In the UK you don't really want a hallway and living room knocked through into one big room. In winter it is so cold in the UK that the last thing you want is to come home from work at 5pm, when it got dark at 4pm, and it's near freezing outside, maybe snowing or very cold raining and open your front door onto a living room. All the heat would rush straight out the front door to be replaced with icy winter air, then you would the rest of the night with the heating on trying to get the house back to the warmth it was before you arrived and spend about £10 in heating bills doing it. Do that 31 times in a winter month is why the average UK energy bill is now something crazy like £350 per month.
It gets much, much colder in many parts of the US than in the UK though, frequently -20°C through winter with lots of snow. The room layout differences are mainly historical.
@@iantellam9970 yes, but you usually have a porch area between the outside and the inside. In the UK (with no porch) the front door opens and if its raining/snowing it will literally come into the room you are walking into. The hallway really helps to stop this from happening
Sorry to breach your guarantee, but I heat water in a microwave oven, particularly when I'm cooking rice or pasta. You can't easily do that in a kettle! Sure, it takes ages, but I'd rather spend 3x as long cooking a cupful of water in a microwave (900w) versus a 2300W kettle.
You have to remember our climate is colder and wetter. We have different house styles in different parts of the country. Much more older properties. We measure our property by room size, not by total size. We have driers and microwaves. Our grass is green because of the weather.
I always wonder if my 87 kvadratmeter < danish measurement. Is bigger or smaller than a 87 square meters US flat.? I have no idea.. But it could be the case idk..
Washington State averages twice as much rain per year as the wettest places in the UK. The western part of the state sees temperatures very similar to the UK, but as you go east you see colder winters and hotter summers.
We look for the number of bedrooms when looking for houses for sale. Also the dimensions of each room are specified. We are a small island with a lot of people so land is expensive and therefore houses are expensive. Also we love our gardens and most have patios, grass and loads of floweers. We cut our grass in the summer once a week or once every two weeks. Having a beautiful garden is something the British take great pride in.
@@billythedog-309 oh yes I was the same growing up even the 1st 2 houses we bought. Both terraces with small yards. I’m in the last house I’ll ever buy now. Detached with gardens. Oz the same as America though because so vast. We lived there & the house we bought was huge. Swimming pool etc etc we are a tiny island so houses going to different 😃
I am running a tour of an old house in the US this weekend and its designed this way. Every single room is closed with one sometimes two doors and all off a common hallway. They would be closed in winter time and sometimes whole rooms would not be used at all during the entire winter.
In the UK electricity costs more than the average mortgage. Our monthly Heating and Electricity bill is £600 per month and monthly repayment to the bank £500
But also a place to wipe your feet, put away your coat and stack your umbrella in the umbrella stand. Also, it's usually where the gas meter and electricity meter are built into a closet.
I think Brits generally care less about the absolute size and more about the quality of life stuff, like garden size (that is usually something that is emphasised on property listings, especially if it is good), proximity to schools, public transport, amenities like shops and pubs. Number of bedrooms is also relevant and used somewhat as a proxy for size, as for instance working from home is easier if you can have a box room (small room) for an office space or craft room. Utility rooms are back in fashion too, for much the same reason - it's nice to be able to put the washing machine in a separate room, and have somewhere to wash down the dog after a walk in the muddy countryside. Things like that matter more to people in the UK than the absolute size of the house.
100 it’s this thing like size doesn’t matter, functionality and quality of the space matters… plus why have all this extra room that u don’t need its such a waste and having to heat it up each winter…. No thank u
Hi Alex, FYI: 'Couldn't care less...' We can often tell a Yank, because they get the English wrong - LOL! It's been an amusing thing on radio, TV and in the newspapers for years in the UK. Do put into YT search: 'Dear America... David Mitchell's SoapBox' - It will make you smile (I hope !?) By the way, you got the rest correct, it's the neighbourhood and what you can afford; so we generally look at price ranges first.
@@stewedfishproductions7959 I didn't use that expression in my comment. I am British by the way, and "could care less" irritates me greatly. I have seen David Mitchell's rant. I used "care less" correctly meaning exactly what I wrote.
@@alexmckee4683 - I have re-read your comment and realised I screwed up... DUH! I'm bad, no excuse. It irritates and irks me too (long before DM's rant) LOL! Sorry, I was taking a tea break from other things and quickly scanning the comments section: And totally misread your words. Cheers & best wishes.
@@stewedfishproductions7959 no need to apologise for an honest mistake, thank you though. No doubt my overly verbose comment(s) are ultimately at fault! 😄
In Denmark (very much the same weather as in UK) we do not always want our dirty outdoor shoes directly into the other rooms of the flat or the house. So there is a hall (and often a back door hall in a house) for outdoor clothes and shoes.
The common walls in Terraced, semi detached houses and flats/apartments/units in the UK and Australia are double or triple bricked so noise is drastically reduced. The hallway/lounge room thing is from way way way back primarily to keep the room you’re in warm by the fire/radiator/wood burner stove. If you knocked the wall down and opened it up then the heat would escape.
Not only that. Even simple brickwall reduces noise better then drywall in US. Also...Americans are known to be really but really loud even in public so I dont think they are silent at own home to not bother neighbors. The culture and way of living is different and people are used to this kind of enviroment.
Has no one ever told this irritating young man that it is often better to keep quiet and be thought a fool,rather than broadcasting on utube and proving his ignorance incontrovertibly to the whole world ?
Generally speaking, microwaves serve 3 purposes in the UK. microwave meals, for when you don’t feel like cooking, reheating leftovers, for when you don’t feel like cooking, and zapping milk for a hot chocolate or Horlicks, because you haven’t gotten round to washing the pan from cooking the other day lol
Also our microwaves are generally stand alone counter top devices and not built in like you see in a lot of US kitchens with a microwave built in above the cooker/stove.
Something that house buyers in Britain look for when searching for properties is how close it is to a school or a transport hub (train station/bus terminal etc) and then it's how many bedrooms it has, these factors influence the price more than the total square footage. My family had a tumble dryer in 1985 and I've had one in every place I've lived in.
Dishwasher and tumble dryers use electricity and that's expensive here in the UK. It's not just about buying the device itself it's about the running costs afterwards. I could buy them tomorrow if I wanted but I don't want a £300 electric bill each month, it's bad enough with a £60 bill. You can air dry clothes for free and wash your dirty pots in the kitchen sink for pennies. By default, by doing these things you also help keep down not only your energy bills but you also help keep down your carbon footprint as you use less electricity the majority of which is produced at a co2 emitting power station. Use less electricity and less electricity generation is needed which means less coal or gas has to be burnt which means less air pollution. Simple.
OMG I worked out what your power is in Aussie dollars and it it expensive...your 60 per month is $105 in Aussie dollars....We get our power bills every 4 months.....
Our family used to have a similar view in regards to dishwashers as for years we used the sink and a tea towel to clean up. When we got a new kitchen a few years ago a dishwasher came with it. Since we had it we tried it a few times and we now wouldn't go back especially when we have guests over for a dinner party it just frees up so much time that its totally worth it for those occasions.
Yeah, I mean we have both a dishwasher and dryer in our house, but we usually hand wash dishes and the only times we've used the dryer is when something is needed quickly and can't be dried quickly, or when it's too damp to air dry. It's been months since we last used it. It's nice to have as an option but I don't think we'd miss it much if it wasn't there
@@cecilia8957 USD 150 per month is considered minimum and need to be frugal, and only possible for a short time in Fall and Spring. In the winter months can be USD 300 or more with heating 24/7. In the summer months, same USD 300 or more with the AC on 24/7.
Between heating and cooling (2 heat pumps for 4,500 sq ft above grade) , pool pump, well pump, 2 laundry pairs, 3 dishwashers, freezer, 4 refrigerators, electronics and lights we average about $400 US per month ($0.13 per kWh) in the US mid-Atlantic. Doesn't seem bad at all.
I love my Victorian terraced home, it has multiple rooms on each floor and 4 bathrooms over 3 storeys with many nooks and crannies plus original features, there’s a front garden, yard and back garden facing south, complete with a pub shed. Hobby rooms, day rooms, tv room, family room. No open plan. It saved our sanity during Covid.
Many UK houses have hallways as the rooms downstairs are all separate. This is mainly due to make it easier to heat the rooms in winter by limiting the space that needs heating and being able to close the door and seal the room. It also provides separate spaces for families where the children can play in a separate room from the main living room.
Cos it's freezing . Who wants the the entrance opening straight to the outside cold weather when you have just spent £387 trying to heat up the living room. A hall lets you shut one door before opening the next.
Something to bear in mind about the tumble dryer thing (clothes dryer?), is that it's really common in the UK to have a washing line. In the summer, I can hang my wet laundry out on the line and it's fully dry in just an hour or two, plus it smells really fresh! I didn't know this until like a week ago, but apparently there are actually local laws against drying clothes in the garden in some parts of the US? That would probably explain the difference though. If you have to dry your clothes indoors, yes, a tumble dryer suddenly becomes really important. But they're quite expensive to run, so I'm happy to take advantage of the free sunlight and wind - the latter of which we have plenty of, lol. As long as it's not raining, it's perfectly possible to dry clothes outside even in the dead of winter here. Though it takes a lot longer than in summer, and you might have to finish them off on an airer inside.
Also UV rays in daylight help reduce bacteria. So I hang washing out on dry days in winter as the wind shakes out creases and they dry quicker indoors after. Saves on ironing and I don't need a tumble dryer. Dry them in front of radiator.
