In theold days, people loved to say: “My home is my fortress!” And they were not wrong. Since ancient times, home has been kind of a sacred place where we feel protected and confident. A place of power, if you will.However, any place of power also has its drawbacks. And we, as rational beings, must admit this. Any home, even the most beloved and cozy one, is not without shortcomings. We’re ready to put up with some of them, while other ones we try to correct to the best of our ability. And it’s precisely these shortcomings of their homes that people are talking about in thisviral threadin the AskReddit community.More info:RedditThis post may includeaffiliate links.
In theold days, people loved to say: “My home is my fortress!” And they were not wrong. Since ancient times, home has been kind of a sacred place where we feel protected and confident. A place of power, if you will.However, any place of power also has its drawbacks. And we, as rational beings, must admit this. Any home, even the most beloved and cozy one, is not without shortcomings. We’re ready to put up with some of them, while other ones we try to correct to the best of our ability. And it’s precisely these shortcomings of their homes that people are talking about in thisviral threadin the AskReddit community.More info:Reddit
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Flat roof. We had our house inspected twice before we moved in and the roof passed because it was new. What no one told us is that a flat roof in the winter (we bought in August) is a nightmare in Michigan. After 8 years of living with it, we finally had the roofline rebuilt to a normal slope and never looked back. Twenty years later and never had a leak in that room again. Lesson - never ever buy a house with any type of flat roof.
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Open concept! I thought I would love it, but now I would kill for a separate kitchen area. It makes our house feel like an apartment.
I really wish all my lower kitchen cabinets were pull out drawers! I hate having to get down on the floor to rummage around to find that pan at the back of the cabinet.
I knew what I was getting into.But at times, a second bathroom would be really nice.
A flock of turkeys will encircle my car when I pull in the driveway on a semi regular basis. They are decently aggressive, and the only thing that I found to work is to repeatedly open an umbrella in their faces, and continue to scare them until they jump off the cliff next to my driveway.This sounds made up, but is my life.
I second not having a pantry. I had no idea how much that would bother me until living with my food in the kitchen cabinets for 8 years.
A separate category should include various manifestations of the unbridledarchitectural imaginationof the builders or previous owners of the house. Especially when your idea of home comfort is in clear contradiction with the gloomy genius of the architect.This is how doors appear that prevent each other from opening, extra steps that have no practical meaning (but are a source of constant falls in the dark), or kitchen hoods that exhaust air back into the kitchen. Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either until I read a couple of similar stories right in this collection!
A separate category should include various manifestations of the unbridledarchitectural imaginationof the builders or previous owners of the house. Especially when your idea of home comfort is in clear contradiction with the gloomy genius of the architect.
This is how doors appear that prevent each other from opening, extra steps that have no practical meaning (but are a source of constant falls in the dark), or kitchen hoods that exhaust air back into the kitchen. Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either until I read a couple of similar stories right in this collection!
Hood over the stove that doesn’t vent outside, in an otherwise good, functional kitchen. WHY DO PEOPLE TAKE THIS SHORTCUT (especially since in this house, you can see where the old one did vent out)???
Black. Shower. Tile. and I’m the a*****e who picked it out.
A pool. We thought, “awesome, a pool!” Always thought we’d like one but didn’t understand what goes into it and in all the excitement of house buying didn’t really look into it until we got here. The costs outweigh the benefits for us. So now we have to either pay all the maintenance costs of running it to use it only a few times per week for a few months out of the year (in Ohio), or pay a bunch up front to demolish it. Every time I look outside it stresses me out, just a giant behemoth of a problem to solve.
And, of course, the neighbors. There are many tales about this - and countless more stories will be told. In a perfect world, neighbors are those with whom youBBQ togetheron the weekends and go to watch football with on Sundays. But this world, alas, is far from perfect… There are also a couple of stories dedicated to the neighbors in our selection, so go through the list, you won’t regret it!
