Multipurpose House Hunters/HHI rant thread

Cafe Society
41

I have seen that a few times in the show, I don’t understand it either.

I also don’t understand the ones where they don’t want a bathroom or laundry room off the kitchen - no clue about that one either. Though I do like the laundry rooms upstairs near all the bedrooms - more dirty laundry comes from bedrooms than basements/garages/kitchens.

I am ambivalent about the whole open plan thing - I like the old style four square houses [you know, 4 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and effectively 4 rooms downstairs and perhaps a half bath, hopefully a nice front and back porch, basement and attic. Let me rummage around for a house floor plan to illustrate. OOoo this isn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I really like it. Ah, this one is more like it. Though the ones in the town my mom lives in also have a full width porch on the back as well.

I notice that the traditional American house is also laid out wrong for the current lifestyle, it is more suited for the old style ‘front porch socializing’ lifestyle. If you look at land use, prior to WW2 the back was typically ‘utility’ - laundry lines, garbage bins, back alleys for garbage collection, small garages to hold the smaller type of cars [the old Ford models A and T] and such. People socialized in the front of the house on porches, in the more formal sitting rooms - you didn’t invite guests back into the kitchens and family eating nooks. Post WW2 you saw the move to suburbs, more space and BBQs in the back yard, but the house still has the social areas plastered in the front until the move towards the back of the house ‘family rooms’, dens and combined dining room/kitchen ‘great rooms’ or ‘country kitchens’ which actually are the start of the whole ‘open concept’ which sort of started with the late mid-century modern.

I also have a liking for the original style colonial 2 up 2 downs, where you have an unheated central hallway with the front door at one end, the back door at the other and the stairs up and down in the hallway. There are 2 chimneys so each of the rooms has a fireplace for heating [kitchen is for cooking obviously] with the Thoroughgood House in Virginia Beach being an excellent example of the style. These are very reminiscent of the fairly basic european housing of the 1300-1700s.

42

Foot skin. This guy yesterday refused to buy a house w/ carpeting b/c as we all know, carpet retains every flake of skin from people’s feet, ever, and when he walks on it he just knows he’s getting foot skin on him.
FOOT SKIN. It made his wife’s misuse of the word grandioso (she meant grandiose, surely) seem tolerable.
Truth be told, I suspect all of these are simply longform commercials for home improvement stores.

43

Yeah, that foot skin thing was strange. I guess he wouldn’t like that way my dog scrapes her butt across the carpet either.

I knew he wasn’t going to get his basement/man room.

44

I love those houses. The Midwest is full of them. We live in a four-square, but not as big and fancy as those in the photos.

I’m sad that so many of the porches have been enclosed, and that outdoor socializing has been moved to the back yard. Ours was enclosed, and so was the second floor sleeping porch. :frowning:

45

Shame, though depending on how the porches were enclosed matters - I like it when they are just given large format screens and no windows, or removable ‘storm windows’ so that you have just a plain screen porch for the summer. [though I will admit to sleeping with the window cracked for nice cold air for sleeping when mrAru isn’t home.]

46

I have to laugh when the wife says that she doesn’t want the kids bedrooms on the first floor for fear they may sneak out when they’re teenagers. Seriously? You were a teenager once, did having your bedroom on the second floor stop you from sneaking out?

I also saw the foot skin husband and the “grandioso” wife. She literally broke out in hives if she spotted a brass fixture. At least they were entertaining.

47

We are House Hunters International junkies.
First, it is kind of fun to see the style of homes, and prices, in other countries - sometimes I am shocked at how cheap the homes are (for sale or rent) but more often than not, I am in shock at how expensive the places can be in countries that don’t exactly have tons of millionaires floating around.

What annoys me the most are the people moving to another country for ridiculous reasons, and have not quite figured out that “Google-thing” to perhaps get a clue about availability, prices, neighborhoods, culture, housing styles - let alone bother to learn two words of the language.

These are usually the embarrassing idiots who should not be moving out of their dumbass county in the USA, let alone overseas.

And of course, they all want to have the five bedroom, modern but with charm, and huge garden with perhaps a pool, centrally located in the city, for about $130 a month - and are SHOCKED that they are not abundant in that price range, if at all.

And yes, I wonder if all American children are suicidal…apparently so, as every parent looks at a balcony and envisions little Jimmy leaping over that if they don’t watch him. It is a miracle that the streets of NYC (or any other urban city world wide) are not littered with the bodies of children who flung themselves off of high rise balconies the minute they had the chance.

Oh, and then the people who are willing to pay $1000 extra per month in rent, or $100,000 extra for a house, as long as little Fifi, their obnoxious poodle, has a place to poop and play. At at the end of the show, they say that “Fifi likes it here.” I got news for ya, Fifi would like a cardboard box under the freeway just as much.

Yes, I know it is rigged with the “choice” of places, and that they have already purchased/rented a place before filming begins (a requirement, I believe), but I think the rampant stupidity and clueless people who move there can’t be faked.

Having lived abroad, I know there are certain things that are “new and different”, but the people on this show are beyond hope; one show had someone packing for their move to Europe and said to their friend, “I wonder if they wear jeans over there?” Yeah, darlin’ - nobody outside of the USA has ever seen, let alone wear a pair of jeans.

Still, love to watch and make snarky comments - and again, still kind of fun to see the prices in those places and what you can or cannot get for the money.

48

This thread makes me respect and appreciate Discovery’s “Buying Alaska” even more.

In case you haven’t seen it – BA is Discovery’s version of HH, except that 1) it’s set in Alaska, which means that 2) the people interested in buying couldn’t care less about open concepts and granite countertops, which 2) makes them very refreshing to watch because they want a property for a specific reason and therefore tend to care less about aesthetics than the average HH/HHI buyer.

The show is basically set up the same as HH/HHI – there’s three properties and they make their decision toward the end of the show. It’s fascinating because a lot of the properties are either out in the bush or close to a very small settlement that may or may not have indoor plumbing or other amenities we tend to take for granted. Alaska really is a place for a certain type of person, which makes me appreciate it even more.

49

You know, now that I think about it, I do feel more secure on an upper story. It’s not some rational risk analysis, it’s just a general feeling of uneasiness. I think it’s more about the windows than anything else. Ground floor windows vaguely creep me out at night, as there could be people on the other side of them. Anyway, I think it’s just about how you grew up and what you got used to.

50

Easy to say. My apartment in China had three rooms. The entry room was 7 feet by 7 feet, with no windows and a door smack in the middle of each wall. The small room was also a 7 foot by 7 foot square, with a window on to the kitchen and another window into the large room. The large room was maybe 8 feet by 12 feet. The large room had a window on to the small room, and a small door/window combo (with the window blocked by the broken AC) on to a small balcony for hanging clothes. So basically, you have three little living spaces with no external windows and lots of random windows into other rooms. The kitchen was a single countertop about five feet long in a tiny hallway (it had previously been an outdoor kitchen and someone graciously windowed it in), with a camp stove and a tiny cold water sink. One one end of the kitchen was a tiny room with a single toilet, and on the other side was a largish tiled room with a washing machine and an open shower.

It was weird. Most of it was unlivable (what do you do with a tiny room full of doors? I kept my fridge and coatrack in it). I don’t think the Chinese did any better than I did- I know the family downstairs from me occupied two adjacent units and just kept the hallway doors open all the time so they could live between them like one. Communism was really a bad thing for interior design. If I ever moved back there, you can bet your bucket I’d search for a more western-style unit where the rooms were useful and the kitchen wasn’t a hallway.