Halls by the front door are mostly for heat conservation (which has been a major concern when building houses in the UK for centuries) but, as many Brits now knock through the kitchen and sitting room into one larger room, it would also be a huge fire hazard to have your escape route from upstairs land inside the room most likely to catch fire. My cottage is 320 years old and made from Cotswold stone. We've spent the last 3 years renovating it including adding as much insulation as we can, moving the stairs so they aren't in the kitchen and adding a front door and hallway (previously the only outside door was also in the kitchen, at the back of the house)
My house is 460 years old, it’s a small cottage. Think of ‘Rose Cottage’ in the movie ‘The Holiday’, it’s got lots of charm, I love it, I think it’s haunted too!👻 😁
In the Uk they list the size of the individual rooms rather than the overall size of the house, you can work it out for yourself. People in the UK look for the number of bedrooms and reception rooms and the sizes of them. Makes sense to me. You need to know whether you have 4 large bedrooms or 2 really big bedrooms and 2 small. The overall size doesn’t tell you that.
In the US you get the overall size and then a size breakdown for each room. Transition spaces and any seating areas within them would not be included in the breakdown.
Dungeons = cellar. Usually older terrace houses have a small room that was used to house coal in centuries gone by. It was dry and available down there to top up the open fires in rooms that used to heat your house. Many of these cellars are now used as an extra room sometimes just for storage. My great gran lived until here 90s and I'd visit her in her home she'd not touched in decades until her death in the 80s. She had 2 rooms, a sitting room and a kitchen/diner with the old aga next to a roaring fire and used to cook and heat water. The toilet was outside in the backyard.
That tea looked normal to me. If you can see through it it's just hot water. The most important thing to know when looking for a house. Is how many bedrooms has it got.
keep in mind that electricity costs in the uk are on average 4-6 times higher than in the states. therefore, devices such as dryers are also an economic question
Many properties have a conservatory because they don’t require planning permission from the local authorities. It’s a convenient way to get an extra usable indoor space for your property.
I'm not surprised you don't like tea if you heat it up in the microwave! Freshly boiled water added to tea in a warmed teapot and left to stand for a few minutes before pouring and adding milk and sugar to taste, is ideally how it should be made. During the first half of the 20th Century, many houses had small buildings at the far ends of their gardens, within which were coal-fired boiler tubs for washing their laundry, which was then hung on ropes outside to dry. In cities, there were also communal public laundries available, that eventually had spin and hot air dryers. As first twin-tub and then automatic washing machines became commonplace, separate 'tumble dryers' were often acquired too - if there was room in the house to accommodate them. Some automatic washing machines double as drying machines, but are rarely as successful; and still, many people continue to hang their laundry outside in the fresh air if they can. The main problem with drying machines is that they use large amounts of electricity, the price of which is currently heading into orbit... Indeed, as of 1 October 2022 the cost for a 9kg load of laundry will be around $2. Some smaller houses do have front doors that open directly into living rooms out of which the stairs might also ascend. The main problem with this arrangement is the cost of keeping it all warm, and also clean as the British climate often requires the use of heavy outer clothing, waterproofs and boots. Hallways provided a buffer zone between outside and warmed rooms, and so are simply more practical in our climate!
I live in a detached house built in 1971. All the bedrooms have built-in closets - strangely, the smallest bedroom has much the biggest closet. We have a combined washer- drier but dry the washing in the back garden when the weather permits. And we do have a microwave though it is mainly used for defrosting bread. The garage is used for storing dustbins, gardening equipment and currently the crop from our pear trees. The cars live on the drive.
the hallway thing is pretty simple, if someone is at your door like a salesman or a delivery person, they cannot see strait into your living room, imagine it being messy because u have a lazy day . or animals that can run out of the house etc.
Another great reaction Ryan! I love it when you google things immediately if you don't understand and yes I used to follow the Wondering Ravens often when they were in the UK. Here is a list of what is in my 11 year old home to allow you to have a better understanding. I live in a 4 bed semi-detached - we opted for a drive as it was cheaper than a property of this size with a garage. I enter the front door to a large hallway, most rooms are shut off from the hallway to keep the heat in as the weather can be cold especially in Winter. Firstly there is a utility room, where my washer / dryer is housed, I also use this room for my pantry - Pantry's were all the rage in older homes, they mostly had a stone shelf to keep goods cold. Next door is the downstairs toilet. Kitchen / Diner - With microwave which we use for heating food up or ready meals if we haven't got time to cook. I have those Granite bench tops that the Ravens don't rate but I actually like. A large Patio door leads to a good size garden, we do love our gardens and love the Summer season where we spend a lot of time outdoors barbequing or just enjoying the garden. Large living room again with patio doors leading to the garden. We added our own fire as a lot of new builds don't bother with fires now. As the room is quite large for the UK I partitioned a good 6 x 8 ft part of it for an office space. We have the obligatory Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs - BUT, BUT BUT these are made in new houses to enable you to easy access to build a lift to go upstairs if you need to when you get older! Good or what? Ha-ha! Upstairs are four decent sized bedrooms, one with on-suite, a huge cupboard for my solar panel boiler and lastly a family bathroom. We are just more compact here in the UK as it's quite a small Island that we live on with quite a large population. Hope this helps.
The hallway and individual rooms dates back to homes being heated by open fires. You'd heat the room you'd be in. Some have knocked into the hallway but it's not always cheap with structural beams there sometimes.
Not sure why they say we Brits don't have granite counter tops...we do and have done for years but granite is difficult to maintain and for many, expensive and so we opt for laminate as a cheaper alternative, however most people would have granite if they could afford it although these days other hard materials are prefered such as quartz. Also, many Americans have said we have separate hot and cold taps (faucets). I think that is generally no longer true as what we would call monoblock taps are now so common both in kitchens and bathrooms. I have had them for years. Basically, detached houses are expensive, especially in some areas and many of us can only afford semi-detached or terraced. Even a terraced house can cost millions of pounds. Many detached houses have offices (generally called studies) and laundry (utility) rooms but for many of us we have to make do with our washing machines in our kitchens. Never owned a drier (No space) but clothes dry very quickly indoors on a clothes drier. In the summer our conservatory can reach temperatures in the 90's so clothes dry in a day. Never owned a microwave; don't like them although they are very popular here. Always make tea using an electric kettle. It's the only way to make proper tea!
I live in an appartment in Belgium on the ground floor. The walls are well isolated so I hear no noises from my neigbours, only soft noises sometimes from the neigbours living upstairs, but not too much so I don't have problems sleeping or anything.
@@EEmB I hear my neighbor quite a bit as well. Whenever he is running his mower or leaf blower closer to our house and I am on that side of the house. Only the one neighbor is within 100m though, so it's not too bad.
Hi, We use microwaves, but not normally to heat water. For tea we want the water to be boiling, so with steam coming off and bubbles being produced, it can be done in a microwave, but is difficult o get right also, as he said, the cup/mug gets hot.
also its more difficult in the microwave. it takes 2 minutes in the kettle. in america, they use half the voltage, so they get half the power. it takes double the time to boil the same amount of water in an electric kettle.
Hallways are generally for privacy and heat. We don't like cold air coming into the main living room every time its opened and it closes us off from anyone coming to the door if its opened. Its a lot nicer in my opinion and actually feels like a room rather than a massive room with everything in it.
“Tudor” was an era in British history during the Middle Ages when our reigning monarchs were of the Tudor dynasty - eg Henry Tudor. The houses were very ornate with wooden beams on the outside of the house as well as the inside, like something out of a Disney animation. A fair few have survived, but the majority burned down in fires mainly caused by candles.
Number of bedrooms is the key indicator here. Plus, the square footage is listed, but it's in the detail, and per room. Plus, you bear in mind that newer houses tend to have smaller rooms than older houses (as a generalisation). I have no idea how many sq ft our house is, but I know it's 4 bedrooms. Commercial property is priced by sq meters though. The kind of dungeon they're talking about - remember, there are still some medieval houses around that people live in. They tend to be big and old and expensive, but there are there. Not everybody has a dryer. We still use washing lines a lot. I don't think I know anybody without a microwave. Correction - apart from one friend who's completely off-grid. The hallways cut the drafts. It's a tradition established when houses didn't have central heating. Countertops - we do have granite and wood - probably most people have laminate or acrylic.
in norway you also have a halway at the entrance or sometimes a room with a door. It is called a "vindfang" or "wind catcher" in english. A "wind catcher" is a small passage room adjacent to the front door of a house. The purpose is to reduce the house's heat loss, or as the word says, prevent the wind from blowing straight into the building. It is also usually used to store outdoor clothes and shoes and the floor is usually made so it can handle lots of water, as in the winter snow often gets dragged in.
@@shasacosmica9572 Nobody said better. E.g. if a family of 5 is looking for a place to live and they want 4 bedrooms, an office and a living room at least, the 6 room flat would be more interesting than the 4 room one.
@@Antanana_Rivo of course,but in my opinion it's not effective just to look at one of these parts. Both in combination should fit. In Berlin in Germany it's the same. They always tell you,it's a 4 - room - flat. But this is not enough for me. I need more information to decide if a flat would suit me
Closets, laundry’s, dens etc all require more square footage… space we simply do not have or is an expensive luxury. We also have wooden houses in the UK… they are called sheds and we keep the lawnmower for our fancy green lawns in them. I cook beans in my microwave and water in my kettle.