Our living room is one step down from the kitchen. Why? Because f**k you, that’s why. Can’t tell you how many times my kids have tripped up/down that one step.My house-to-garage door comes in at an angle and with only enough room to open the door. Go left to the kitchen and living room, right to the front door and upstairs, or straight into the bathroom. It’s become a huge bottleneck with everybody always running into each other at that intersection. Also makes it hard to bring in furniture.
We bought this home sight unseen from 2,000 miles away- the first time we saw it was when we pulled into the driveway. My family had toured it for me and helped but a lot of things were a surprise.Given that, I am remarkably in love with it after living here for 17 years and feel like we did an excellent job choosing it.BUT there is a side door from the side porch that enters the kitchen and the door/stairway to the basement is right there in such a way that you have to close the exterior door to go down the stairs. You can’t walk in the back door and go straight down the stairs to the basement, you have to come in and close the door behind you first even if the door to the stairway is kept open.It’s a small thing that only comes up when we have to move something from outside down the stairs like a mattress. Fortunately it’s easy enough to take things around outside and in the basement door.This home also has what’s known as a tuck-under garage.It is not visible from the front of the house- you have to drive around back and enter it next to the walk-out basement door. The way the patio roof support posts are arranged means there is zero way to ever get a car into it. Which is fine, we likely wouldn’t anyway as we use it more for lawn equipment storage.No one noticed that there was no dishwasher- I don’t use one anyway, I just find it funny that no one ever noticed.And when we moved in we thought the fenced yard was the entire property, but when we had it surveyed later on for fence moving possibilities we discovered that we also owned a huge portion of the woods behind us. We have acreage! It’s still untouched but it’s wonderful that there can always be woods behind me with no possibility ever of anyone building anything.It’s been interesting.
No door to the backyard. There is one to the driveway, but its not the sameI too do not have a pantry. Very irritating. No real closets at all actually.Since my house is over 100 years old, the attic that is now my bedroom gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter.No second bathroom and no place to put one!
Our last house… (and many reasons why we moved) had Cathedral Ceilings… love the look, always felt cold! And an open floor plan, there was no way to contain the toys bc everything was open and just out! I realize I like rooms.
No window in bathrooms.
We have a Jack and Jill bathroom that connects the kids rooms and I absolutely hate it. They are younger(4 and 8) so they sneak through it at night and don’t sleep and worse part is we don’t even notice until we hear giggling at midnight🤦♀️. Plus if one goes to the bathroom it wakes the other one up because they don’t like to close the doors and the light wakes them. This is way worse when one is sick and in and out of the bathroom. Usually I make them to the spare room when this happens because it’s easier to have only one up not two kids.Also I hate our open floor plan. We have two story with a finished basement. When the kids go to bed we can’t even hang in the main level because the stairs are open and you can hear everything(I mean it looks nice but god damn there is no privacy). Also bad when the kids wake early since then everyone’s up since it echos so bad . Only place we can go where they can’t hear us is the basement Luckly we added a door to that area otherwise we have the same issue.
Having a crawlspace with a dirt floor. My next house will have a basement (I already bought it) and I am so glad I will no longer have the dark mystery under the house. Every major issue I’ve had with this house has been crawlspace related and because it’s dark, scary, and difficult to access, the issues go on longer than they would if they were somewhere you could notice them.
We bought a 1952 built house in West Virginia in 2020. The door from the house to the garage was a normal looking door, but 2/3 sized. It made exiting from the house to the garage (where clothes washer and dryer were installed) a challenge with a laundry basket in your hands. Why 2/3 sized? Never could figure out why. When we remodeled the kitchen in 2021, we had the contractor replace it with a regular, human sized door.Edited to add: also, the clothes dryer had no vent to the outside. Vented into a 5 gallon bucket with 4" of water in it. The garage is made of concrete block clad with vinyl siding. Took me most of a day to drill a 4 1/8" hole through the concrete block and install a vent to the outside. How had no one thought of doing that in the prior 70 years of the house’s existence?
