Location, Location, Location

Deedaa that's madness.
I get mad when people rip out period features.
I do think with most people it comes down to the plot and the location. There have been quite a few houses featured in property programmes where they demolish and build something totally different, not necessarily with a larger footprint.

We bought a tiny cottage in Cornwall which had been turned upside down, so the living room and kitchen were upstairs and the bedrooms were down stairs. The view from the living room windows was wonderful.

After we left the woman who bought it turned it back so that the living room was down stairs, with the view obscured by the high farm hedges across the lane. I could never fathom why she did it. In the years we lived there every person who came to the cottage looked out of the windows and said "Wow! Look at the view!"

I must confess, the complete, virtual rebuild of a house does some times puzzle me. Some times people buy a house and then majorly rebuild because they have bought the property because of its location even though the house itself is not at all what they want. What happens where I live is builders buy a small bungalow or similar on a good plot or good position and then transform it to something much bigger and after a while sell up and move on.

What puzzled me was when I sold my parents bungalow, on a private estate in Sussex, its two main selling points were that it had big rooms with enormous windows making it wonderfully light and airy, and, because it was on a small plot, the front wall was quite low and well planted with trees and because all the other houses were similar there was a wonderful leafy view from every window that extended well beyond the boundary of the property.

The lady who bought it first put a six foot tall fence all round the boundary cutting out the long leafy views making the fence the only thing you could see from the windows because the fence was so close to the house, and when she replaced the windows, which we expected to happen, she first got builders in put in extra brickwork and reduce the size of the windows and then chose plastic windows with very wide styles and tiny georgian panes that reduced the amount of light coming into the house by 50%. By so doing she reduced the selling price of the house by at least 10% and probably more because she had removed the two unique qualities of the house missing from similar homes on the same estate.

Fortunately, now my parents have died I never visit that part of Sussex, but it puzzles me more than it upsets me.

But not taking out period features!!

We have altered, added to, all our houses as circumstances changed.
However, we have lived in them as they were, apart from decoration, for some time before deciding what to do (or having any money to do anything).

Perhaps it really is location, location, location, then turning the house into something that really suits you.

And that I totally agree with.

Changing things one by one over time is OK - money is not totally elastic, and our ideas change over the years anyway. What grates is changing everything about a house as soon as they buy it, whatever the state of repair and decoration. No time given to living with it and seeing why the previous owners had it arranged as they did, what works and what doesn't.

Beautiful period features are ripped out to give a vast empty "modern and clean" space, which in a few years time will be decorated with "retro" reproductions of the same features. If you buy a house which is "of its period" then the proportions all go together.

No for us either. But there is HUGE money in doing so. My sil never worked in a 'job' as such- but has made massive money by buying, doing up and selling houses over the last 50 years or so.

There is compromise and there is complete change. We compromised with this house insofar as we have one less bedroom than we would have liked. I can see the sense of tweaking to suit but it's these huge renovation projects I wonder about.

Speaking personally, we moved from West Sussex to Lancashire and four years later moved back to London. Prices had rocketed down here but had been fairly static in Lancs. Our house here was all we could afford and we have gradually got it how we want it - extending the tiny kitchen, knocking down the so-called "conservatory" and building a new back room and eventually doing the loft.

I think probably a lot of people have to settle for a house that isn't quite right but which they can alter over time.

Our neighbours bought their large beautifully decorated and fitted-out bungalow from our previous neighbours who had worked very hard on it - it was beautiful with a terrace and pond and stream. There is a fair bit of land and outbuildings as well. The current owners are very "alternative" and have stripped the place - they have removed the kitchen and not replaced it at all - it is now just a huge empty room with a dresser at one end and a table in the middle. There is a sink and a small cooker in what was once the utility room. No cupboards - they have all been removed and stuff is just strewn everywhere. They have removed all the doors in the place!! - and the terrace has gone.

The mother of the woman there is really upset about what they have done and quite at a loss to understand what their thinking is.

It does seem a shame that a beautiful home that many would have enjoyed has been stripped. It is of course their right to do so, but I have made a point of not mentioning the state of it to the previous owners - they would be heartbroken after all their hard work.

I think the clue is in the title Katek
You have to compromise, you can have a perfect location or a perfect house but rarely both. So nearly every house you look at will have something you want to alter but if it's the perfect location then to me it's a no brainer. Also cost comes into it. When we bought this house we couldn't have afforded it in 'turn key condition'
I get so frustrated with the people on the programme who don't know the meaning of the word compromise.

I confess we have added to or rearranged the interior of almost every house we have ever owned.

No house is ever ideal in every way. If it is, it is usually out of one's price bracket. As Kirsty and Phil are always saying, compromises are necessary. If you really like a house overall and the location is what you want, if a few internal or external tweaks can make it even closer to what you want, why not?

When we moved into our current house, which was just what we were looking for, in the right area, right size, right price etc, it had a tiny kitchen and a downstairs bathroom, but also more bedrooms upstairs than we required. We turned one bedroom into a bathroom and the kitchen was extended into the downstairs bathroom area. It wasn't expensive to do and if that had been done before the house was put up for sale its increased price would have put it out of our price bracket.

Half the fun of Location x 3 is that so many of the buyers are expecting to find the perfect house and have been house hunting for years sometimes because they cannot find it. The one lesson they learn on the programme is compromise.

That seems to happen so often round my way. Someone buys a perfectly nice house, then gets it completely made over and extended to be twice the size and nothing like the ambience it once had. I always wonder why they didn't buy a bigger/newer/different house to start with.