Microwaves are for heating up leftovers or ready meals or maybe a pot noodle. Get an electric kettle for tea. Rooms have better insulation but open spaces are getting more trendy as they make spaces seem bigger.
The UK has the concept of cosiness as a feature of a house. So we tend to have smaller rooms and the hallways are not heated or the upstairs save for maybe the bathroom. It's very expensive now to heat every room in the house and before they were all heated by coal fires, so you'd just stay in the 'living room' as it was the warmest in the house, and the kitchen would have a range cooker and maybe a back boiler to heat hot water. My house it an old 140+ years Victorian house and we still have two rooms with coal fires, which we light occasionally in winter time. As it's so expensive to heat the house now (around £180 per month for gas and electric and it's practically doubling next month :-( ) we now only heat the front room to around 17'c and the rest of the house is unheated, but the front room is very cosy, so it's fine 🙂
The terraced houses I know (mainly in Germany) have a very good sound insulation. Essentially, both houses bordering each other have their own ‘outside’ wall. You really have knock over something really heavy to hear anything. The largest downside of a terraced house is that your house can only have windows on two sides instead of four, making it darker inside.
I'm with the Brits when it comes to hallways. Not everyone is welcome in my personal space, and it's much easier to stop them from arriving there if it isn't the first place they arrive. Even a living room is personal to the family, not an area for anyone and everyone.
Kettles existed waaaay before microwaves. We do have microwaves though to defrost or heat food if in a rush or if not good at cooking (ready meals). Definitely don't use it to make tea 😂
Couple of things: Combination washer/dryer machines are pretty common in the UK, especially in flats. So a lot of UK homes have dryers, it's just built into the same machine. Microwaves are just as common as in the US, just not used for boiling water. Also while it's definitely the case that UK houses are smaller overall, the figures are skewed a little by terraced houses which are often priced about the same to rent as flats (esp. in the North), and are generally more apartment-sized. So the average detached house, while smaller, isn't quite as small as the number suggests there. Terraced and semi-detached houses don't suffer quite the same noise issues as apartments as they are separated from each other with a thick, solid brick wall. If someone was hammering on the wall, or having a super loud party with thumping music, you might hear something though. Having a hallway and smaller rooms makes things easier to heat. This was especially important in the days before central heating where rooms were heated with open fires. As a lot of houses in the UK date from this time this is why they are often laid out this way. With this less of an issue now, it's not uncommon to knock walls through to make things more open.
The US house size is pulled down by housing built around WW2 and into the 70s. I live just NE of Washington Dc and NW of Baltimore MD and the average house size in my area is around 4,500 sq ft. New builds are larger and this is mainly due to land costs. We are in an area that is not serviced my municipal water and sewer, which is very common. About 30% of US homes have private well and septic systems. In order to have enough separation between the well and septic system our county has a minimum lot size of 2 acres outside urban corridors. This pushes the price of the average building lot to over $200,000 and it is very difficult to recoup that investment building anything less than 4,000 square feet above grade.
It probably wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not born in the UK but we usually know the size of our homes by the style, age and number of bedrooms. For example if someone says they are buying a 3 bed 1930/40s semi detached I have a picture in my mind as a typical size as they are all built very much the same.
Yes, in the UK you usually get a pretty good idea of the size of the house from the outside pictures. Doors tend to be a standard size, so gives a good reference for scale. Number and size of windows likewise. As others have also said the number of rooms and individual room sizes are usually listed, along with floor plans. Just need to do the maths.
The filtering of property searches in the UK tends to be primarily by number of bedrooms- and the listings give dimensions of each room individually. Drying machines- cost a lot to run. I have one, but use it very sparingly. Most Brits dry clothes on a line outdoorrs whenever they can. Microwaves- pretty much everyone has one in the UK. We don't use it to initially make hot drinks- but reheating one that's gone cold, then yes! The hall walls- are there partially for privacy reasons, but mainly because they lare load bearing walls- the bedrooms above are built thabove this wall.
Hallways making for smaller rooms: You heat the rooms, not the hallways. That open plan living room would increase your heating bill. Just close the doors to the rooms off the hallway and it takes less energy to keep warm.
Hi Ryan, please bear in mind that UK is cold in the winter so we like to be snug and warm, which is why we have rooms off of the hallway, our houses are smaller because the UK is rather small and we buy houses based on the number of rooms and the sizes of each room. Many people in the UK have driers, washing machines, dishwashers and microwaves but we like to hang our washing outside to dry in the summer months and use dryers in the winter. We enjoy our gardens and our husbands will often be out mowing and tending to the lawn, we just love sitting out or entertaining in our garden spaces and having a conservatory is a bonus.
UK winters are much warmer than most US states and almost everywhere in Canada. Summer temperatures in most of the US and much of Canada are far higher than the UK. The UK as a whole doesn't see huge temperature swings. The big difference is that we are required to have several times the amount of insulation in North America.
Only time I saw a basement (never called a dungeon) was in old Victorian and Edwardian houses originally built for the slightly wealthier to much wealthier folk who had servants as they were where the kitchens, coal stores, pantries were to be found.
I thought his comment weird about her tea, which, to me, is exactly what tea looks like, (although I prefer it milkier) then realised he probably doesn't put any milk in the tea he makes, so would expect it to be a clear drink.
They're joking about many of our houses having dungeons. I've lived in a number of houses and none have had torture chambers below. The screams that people may have heard while passing my dwellings were nothing to do with me. Those cupboards surrounding the bed aren't tacky at all. The microwave thing was confusing. Of course we use microwaves, mainly for reheating food. I have used mine for heating up a cooled-down hot drink, though as he says, not from cold, as the mug would be really hot. I once had a colleague who refused to use microwaves on the grounds that she didn't want to use 'radiation' to cook food. Do you grill food? I asked. Of course she said. Well, I said, same radiation, just a different frequency. I would say that people do have granite counter tops, or at least granite-effect tops, since these granite things must be extraordinarily heavy. These 'American houses v British houses' video are strangely compelling. And wonder of winder, the Wandering Ravens didn't talk about plus, outlets and taps.
In the Netherlands, there will always be a hallway first, no matter how small it sometimes is. In the hallway you will often have access to the toilet and a coat and shoe rack. This way you can take off your coat and shoes (taking off shoes tends to be optional) and enter the livingroom. The hallway keeps the cold out of the rest of the house. I think it works really well.
Everyone I know has a dishwasher, microwave, tumble drier and granite worktops (not sparkly). We nearly all have hallways. Remember it can get pretty chilly here so we don’t want any heat to escape when front door is opened.
Probably depends on factors like area, economic class/income bracket and house size, etc. I think I know quite different people to you, lol My little council house would never fit a dishwasher or tumble drier and the worktops are the cheep and crappy laminate on fibreboard kind. We dry our washing outside in good weather and on a clothes horse in bad weather and in the winter. We did recently invest in a heated clothes airer to hang clothes on to dry this winter though as we know we won't be able to keep the house warm enough to dry things when the weather gets colder, since we struggled to do that even last year when electric and the cost of living in general was cheaper. We do have a small microwave and a hallway though. I think it's interesting that we often don't realise how much what is considered 'the norm' for living varies even within our own country and it's always just as interesting to see the discussions in the comments of how various different people live or what they think is normal in the UK, as it is to watch the videos about another country's way of living.
@@gabeangel8104 Very true. I know I’m lucky to live as I do. When I was young we had no central heating, just a coal fire in living room. So we had the proverbial ice on insides of bedroom windows and we all suffered chilblains.
You come into the hallway in my house and all the rooms have doors, its to keep the warmth in Also, a lot of terraces are Victorian/Edwardian and the walls are very thick, built to last
The official climates of many US states have colder winters than ours; but the UK specialises in windy, damp cold, which I suspect feels colder than the dry cold of some country's winters.
The UK and the Pacific NW of the US have very similar winters. Parts of Washington state see twice as much rain per year as the wettest parts of the UK. You are right that the cold damp weather is harder to dress for and feels colder than the same temp when dry, but the houses aren't really built to deal with it either. If UK homes were insulated well with a good vapor barrier you could heat them with a candle.
Some people do live in mobile homes in the U.K. but we call them static caravans! They have 2 wheels on an axle in the middle so can be towed but that is usually just moving it about on the residential park to it’s final resting place, the legs front and rear are then pulled down and the home is stabilised, very often a veranda is put around it to sit out on. Very similar to the ones you have in Florida and usually older people live in them. We also have bungalows, one story square brick built dwellings, which were built in the 1930’s to 1950’s, and traditionally for older people as there were no stairs, these days younger families are buying them and altering the internal layout, adding stairs and putting dormer windows in the roof, thereby gaining possibly 2 extra bedrooms and an upstairs bathroom! The old British joke is that when building a normal house the first builder ran out of bricks so said to his workforce “just bung a low roof on it” ha ha!😂 but the term bungalow is I believe Hindi and these one story dwellings with verandas were originally built in India during the Empire! Our terrace houses are like your brownstones, except a lot smaller. In country places there are a lot of older properties called cottages dating from the 1600’s and even before, these were timber framed and the gaps filled with daub and wattle, these are mainly thatched and many are lopsided due to age, think William Shakespeare or his wife Mary Arden, Google her and you will see what I mean, or Google Earth Shanklyn on the Isle of Wight, many chocolate box looking houses with thatch roofs. I think if you googled the terms used for U.K. houses with pictures you would understand the variety we have here. We know the size of a house by looking at the real estates particulars or rightmove, where the details tell you how many rooms and their individual sizes, ie 1 x bedroom is 12 ft x 12 ft, so you can visualise each room and if your furniture will fit, we don’t want to know the overall size all added together we want to know the individual room size, to see if your super king bed or sofa will fit. The dungeon is a cellar, or in USA a basement, some are damp and unmodernised some are done out as a cinema room so warm and part of the living accommodation! These idiots know nothing about British homes!