Our house is nearly perfect, but for a couple of things:The outside HVAC units (two of them, the 4 ton main one and a smaller unit for the upstairs room over the garage) are both just outside the master bedroom windows. Noise, noise, noise. Who thought that was a good idea?The other thing is the house is on a hill, so the front yard is very sloped and harder to mow, and has drainage issues due to underground water. This also makes our driveway steep and curved. I didn’t realize how much of a pain all of this would be. Box trucks can’t get into the driveway for deliveries or repairs, smaller trucks come in the driveway and then can’t back out properly without trashing the turf on either side of the driveway. I feel like I spend my life fixing the lawn.
Not my current home, but I moved in somewhere that only had one drawer in the kitchen. I didn’t realise when viewing, because who counts drawers? Anyway it was super inconvenient, and since then when looking at our current home we checked the number of drawers!Current home: smoke detector is a foot away from the oven.
My first house had plaster walls. Like the old school plaster on wood lath. Even the ceilings. Sure it looks good…but it freaking SUCKS if you need to cut a hole or even just hang a friggin' picture. When our bathroom fan died, I bought a replacement that was 1/8" wider than the original. When I tried cutting the opening larger for the new fan, huge chunks of plaster broke off and the hole ended up being all jagged and ugly. When we had the bathroom redone, we told them to take out ALL of the plaster and replace with drywall. I will never buy another house with plaster walls.
Spiral staircase.
Had a place with a sunroom. Such a nice feature.Except that it was horribly cold 3/4 of the year and stifling hot the other 1/4.It attracted carpenter ants that nested in the beams, so part of the summer would be spent killing hundreds of large flying ants (the males) while the females made sawdust out of the main supports.The upper glass windows became permanently dirty from the sunlight, snow load, and crud from the trees and it was a pain to get up there to caulk them, leading to infiltration that I couldn’t prevent, manage, or afford to fix because of having little kids.Tearing it down cost a ton but it was such a relief.
My house doesn’t have many windows that face the front. We have a bay window in the master bedroom, and small windows on our front door. But other than that we have little visibility to our front yard. It’s actually not possible to see my whole driveway from inside. We have tons that face the back so natural light is no problem. But it’s simply annoying that I can’t tell when someone pulls into my driveway.
Parents’ old house: wooden stairs. They had slightly rounded edges and no nonslip stuff. Apparently my brain turns various kinds of stairs into slides because I slipped down those stairs at least 20+ times while living there. It’s something about the wood grain, I think: the pattern + the lack of texture = woop!(And later as an adult about 8 times over the course of 3 years in an apartment with carpeted stairs but those were horribly worn and loose in spots.).
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We remodeled our kitchen years ago and installed a fancy Delta touch faucet. Great idea, we thought! Ability to turn faucet on with your chin or with the back of your raw chicken-handling hand seemed like it would be a luxury.It’s not. It works about 95% of the time, which sounds like a lot but means every 10 times you use the sink (to turn either on or off) it doesn’t work and you have to touch it again. Not quite as bad as the hands free faucets in public bathrooms, but not that much better.But the worst part about it is that it looks like a normal faucet… so it confuses the hell out of guests who try to use it. Touch the handle and push it forward to turn on the water… and the faucet turns on and immediately turns off. So they try again, and again, and wonder what the f**k is wrong with our faucet.
Not in, but outside. We have 1/2 acre in a city - no fence. The neighbor’s dogs run like wildebeests around the neighborhood and poop everywhere. My other neighbor said he’s been taking the poop and putting it back on their front porch 💩 and it still doesn’t deter them. Fences for our yard have been quoted from 15-30k.
Windows that extend nearly to the floor. Can’t put any furniture against that wall without blocking the windows and making them hard to open and close.
A corner lot.It’s a pain in the a*s with the shoveling and mowing with no benefit to me (garden in front yard isn’t doable).
