offend some of you who have gas ducted heating for that I’m sorry. I hate ducted heating. This place is a carbon emissions nightmare…I mean it’s probably dirtier that Hazelwood (as a Victorian again). When the heating is on it sounds like its hailing outside, it gives us a serious fright when it comes on in the morning. We have it set at around 21 degrees, in the mornings it struggles to get the place comfortable…just before we all leave. At night it sends us into menopause throughout the evening ..either too hot or too cold. In the room our daughter sleeps in we have put a heavy blanket on the duct, on our 1st night here the poor little thing lost 20 kgs. It must have been 50 in there before she came out crying. I shudder to think what our gas bill is going to be, even though we wear jumpers and keep it off as much as possible.

There are lots of other gripes but the one big positive is that we are in love with our plans even more now. We can’t wait to live in a hydronicly heated, double glazed, solar passive, zoned living, quality built house. Yes we have bled to make it a near reality but can see now the folly of doing things on the cheap.

I can relate to your 'rant'

A fair bit of what I have learned about houses has been because I have lived in a lot of houses with things I don't like.

A word of warning once you have learned all the problems and then built a new house you will find it very hard to but an existing house again if you need to move because everything you look at will have things that annoy you.

LOL great post. I hate menopause

Amen to that Suh

We too are living in a rental not for too much longer I hope and have gas ducting heating. Just got our bill for the last quarter and it's $418 - there are just the two of us. For the same period last year in our house that we sold our gas bill was $180 but we didn't have ducted heating - we had a flueless gas heater in the family room and closed off the parts of the house we didn't need to heat. We have no option here but to heat the whole house (4 bedrooms)!! Your rental sounds like a demolition job!

LOL

Yes definitely sounds like a demo job!

How long until you move into your home?

I'm sure can't wait!!!!!


Holly

Well I should be careful how much i bemoan our current rental....as we move back into our house in 10 weeks. If you look at my other thread there is a pic... nothing has changed since that was taken arghhhhhh.

So when we move back in there will be no heating and very likely no working plumbing...yep we will be camping for ..well who knows how long lol.

as for the heating costs at our rental...I shudder to think what the bill will be. The rental is thermally useless, drafts everywhere so the furnace works very hard to keep the house remotely warm.

I totally know where you are coming from.... we moved into a "newer" rental last year... the workmanship on it is terrible....
When it rains the guttering overflows, down the back door of the garage like a waterfall, then water goes across the garage and out the front!!!! everything in its path gets wet! The paint is coming off the walls in multiple areas.... it is dreadful!
The lounge room layout is ...well ... not what I would do anyway!

oh I can say that moving from our home of 7 years into a rental while we wait for our build as re-affirmed that we are doing the right thing with our new home

the passive heating and cooling, etc etc oh and a Kitchen with space (how did people in the 60's cook I have no idea) I cannot wait only 10 more months to go!