Utility rooms are pretty common in houses built pre 1970 as they originally had a part of it used as a coal shed to store coal for the fire which was delivered weekly . No one has coal fries now so most have become larger utility rooms where the washing machine / dryer and sometimes spare toilet is .
brits do have microwaves but they are used almost exclusively for food. granite or quartz worktops are considered high end and most houses have worktops made from wood. a hallway is necessary for two reasons, one, our winters are frigid and it's better to freeze a hallway than a room where you spend a lot of time, and two, those walls are usually load bearing and would collapse the house if taken down.
There are some terrace Houses which are incredibly large and expensive and prestigious. For example the terrace houses around Regents Park in London are 5-6 storeys high and over 10,000 ft and are likely to cost many millions anything over £25 million or much much more. They are usually early 19th century built during the Regency Period. I live in a converted farm barn dated 1869. The outer walls are made of brick and flint and are approx 15 inches thick. It is gorgeous and I love it I have a beautiful garden b with lovely green lawn and lots of rose bushes and climbing roses on the walls as well as lots of other flowers During the autumn and winter season I often have pheasants and partridges in my garden. It is wonderful and I love living in this house.
Nice to look back at a video of the Wandering Ravens. I was subscribed so I saw all of them. They had to stop making content, and I do miss them. Such lovely people!
Yes we do all have a microwave in British homes.. & the wall between the hallway & living room is designed to keep the heat in the living room.. most houses were build way before centre heating so it kept the room warm.. hence we have smaller rooms x
Everyone I know has a Microwave what are they talking about. A lot of people I know have a Dishwasher. Yes most of us do have ether a Washer/Dryer (a single unit) or separate Washer and Dryer. Yes loads of kitchens do have Granite Work Tops. I will say again, What Are They Talking About ?
Most of the traditional semis are over a hundred years old. Most rooms would have been heated by a coal fire. Separate rooms kept the heat in. Most have had some walls removed now. We still like an entrance hall or vestibule as you don't let the cold wet British winter in every time you open the door.
I don't think that most traditional semis are over 100 years old. The Victorians and Edwardians often did build semis but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority were put up in the period 1930-1960 both in private housing estates and council estates so they would only be 60-90 years old. There is a remarkable uniformity of design up and down the country during that period which encompassed major building schemes energised by slum clearance and the destruction of housing stock during WWII.
@@MrBulky992 suppose we base our assessments on where we live. A semi built in 1922 IS a 100 years old. ALso Short of architectural students, historians, lawyers and estate agents I do not know who would quibble about so few years. Compared to the housing stock of the USA any housing that old IS old. The examples of British housing he was shown and asking about were not newer developments.
@@anitaherbert1037 I was querying use of the word "most" for purposes of accuracy. The classic semis we recognise today were not being built in the greatest numbers in 1922 and the years preceding (you said 'over 100 years'). The heyday of the semis was later, during the housing booms just before and after WWII.
@@MrBulky992 where I grew up the better terraces and semis were by one builder and then there was a boom in the 60sand in the 70s with the introduction of new industries.
In the UK you would struggle to find a house built of wood so the deviding walls are of brick or in older houses stone so noise doesn't tend to be a problem, plus the houses tend to last for hundreds of years.My house is 120years old I think of it as quite new.
In the UK we build our houses out of brick rather than wood and plaster. Brick makes for great sound (and heat) insulation so we rarely have problems with noise from neighbours. (Before anyone gets triggered, yes, I know it can happen, but I'm talking in general and compared to US apartments) About the hallways in UK, having a separate hall/living room is a lot more heat efficient. Without the hallway your heat will be escaping up the stairs and going god knows where rather than just heating the single living room.
The emphasis is the other way round as regards Microwaves and making Tea. Both The USA and The UK use Microwaves to heat up food or cook quick, convenient food but 1% or LESS in The UK use Microwaves to make Tea though I have, personally, heated up a cup that I forgot about, and have gone cold.ALL Social gatherings in The UK are either inside or in the back garden. I have rarely (never ? ) seen a gathering on the front lawn, which is, usually, small.The London House prices are ridiculous and for 8 million + Londoners the average home costs £600,000 or $834,000. A large Broom Cupboard, in Kensington, went for over £200,000.
In the UK when looking at house sizes you go off the number of rooms and the general size of those rooms. A large house in the UK may have 5 bedrooms, an average house 3 bedrooms and a small house 2 bedrooms or less. We don’t use the total square feet or square metres fi the entire house as it’s just a number and most people don’t have a clue how much room that actually is!
We are minute compared to the u.s. , houses are compressed together I've lived in a semi detached built in the 50s and a terraced house built in the early 1900s . Some people live in cottages dating back hundreds of years .
We choose our houses by the number of rooms - how many bedrooms - does it have gardens or a garage etc - square footage is irrelevant Detached just means it's not attached to another property 👍 I live in a detached 3 bedroom house with gardens back and front - the next houses on either side are only feet away we are separated by fences I have 2 supermarkets within walking distance plus a pizza place a hairdresser a chemist 2 garages (for filling up with petrol) a park with woodland and swings and slides for kids - there are also a couple of infant/junior schools a doctor's surgery and a hospital - I can walk into town in 15 minutes and to a beach in 10 minutes 👍 I mainly use my microwave for heating up ready meals I have a separate washer and drier in the kitchen - also a dishwasher I love it
Hi Ryan, these 2 stayed in various homes in the UK (I think they were 'House sitting' and 'dog sitting'), one of the places they stayed in had a dungeon.
When tornadoes and hurricanes are tearing up and destroying American wooden houses, I often wonder why more aren’t constructed from brick or stone etc. Surely they would provide a more resilient home for your extreme weather conditions?
18:59 that'll be all the rain. Grass is very easy to keep green if it rains every other week. But yeah, hanging out in the front garden unless you're working in it - watering plants, weeding, washing your car, etc is considered really weird. The back garden is where you chill out, on the dozen days a year where it's warm enough and not raining.
4:32 - There definitely are mobile homes in the UK, but they're called "static caravans" (caravan is British English for 'RV' or 'travel trailer'), and they're usually vacation homes.
Older terraced houses in the UK have thick solid walls between them, and have very minimal sound transference. Some newer build terraced houses can be a bit noisy, but still better than a flat. On property listings that have floorplans, they typically do have the total square footage at the bottom of the floorplan (sometimes its above).
UK estate agents will tell you how big each room is on the website and usually have a floor plan. Plus you can also see from the size of the house how big it is as they will have lots of pictures
Hallways - since it's a closed area you save on heating costs; it's practical because you don't have to heat the hallway, just the room you're staying in. If you have stairs in the hallway it's especially important to have a hallway because if not, all the heat will dissappear to the 2nd floor. That's why, in old houses you'll often find a door at the top or bottom of the stairs. Also, if there is a hallway with doors to other rooms, the gail that comes in when you open the front door will not reach the other rooms. That's the reason in old houses you often have a small hallway between the outer door and the inner door, it creates another barrier. Traditionally, in Norway we operate with 'heated areas' (i.e. roms we stay in often and keep warm) and non-heated areas like the cellar, the hallways and just under the roof. Because of the difference in temperature you can use the different areas for varios purposes, e.g. storing root vegetables, jam and plants you need to keep frost free in the cellar, whereas dry things that are not damaged by the cold (e.g. smoked dry meat, summer clothes and the like) are stashed in the space just beneath the roof.
I don't live in the UK, but in Germany. But the situation with the hallways is exactly the same as in the UK. Most homes has it. And there are some good reasons to have it. There is always a place to hang your jacket or other things you need if you go outside. Your shoes,your bags, umbrella, keys and so on. Another point is that you have less room to heat,when it's cold outside. So you can close the door of every room an heat it seperate. Most of Germans, and I think it's similar in the UK,don't warm their hallway or their bedroom. At least not so much as they would do it in the livingroom
AND WE DO USE MICROWAVES THERE JUST NOT OVENS, WE USE THEM FOR READY MEALS BTW WE DON'T USE THEM FOR TEA IF IT GETS COLD, WE TIP THEM OUT AND RE DO IT JUST TIPPING MOST OUT AND ADDING HOT WATER MAKES IT TASTE GROSS.......
Neighbours can be a big issue, I bought our semi detached specifically because it has a big extension, on the opposite side to our neighbour, in which our bedroom and lounge are situated, so we can play our music much louder without annoying the neighbour and rarely hear from him anyway as he's fortunately very quiet :) You hear a lot of horror stories about 'neighbours from hell' in the UK!
The walls in the entry might be load-bearing OR (and most likely) it's about containing heat. The bigger and more open the area, the harder to heat. I live in Australia and our homes are much more open-plan usually. That's because (in Queensland especially), the goal is to cool rather than heat most often.