Galley kitchen. Tiny, dark, and closed off. Cannot be enlarged or opened up without doing a home addition or relocating the kitchen into another part of the house ($$$$$). I knew that I didn’t like it but I didn’t anticipate just how much I would grow to hate it.Frankly I thought this would be our starter home and we would only be here a few years. Ha! At least we are in a pretty great neighborhood. .
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Our home is a walkout from the basement, so built into a hill. It’s nice to be able to walk out to a patio but a pain in the a*s to mow. I didn’t think it would be a big deal but on hot summer days it really sucks.Also, we back up to a wildlife area. Very pretty and we feel fortunate to have the view. However, that means lots of field mice to fend off.Other than that the inside of our homeis great. This is our first new/modern home so not much to nitpick there.
Ok this is a first world problem. I’m 5’11” and my husband is 6’4”. The kitchen sink is huge and sunken in already low countertops. (Standard height for older hothouse). If we want to wash stuff in the sink we have to bend way over. It’s really annoying.
Sloping driveway with a garage.The garage and basement are on the same level. With a sloping driveway, you have to shovel the snow UP (instead of the side). So if it get slippery, it’s a struggle to push it up.Also you have to be diligent because your car can’t come out if it’s snowed in. So you have to plan ahead and make sure it’s cleared out, with no ice, so you can drive out when required.
This one is silly, but we have a massive Palladian window in our foyer. I loved the look when we first toured it. It lets in a ton of light, but puts our upstairs on display at night if we use the hall light. Not a fan of people being able to see so clearly into our house.
My fridge is right up against an exterior wall of my house. Think of my kitchen as having a dead end. I have a french door fridge that has a left side freezer and right side fridge. The right side door is not able to open all the way because the handle hits the side of the wall preventing the drawers from fully opening. Annoying as hell.
- We have two bathrooms. The upstairs bathroom has a tub, but no shower. I did not realize how much I’d hate showering downstairs.2. Our backyard only has one major tree. In the summer, the yard is shaded before noon and an arid hellscape after the kids get bored enough to consider playing outside.
The pantry is the one for me. When the house was built they opted to add a third toilet/sink combo right beside the kitchen instead of having a pantry. To combat this they added new cabinetry which is great except for its L shaped and the L stops literally in line with the garage door, meaning you can not bring anything large in and out through the garage door, which was wonderful on move in with the furniture. So now I have no pantry and guests get to do their business inches away from the counter I’m cooking our meal on.
we have to essentially turn the downstairs into a meat locker to be able to get the upstairs bedrooms comfortable. See if you have baffles coming out of the furnace, or get some installed.
Yardwork.
Two bedrooms have light switches on the wall on the side where the door hinges are. Just inconveniently placed, but we can’t switch the doors because of room configuration so we’d have to pay probably hundreds of dollars to have the light switches moved just to satisfy that bit of inconvenience.
I have a sky light in my guest bathroom. I love the sunlight, but I hate it when it rains. It is so loud that I have to close the door.
I have a very long driveway. It’s 1000 feet from my garage to the street. Trash day is awful cause not only is it a decent walk, but it’s uphill too. I stubbornly try to get the trash and recycling up in one trip. But usually both are very heavy. Often I’ll end up leaving the heavier one about half way up, then come back for it after I get the lighter one to the curb.
We purchased a home on a beautiful 1.25 acre lot. It looks like our own private park. In practice though, in two years we have spent $8,500 cutting down or trimming trees. Though we got a lot done, there is likely to be no end to the amount of money and attention this will take.
Master bedroom is upstairs instead of downstairs and separate. Drives me absolutely nuts. Granted, it’s nice while the kids are little and wake up in the middle of the night (3 y.o & 6 m.o) but in terms of privacy for.. activities.. is not ideal, and I think about when we’re older going up those stairs.Also, having the downstairs bathroom very close to the dining room. Also not ideal especially when guests are using it.
I hate that it’s not a single level. .
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