In large parts of the US and Canada we are stuck in the middle. We need to retain heat in the winter and dump heat in the summer. We do this by insulating the shit out of everything and then using HVAC to get the temperature that we want. We heat and cool a 4,500 square foot open plan with 20' ceilings in half of the house with two heat pumps. If the great room (20' cube and open to most of the house) feels a little cool we throw another log on the fire. Like most in the US though, we aren't coming in through the front door. You are usually coming in from the vehicle which is either in a garage or parked beside the house, so the mud-room is located next to the back/garage door and the front door has a foyer.
Everyone I know has a clothes dryer, microwave and dishwasher. The microwave and dishwasher are often built-in / integrated into the kitchen cabinetry. And lots of uk homes have a utility / laundry room for the washing machine and dryer. We do refurbish, upgrade our homes - it's almost a national pastime! My 30 year old son's home (shared with his gf now) is a modern town house outside Manchester (15 minutes from Manchester International Airport which has flights to nearly everywhere in the world) which includes 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a utility / laundry room, large sitting room, kitchen-diner, a garage and a decent garden. It's built on 3 storeys so the footprint is quite small but it fits in a lot of accommodation in a very efficient way.
I strongly advise against heating or reheating hot drinks in the microwave as there is a real risk of super-heating the liquid. If a drink is super-heated the water is actually above the temperature at which water boils and introduction of an object that contains multiple cavities (e.g. a rusty spoon) can result in instant boiling to the extent that the cup of liquid resembles a volcano. Whilst this might sound like a fun idea to play around with, this can easily result in severe burns if the liquid gets on your skin (I actually saw this happen myself once - about 80% of the liquid left the cup). In the most extreme examples the liquid can actually explode, and all that would be needed to make this happen would be to make the liquid move (e.g. taking it out of the microwave). Additionally, adding sugar or powder to the drink (or using a spoon with either still on the surface) would make the explosive action even more likely.
I live in a 4 storey, 4 bed brick terraced house. A lot of US homes seem to be made of wood, I would worry about the big bad wolf. My home is Victorian and has high ceilings and reasonable sized rooms. Although my hallway and bathroom aren't that large, it cuts down the heating bills. We are a fraction of the size of the US so that dictates home size a lot. My garden is at least 20 meters long and I have a smaller back garden, which is still bigger than many peoples front garden. We do have some people who live in static caravan type homes, usually older people whose children have left home and they want to downsize. I've been in a few they are more like bungalow's than mobile homes. I don't use my cellar space but it's 2 large rooms that could be lived in, if I spent £20,000 to do it up. I just can't imagine living in a house made of wood, when I see hurricanes in US they always seem to get blown away, very strange.
Adding to the talk about it being better insulation to have a hall, there is also the fact as 'mudrooms' are not a thing in the UK the hall is essentially our equivalent. So all the wet and dirty stuff can be contained in that room too. There was a craze a while back in the UK to make houses more open plan but while kitchen diners are fine, I was adamant when we were house hunting that I wouldn't live in home without a seperate hall. And having finally had the time to redecorate it back in 2020, I get a lot of pleasure coming home and entering into my beautiful hall. :-)
If you thinkg washing machines in the kitchen are strange take a look at the Netherlands. Most washing machines/dryers there are in the bathroom, something I had to get used to when I moved there from the UK.
House prices around the uk normally relate to location, proximity to public transport and services over actual size. Size matters, but ability to live matters more. That’s why a 4 bedroom house in the sticks will cost less than a studio flat across the road from a train station or within walking distance from a school or hospital. You count how many bedrooms you need, then filter by that, and rough geographical location, I.e proximity to your work or your kids school, then most of us arrange price low to high, then start making calls to organise viewings. Large rooms are a bonus, but unless you are made of money, number of rooms trumps that. Or you just cry coz you can’t afford any of them
80% americans having a dryer vs 58% of brits isn't even a big difference, so it shouldn't blow your mind. its a huge machine that takes up valuable space and the environment angle too
tumble driers make the house so damp, even with the thing you throw out of the window. We use clothes horses and radiators in winter. It's amazing how if you get a clothes horse and run a fan through it overnight, everything is dry in the morning, and fans are very cheap to run
A conservatory is usually boiling in summer and freezing in winter. People are starting to build extensions with glass ceilings or lanterns (ceiling windows) or posher new tech conservatories
In the UK you don't really want a hallway and living room knocked through into one big room. In winter it is so cold in the UK that the last thing you want is to come home from work at 5pm, when it got dark at 4pm, and it's near freezing outside, maybe snowing or very cold raining and open your front door onto a living room. All the heat would rush straight out the front door to be replaced with icy winter air, then you would the rest of the night with the heating on trying to get the house back to the warmth it was before you arrived and spend about £10 in heating bills doing it. Do that 31 times in a winter month is why the average UK energy bill is now something crazy like £350 per month.
doesnt help that most houses dont have reverse cycle AC.
It gets much, much colder in many parts of the US than in the UK though, frequently -20°C through winter with lots of snow. The room layout differences are mainly historical.
@@iantellam9970 yes, but you usually have a porch area between the outside and the inside. In the UK (with no porch) the front door opens and if its raining/snowing it will literally come into the room you are walking into. The hallway really helps to stop this from happening
@@zoebunnyx spot on
@@zoebunnyx That's what I'm saying. They're designed differently, but it's not because one place is cold and the other isn't.
I can guarantee no one heats water with a microwave in the UK.
Exactly, why else have a Kettle?
really? here in Spain we use microwaves for everything
The thought of it is pure horror 😂
Sorry to breach your guarantee, but I heat water in a microwave oven, particularly when I'm cooking rice or pasta. You can't easily do that in a kettle!
Sure, it takes ages, but I'd rather spend 3x as long cooking a cupful of water in a microwave (900w) versus a 2300W kettle.
@@pilarlopez8815 😱
You have to remember our climate is colder and wetter. We have different house styles in different parts of the country. Much more older properties. We measure our property by room size, not by total size. We have driers and microwaves. Our grass is green because of the weather.
Kettles too
I always wonder if my 87 kvadratmeter < danish measurement. Is bigger or smaller than a 87 square meters US flat.? I have no idea.. But it could be the case idk..
And the German word Wetter translates to weather. That says something, right?😂
Depends on what state you're in. Many of the northern states are far colder and wetter than here
Washington State averages twice as much rain per year as the wettest places in the UK. The western part of the state sees temperatures very similar to the UK, but as you go east you see colder winters and hotter summers.
We look for the number of bedrooms when looking for houses for sale. Also the dimensions of each room are specified. We are a small island with a lot of people so land is expensive and therefore houses are expensive.
Also we love our gardens and most have patios, grass and loads of floweers. We cut our grass in the summer once a week or once every two weeks. Having a beautiful garden is something the British take great pride in.
Where l grew up hardly anybody had a garden and l've only had 3 gardens out of the 9 houses l've lived in.
@@billythedog-309 where do you live Billy?
What Sophie said 👍🏻
@@MrsLynB l've moved about, but l grew up in Leeds where l lived predominantly in terraced houses, three of which were back to backs.
@@billythedog-309 oh yes I was the same growing up even the 1st 2 houses we bought. Both terraces with small yards. I’m in the last house I’ll ever buy now. Detached with gardens. Oz the same as America though because so vast. We lived there & the house we bought was huge. Swimming pool etc etc we are a tiny island so houses going to different 😃
Hi Ryan, the hallway is shut off with a door to keep the bad weather outside and the heat inside.
Greetings from the Netherlands 🇳🇱
I am running a tour of an old house in the US this weekend and its designed this way. Every single room is closed with one sometimes two doors and all off a common hallway. They would be closed in winter time and sometimes whole rooms would not be used at all during the entire winter.
In the UK electricity costs more than the average mortgage. Our monthly Heating and Electricity bill is £600 per month and monthly repayment to the bank £500
@@timpullen4941 But that's a fairly new situation. Hallways have been there forever.
But also a place to wipe your feet, put away your coat and stack your umbrella in the umbrella stand. Also, it's usually where the gas meter and electricity meter are built into a closet.
I think Brits generally care less about the absolute size and more about the quality of life stuff, like garden size (that is usually something that is emphasised on property listings, especially if it is good), proximity to schools, public transport, amenities like shops and pubs. Number of bedrooms is also relevant and used somewhat as a proxy for size, as for instance working from home is easier if you can have a box room (small room) for an office space or craft room. Utility rooms are back in fashion too, for much the same reason - it's nice to be able to put the washing machine in a separate room, and have somewhere to wash down the dog after a walk in the muddy countryside. Things like that matter more to people in the UK than the absolute size of the house.
100 it’s this thing like size doesn’t matter, functionality and quality of the space matters… plus why have all this extra room that u don’t need its such a waste and having
to heat it up each winter…. No thank u
Hi Alex, FYI: 'Couldn't care less...' We can often tell a Yank, because they get the English wrong - LOL! It's been an amusing thing on radio, TV and in the newspapers for years in the UK.
Do put into YT search: 'Dear America... David Mitchell's SoapBox' - It will make you smile (I hope !?)
By the way, you got the rest correct, it's the neighbourhood and what you can afford; so we generally look at price ranges first.
@@stewedfishproductions7959 I didn't use that expression in my comment. I am British by the way, and "could care less" irritates me greatly. I have seen David Mitchell's rant. I used "care less" correctly meaning exactly what I wrote.
@@alexmckee4683 - I have re-read your comment and realised I screwed up... DUH! I'm bad, no excuse. It irritates and irks me too (long before DM's rant) LOL! Sorry, I was taking a tea break from other things and quickly scanning the comments section: And totally misread your words. Cheers & best wishes.
@@stewedfishproductions7959 no need to apologise for an honest mistake, thank you though. No doubt my overly verbose comment(s) are ultimately at fault! 😄
In Denmark (very much the same weather as in UK) we do not always want our dirty outdoor shoes directly into the other rooms of the flat or the house. So there is a hall (and often a back door hall in a house) for outdoor clothes and shoes.
The common walls in Terraced, semi detached houses and flats/apartments/units in the UK and Australia are double or triple bricked so noise is drastically reduced.
The hallway/lounge room thing is from way way way back primarily to keep the room you’re in warm by the fire/radiator/wood burner stove. If you knocked the wall down and opened it up then the heat would escape.
Not only that. Even simple brickwall reduces noise better then drywall in US. Also...Americans are known to be really but really loud even in public so I dont think they are silent at own home to not bother neighbors. The culture and way of living is different and people are used to this kind of enviroment.
The hallway is also for wiping your muddy shoes and taking off your coat, hat, gloves, and shawl.
Has no one ever told this irritating young man that it is often better to keep quiet and be thought a fool,rather than broadcasting on utube and proving his ignorance incontrovertibly to the whole world ?
Generally speaking, microwaves serve 3 purposes in the UK. microwave meals, for when you don’t feel like cooking, reheating leftovers, for when you don’t feel like cooking, and zapping milk for a hot chocolate or Horlicks, because you haven’t gotten round to washing the pan from cooking the other day lol
You forgot about starting off Jacket spuds!
Also our microwaves are generally stand alone counter top devices and not built in like you see in a lot of US kitchens with a microwave built in above the cooker/stove.
Dont forget softening the butter when youve left it out all night and you turned the heating off
Porridge as well
@@geoffpriestley7001 how can you forget putting butter back into the fridge?
Something that house buyers in Britain look for when searching for properties is how close it is to a school or a transport hub (train station/bus terminal etc) and then it's how many bedrooms it has, these factors influence the price more than the total square footage.
My family had a tumble dryer in 1985 and I've had one in every place I've lived in.
Dishwasher and tumble dryers use electricity and that's expensive here in the UK. It's not just about buying the device itself it's about the running costs afterwards. I could buy them tomorrow if I wanted but I don't want a £300 electric bill each month, it's bad enough with a £60 bill.
You can air dry clothes for free and wash your dirty pots in the kitchen sink for pennies. By default, by doing these things you also help keep down not only your energy bills but you also help keep down your carbon footprint as you use less electricity the majority of which is produced at a co2 emitting power station. Use less electricity and less electricity generation is needed which means less coal or gas has to be burnt which means less air pollution. Simple.
OMG I worked out what your power is in Aussie dollars and it it expensive...your 60 per month is $105 in Aussie dollars....We get our power bills every 4 months.....
Our family used to have a similar view in regards to dishwashers as for years we used the sink and a tea towel to clean up. When we got a new kitchen a few years ago a dishwasher came with it. Since we had it we tried it a few times and we now wouldn't go back especially when we have guests over for a dinner party it just frees up so much time that its totally worth it for those occasions.
Yeah, I mean we have both a dishwasher and dryer in our house, but we usually hand wash dishes and the only times we've used the dryer is when something is needed quickly and can't be dried quickly, or when it's too damp to air dry. It's been months since we last used it. It's nice to have as an option but I don't think we'd miss it much if it wasn't there
@@cecilia8957 USD 150 per month is considered minimum and need to be frugal, and only possible for a short time in Fall and Spring. In the winter months can be USD 300 or more with heating 24/7. In the summer months, same USD 300 or more with the AC on 24/7.
Between heating and cooling (2 heat pumps for 4,500 sq ft above grade) , pool pump, well pump, 2 laundry pairs, 3 dishwashers, freezer, 4 refrigerators, electronics and lights we average about $400 US per month ($0.13 per kWh) in the US mid-Atlantic. Doesn't seem bad at all.
Remember that England (just England) is about the size of Alabama - but Alabama has a population of 6 million, England has 56 million…
I love my Victorian terraced home, it has multiple rooms on each floor and 4 bathrooms over 3 storeys with many nooks and crannies plus original features, there’s a front garden, yard and back garden facing south, complete with a pub shed. Hobby rooms, day rooms, tv room, family room. No open plan. It saved our sanity during Covid.
I moved into my victorian terrace a year ago and I love it too! I like the look of a new build bit nothing can beat victorian homes IMO
Many UK houses have hallways as the rooms downstairs are all separate. This is mainly due to make it easier to heat the rooms in winter by limiting the space that needs heating and being able to close the door and seal the room. It also provides separate spaces for families where the children can play in a separate room from the main living room.
Insulation would make heating the space much easier.
@@rich7447 Insulation AND the Hallway is even more efective
@@Kai1311811 With the very limited space that houses in the UK have to work with they really can't afford to lose any.
Cos it's freezing . Who wants the the entrance opening straight to the outside cold weather when you have just spent £387 trying to heat up the living room. A hall lets you shut one door before opening the next.
Something to bear in mind about the tumble dryer thing (clothes dryer?), is that it's really common in the UK to have a washing line. In the summer, I can hang my wet laundry out on the line and it's fully dry in just an hour or two, plus it smells really fresh!
I didn't know this until like a week ago, but apparently there are actually local laws against drying clothes in the garden in some parts of the US? That would probably explain the difference though. If you have to dry your clothes indoors, yes, a tumble dryer suddenly becomes really important. But they're quite expensive to run, so I'm happy to take advantage of the free sunlight and wind - the latter of which we have plenty of, lol. As long as it's not raining, it's perfectly possible to dry clothes outside even in the dead of winter here. Though it takes a lot longer than in summer, and you might have to finish them off on an airer inside.
Also UV rays in daylight help reduce bacteria. So I hang washing out on dry days in winter as the wind shakes out creases and they dry quicker indoors after. Saves on ironing and I don't need a tumble dryer. Dry them in front of radiator.
Halls by the front door are mostly for heat conservation (which has been a major concern when building houses in the UK for centuries) but, as many Brits now knock through the kitchen and sitting room into one larger room, it would also be a huge fire hazard to have your escape route from upstairs land inside the room most likely to catch fire.
My cottage is 320 years old and made from Cotswold stone. We've spent the last 3 years renovating it including adding as much insulation as we can, moving the stairs so they aren't in the kitchen and adding a front door and hallway (previously the only outside door was also in the kitchen, at the back of the house)
My house is 460 years old, it’s a small cottage. Think of ‘Rose Cottage’ in the movie ‘The Holiday’, it’s got lots of charm, I love it, I think it’s haunted too!👻 😁
Your so lucky I'd love it .
In the Uk they list the size of the individual rooms rather than the overall size of the house, you can work it out for yourself. People in the UK look for the number of bedrooms and reception rooms and the sizes of them. Makes sense to me. You need to know whether you have 4 large bedrooms or 2 really big bedrooms and 2 small. The overall size doesn’t tell you that.
In the US you get the overall size and then a size breakdown for each room. Transition spaces and any seating areas within them would not be included in the breakdown.
Dungeons = cellar. Usually older terrace houses have a small room that was used to house coal in centuries gone by. It was dry and available down there to top up the open fires in rooms that used to heat your house. Many of these cellars are now used as an extra room sometimes just for storage.
My great gran lived until here 90s and I'd visit her in her home she'd not touched in decades until her death in the 80s. She had 2 rooms, a sitting room and a kitchen/diner with the old aga next to a roaring fire and used to cook and heat water. The toilet was outside in the backyard.
That tea looked normal to me. If you can see through it it's just hot water.
The most important thing to know when looking for a house. Is how many bedrooms has it got.
keep in mind that electricity costs in the uk are on average 4-6 times higher than in the states. therefore, devices such as dryers are also an economic question
Many properties have a conservatory because they don’t require planning permission from the local authorities. It’s a convenient way to get an extra usable indoor space for your property.
I'm not surprised you don't like tea if you heat it up in the microwave! Freshly boiled water added to tea in a warmed teapot and left to stand for a few minutes before pouring and adding milk and sugar to taste, is ideally how it should be made.
During the first half of the 20th Century, many houses had small buildings at the far ends of their gardens, within which were coal-fired boiler tubs for washing their laundry, which was then hung on ropes outside to dry. In cities, there were also communal public laundries available, that eventually had spin and hot air dryers. As first twin-tub and then automatic washing machines became commonplace, separate 'tumble dryers' were often acquired too - if there was room in the house to accommodate them. Some automatic washing machines double as drying machines, but are rarely as successful; and still, many people continue to hang their laundry outside in the fresh air if they can. The main problem with drying machines is that they use large amounts of electricity, the price of which is currently heading into orbit... Indeed, as of 1 October 2022 the cost for a 9kg load of laundry will be around $2.
Some smaller houses do have front doors that open directly into living rooms out of which the stairs might also ascend. The main problem with this arrangement is the cost of keeping it all warm, and also clean as the British climate often requires the use of heavy outer clothing, waterproofs and boots. Hallways provided a buffer zone between outside and warmed rooms, and so are simply more practical in our climate!
I live in a detached house built in 1971. All the bedrooms have built-in closets - strangely, the smallest bedroom has much the biggest closet. We have a combined washer- drier but dry the washing in the back garden when the weather permits. And we do have a microwave though it is mainly used for defrosting bread. The garage is used for storing dustbins, gardening equipment and currently the crop from our pear trees. The cars live on the drive.
the hallway thing is pretty simple, if someone is at your door like a salesman or a delivery person, they cannot see strait into your living room, imagine it being messy because u have a lazy day .
or animals that can run out of the house etc.
Another great reaction Ryan! I love it when you google things immediately if you don't understand and yes I used to follow the Wondering Ravens often when they were in the UK.
Here is a list of what is in my 11 year old home to allow you to have a better understanding.
I live in a 4 bed semi-detached - we opted for a drive as it was cheaper than a property of this size with a garage.
I enter the front door to a large hallway, most rooms are shut off from the hallway to keep the heat in as the weather can be cold especially in Winter. Firstly there is a utility room, where my washer / dryer is housed, I also use this room for my pantry - Pantry's were all the rage in older homes, they mostly had a stone shelf to keep goods cold. Next door is the downstairs toilet.
Kitchen / Diner - With microwave which we use for heating food up or ready meals if we haven't got time to cook. I have those Granite bench tops that the Ravens don't rate but I actually like. A large Patio door leads to a good size garden, we do love our gardens and love the Summer season where we spend a lot of time outdoors barbequing or just enjoying the garden.
Large living room again with patio doors leading to the garden. We added our own fire as a lot of new builds don't bother with fires now. As the room is quite large for the UK I partitioned a good 6 x 8 ft part of it for an office space.
We have the obligatory Harry Potter cupboard under the stairs - BUT, BUT BUT these are made in new houses to enable you to easy access to build a lift to go upstairs if you need to when you get older! Good or what? Ha-ha!
Upstairs are four decent sized bedrooms, one with on-suite, a huge cupboard for my solar panel boiler and lastly a family bathroom.
We are just more compact here in the UK as it's quite a small Island that we live on with quite a large population. Hope this helps.
The hallway and individual rooms dates back to homes being heated by open fires. You'd heat the room you'd be in. Some have knocked into the hallway but it's not always cheap with structural beams there sometimes.
Not sure why they say we Brits don't have granite counter tops...we do and have done for years but granite is difficult to maintain and for many, expensive and so we opt for laminate as a cheaper alternative, however most people would have granite if they could afford it although these days other hard materials are prefered such as quartz. Also, many Americans have said we have separate hot and cold taps (faucets). I think that is generally no longer true as what we would call monoblock taps are now so common both in kitchens and bathrooms. I have had them for years. Basically, detached houses are expensive, especially in some areas and many of us can only afford semi-detached or terraced. Even a terraced house can cost millions of pounds. Many detached houses have offices (generally called studies) and laundry (utility) rooms but for many of us we have to make do with our washing machines in our kitchens. Never owned a drier (No space) but clothes dry very quickly indoors on a clothes drier. In the summer our conservatory can reach temperatures in the 90's so clothes dry in a day. Never owned a microwave; don't like them although they are very popular here. Always make tea using an electric kettle. It's the only way to make proper tea!
Hey Ryan. We have hallways in the UK to conserve heat in the winter and to keep rooms cooler in the summer. 🙂
I live in an appartment in Belgium on the ground floor. The walls are well isolated so I hear no noises from my neigbours, only soft noises sometimes from the neigbours living upstairs, but not too much so I don't have problems sleeping or anything.
I'm in Sweden, here I hear when my neighbours talk, have their tv on, even clear their throats, goes to the bathroom, and EVERYTHING else...
@@EEmB bruh what are ur walls made of …paper
@@EEmB I hear my neighbor quite a bit as well. Whenever he is running his mower or leaf blower closer to our house and I am on that side of the house. Only the one neighbor is within 100m though, so it's not too bad.
Hi, We use microwaves, but not normally to heat water.
For tea we want the water to be boiling, so with steam coming off and bubbles being produced, it can be done in a microwave, but is difficult o get right also, as he said, the cup/mug gets hot.
also its more difficult in the microwave. it takes 2 minutes in the kettle. in america, they use half the voltage, so they get half the power. it takes double the time to boil the same amount of water in an electric kettle.
Tastes rank if it’s made in the microwave
Hallways are generally for privacy and heat. We don't like cold air coming into the main living room every time its opened and it closes us off from anyone coming to the door if its opened. Its a lot nicer in my opinion and actually feels like a room rather than a massive room with everything in it.
“Tudor” was an era in British history during the Middle Ages when our reigning monarchs were of the Tudor dynasty - eg Henry Tudor. The houses were very ornate with wooden beams on the outside of the house as well as the inside, like something out of a Disney animation. A fair few have survived, but the majority burned down in fires mainly caused by candles.
Number of bedrooms is the key indicator here. Plus, the square footage is listed, but it's in the detail, and per room. Plus, you bear in mind that newer houses tend to have smaller rooms than older houses (as a generalisation). I have no idea how many sq ft our house is, but I know it's 4 bedrooms. Commercial property is priced by sq meters though.
The kind of dungeon they're talking about - remember, there are still some medieval houses around that people live in. They tend to be big and old and expensive, but there are there.
Not everybody has a dryer. We still use washing lines a lot. I don't think I know anybody without a microwave. Correction - apart from one friend who's completely off-grid.
The hallways cut the drafts. It's a tradition established when houses didn't have central heating.
Countertops - we do have granite and wood - probably most people have laminate or acrylic.
in norway you also have a halway at the entrance or sometimes a room with a door. It is called a "vindfang" or "wind catcher" in english. A "wind catcher" is a small passage room adjacent to the front door of a house. The purpose is to reduce the house's heat loss, or as the word says, prevent the wind from blowing straight into the building. It is also usually used to store outdoor clothes and shoes and the floor is usually made so it can handle lots of water, as in the winter snow often gets dragged in.
We don't know the sq ft/sq m of our houses because we dont care. What matters to us is how many bedrooms and toilets there are.
So it's better to have let's say 100 square meter with 6 bedroom than 140 square meter with 4 bedroom? 🤔
@@shasacosmica9572 Nobody said better. E.g. if a family of 5 is looking for a place to live and they want 4 bedrooms, an office and a living room at least, the 6 room flat would be more interesting than the 4 room one.
@@Antanana_Rivo of course,but in my opinion it's not effective just to look at one of these parts. Both in combination should fit. In Berlin in Germany it's the same. They always tell you,it's a 4 - room - flat. But this is not enough for me. I need more information to decide if a flat would suit me
@@shasacosmica9572 And that's why you'd go and visit the place.
@@bakersmileyface one could safe so much time, if all informations about the flat would be shared from beginning.
Closets, laundry’s, dens etc all require more square footage… space we simply do not have or is an expensive luxury. We also have wooden houses in the UK… they are called sheds and we keep the lawnmower for our fancy green lawns in them. I cook beans in my microwave and water in my kettle.
Microwaves are for heating up leftovers or ready meals or maybe a pot noodle. Get an electric kettle for tea. Rooms have better insulation but open spaces are getting more trendy as they make spaces seem bigger.
We DO use microwaves for mainly re-heating left over food or pre-made meals. For hot drinks we use a kettle.
The UK has the concept of cosiness as a feature of a house.
So we tend to have smaller rooms and the hallways are not heated or the upstairs save for maybe the bathroom.
It's very expensive now to heat every room in the house and before they were all heated by coal fires, so you'd just stay in the 'living room' as it was the warmest in the house, and the kitchen would have a range cooker and maybe a back boiler to heat hot water.
My house it an old 140+ years Victorian house and we still have two rooms with coal fires, which we light occasionally in winter time.
As it's so expensive to heat the house now (around £180 per month for gas and electric and it's practically doubling next month :-( ) we now only heat the front room to around 17'c and the rest of the house is unheated, but the front room is very cosy, so it's fine 🙂
The terraced houses I know (mainly in Germany) have a very good sound insulation. Essentially, both houses bordering each other have their own ‘outside’ wall. You really have knock over something really heavy to hear anything.
The largest downside of a terraced house is that your house can only have windows on two sides instead of four, making it darker inside.
I'm with the Brits when it comes to hallways. Not everyone is welcome in my personal space, and it's much easier to stop them from arriving there if it isn't the first place they arrive. Even a living room is personal to the family, not an area for anyone and everyone.
agree. personal to the family.
Kettles existed waaaay before microwaves. We do have microwaves though to defrost or heat food if in a rush or if not good at cooking (ready meals). Definitely don't use it to make tea 😂
I use my microwave to heat up baked beans. That's it really 😂
Couple of things:
Combination washer/dryer machines are pretty common in the UK, especially in flats. So a lot of UK homes have dryers, it's just built into the same machine.
Microwaves are just as common as in the US, just not used for boiling water.
Also while it's definitely the case that UK houses are smaller overall, the figures are skewed a little by terraced houses which are often priced about the same to rent as flats (esp. in the North), and are generally more apartment-sized. So the average detached house, while smaller, isn't quite as small as the number suggests there.
Terraced and semi-detached houses don't suffer quite the same noise issues as apartments as they are separated from each other with a thick, solid brick wall. If someone was hammering on the wall, or having a super loud party with thumping music, you might hear something though.
Having a hallway and smaller rooms makes things easier to heat. This was especially important in the days before central heating where rooms were heated with open fires. As a lot of houses in the UK date from this time this is why they are often laid out this way. With this less of an issue now, it's not uncommon to knock walls through to make things more open.
The US house size is pulled down by housing built around WW2 and into the 70s. I live just NE of Washington Dc and NW of Baltimore MD and the average house size in my area is around 4,500 sq ft. New builds are larger and this is mainly due to land costs. We are in an area that is not serviced my municipal water and sewer, which is very common. About 30% of US homes have private well and septic systems. In order to have enough separation between the well and septic system our county has a minimum lot size of 2 acres outside urban corridors. This pushes the price of the average building lot to over $200,000 and it is very difficult to recoup that investment building anything less than 4,000 square feet above grade.
It probably wouldn’t make much sense to anyone not born in the UK but we usually know the size of our homes by the style, age and number of bedrooms. For example if someone says they are buying a 3 bed 1930/40s semi detached I have a picture in my mind as a typical size as they are all built very much the same.
Yes, in the UK you usually get a pretty good idea of the size of the house from the outside pictures. Doors tend to be a standard size, so gives a good reference for scale. Number and size of windows likewise. As others have also said the number of rooms and individual room sizes are usually listed, along with floor plans. Just need to do the maths.
The filtering of property searches in the UK tends to be primarily by number of bedrooms- and the listings give dimensions of each room individually. Drying machines- cost a lot to run. I have one, but use it very sparingly. Most Brits dry clothes on a line outdoorrs whenever they can. Microwaves- pretty much everyone has one in the UK. We don't use it to initially make hot drinks- but reheating one that's gone cold, then yes!
The hall walls- are there partially for privacy reasons, but mainly because they lare load bearing walls- the bedrooms above are built thabove this wall.
Hallways making for smaller rooms:
You heat the rooms, not the hallways. That open plan living room would increase your heating bill. Just close the doors to the rooms off the hallway and it takes less energy to keep warm.
Hi Ryan, please bear in mind that UK is cold in the winter so we like to be snug and warm, which is why we have rooms off of the hallway, our houses are smaller because the UK is rather small and we buy houses based on the number of rooms and the sizes of each room. Many people in the UK have driers, washing machines, dishwashers and microwaves but we like to hang our washing outside to dry in the summer months and use dryers in the winter. We enjoy our gardens and our husbands will often be out mowing and tending to the lawn, we just love sitting out or entertaining in our garden spaces and having a conservatory is a bonus.
UK winters are much warmer than most US states and almost everywhere in Canada. Summer temperatures in most of the US and much of Canada are far higher than the UK. The UK as a whole doesn't see huge temperature swings.
The big difference is that we are required to have several times the amount of insulation in North America.
Only time I saw a basement (never called a dungeon) was in old Victorian and Edwardian houses originally built for the slightly wealthier to much wealthier folk who had servants as they were where the kitchens, coal stores, pantries were to be found.
When you get round to making tea, that’s exactly the colour your looking for.
The 'opaque' tea is part from the longer brew time, and part from the milk in it. The colour is very much tea, not coffee.
I thought his comment weird about her tea, which, to me, is exactly what tea looks like, (although I prefer it milkier) then realised he probably doesn't put any milk in the tea he makes, so would expect it to be a clear drink.
They're joking about many of our houses having dungeons. I've lived in a number of houses and none have had torture chambers below. The screams that people may have heard while passing my dwellings were nothing to do with me.
Those cupboards surrounding the bed aren't tacky at all.
The microwave thing was confusing. Of course we use microwaves, mainly for reheating food. I have used mine for heating up a cooled-down hot drink, though as he says, not from cold, as the mug would be really hot.
I once had a colleague who refused to use microwaves on the grounds that she didn't want to use 'radiation' to cook food. Do you grill food? I asked. Of course she said. Well, I said, same radiation, just a different frequency.
I would say that people do have granite counter tops, or at least granite-effect tops, since these granite things must be extraordinarily heavy.
These 'American houses v British houses' video are strangely compelling. And wonder of winder, the Wandering Ravens didn't talk about plus, outlets and taps.
In the Netherlands, there will always be a hallway first, no matter how small it sometimes is. In the hallway you will often have access to the toilet and a coat and shoe rack. This way you can take off your coat and shoes (taking off shoes tends to be optional) and enter the livingroom. The hallway keeps the cold out of the rest of the house. I think it works really well.
US: Apartments (rental) and Condos (own), UK: Flats (rental/own), Australia: Units (rental/own)
Everyone I know has a dishwasher, microwave, tumble drier and granite worktops (not sparkly). We nearly all have hallways. Remember it can get pretty chilly here so we don’t want any heat to escape when front door is opened.
it always gives the size of every individual room when looking at homes online....it just doesn't give the total area
Probably depends on factors like area, economic class/income bracket and house size, etc. I think I know quite different people to you, lol
My little council house would never fit a dishwasher or tumble drier and the worktops are the cheep and crappy laminate on fibreboard kind. We dry our washing outside in good weather and on a clothes horse in bad weather and in the winter. We did recently invest in a heated clothes airer to hang clothes on to dry this winter though as we know we won't be able to keep the house warm enough to dry things when the weather gets colder, since we struggled to do that even last year when electric and the cost of living in general was cheaper.
We do have a small microwave and a hallway though.
I think it's interesting that we often don't realise how much what is considered 'the norm' for living varies even within our own country and it's always just as interesting to see the discussions in the comments of how various different people live or what they think is normal in the UK, as it is to watch the videos about another country's way of living.
@@gabeangel8104 Very true. I know I’m lucky to live as I do. When I was young we had no central heating, just a coal fire in living room. So we had the proverbial ice on insides of bedroom windows and we all suffered chilblains.
You come into the hallway in my house and all the rooms have doors, its to keep the warmth in
Also, a lot of terraces are Victorian/Edwardian and the walls are very thick, built to last
The official climates of many US states have colder winters than ours; but the UK specialises in windy, damp cold, which I suspect feels colder than the dry cold of some country's winters.
The UK and the Pacific NW of the US have very similar winters. Parts of Washington state see twice as much rain per year as the wettest parts of the UK.
You are right that the cold damp weather is harder to dress for and feels colder than the same temp when dry, but the houses aren't really built to deal with it either. If UK homes were insulated well with a good vapor barrier you could heat them with a candle.
Some people do live in mobile homes in the U.K. but we call them static caravans! They have 2 wheels on an axle in the middle so can be towed but that is usually just moving it about on the residential park to it’s final resting place, the legs front and rear are then pulled down and the home is stabilised, very often a veranda is put around it to sit out on. Very similar to the ones you have in Florida and usually older people live in them. We also have bungalows, one story square brick built dwellings, which were built in the 1930’s to 1950’s, and traditionally for older people as there were no stairs, these days younger families are buying them and altering the internal layout, adding stairs and putting dormer windows in the roof, thereby gaining possibly 2 extra bedrooms and an upstairs bathroom! The old British joke is that when building a normal house the first builder ran out of bricks so said to his workforce “just bung a low roof on it” ha ha!😂 but the term bungalow is I believe Hindi and these one story dwellings with verandas were originally built in India during the Empire! Our terrace houses are like your brownstones, except a lot smaller. In country places there are a lot of older properties called cottages dating from the 1600’s and even before, these were timber framed and the gaps filled with daub and wattle, these are mainly thatched and many are lopsided due to age, think William Shakespeare or his wife Mary Arden, Google her and you will see what I mean, or Google Earth Shanklyn on the Isle of Wight, many chocolate box looking houses with thatch roofs. I think if you googled the terms used for U.K. houses with pictures you would understand the variety we have here. We know the size of a house by looking at the real estates particulars or rightmove, where the details tell you how many rooms and their individual sizes, ie 1 x bedroom is 12 ft x 12 ft, so you can visualise each room and if your furniture will fit, we don’t want to know the overall size all added together we want to know the individual room size, to see if your super king bed or sofa will fit. The dungeon is a cellar, or in USA a basement, some are damp and unmodernised some are done out as a cinema room so warm and part of the living accommodation! These idiots know nothing about British homes!
Utility rooms are pretty common in houses built pre 1970 as they originally had a part of it used as a coal shed to store coal for the fire which was delivered weekly . No one has coal fries now so most have become larger utility rooms where the washing machine / dryer and sometimes spare toilet is .
brits do have microwaves but they are used almost exclusively for food. granite or quartz worktops are considered high end and most houses have worktops made from wood. a hallway is necessary for two reasons, one, our winters are frigid and it's better to freeze a hallway than a room where you spend a lot of time, and two, those walls are usually load bearing and would collapse the house if taken down.
There are some terrace Houses which are incredibly large and expensive and prestigious. For example the terrace houses around Regents Park in London are 5-6 storeys high and over 10,000 ft and are likely to cost many millions anything over £25 million or much much more. They are usually early 19th century built during the Regency Period.
I live in a converted farm barn dated 1869. The outer walls are made of brick and flint and are approx 15 inches thick. It is gorgeous and I love it I have a beautiful garden b with lovely green lawn and lots of rose bushes and climbing roses on the walls as well as lots of other flowers
During the autumn and winter season I often have pheasants and partridges in my garden. It is wonderful and I love living in this house.
Nice to look back at a video of the Wandering Ravens. I was subscribed so I saw all of them. They had to stop making content, and I do miss them. Such lovely people!
The fitted over the bed storage is loved by some .most of us have both washing machines and drying machines but in the kitchen or a large cupboard.
With 70 million people living on a small island there isn't much space hence why our houses are so small.
We do have granite counter tops.
I live in a council flat. We have wooden work tops with a fake granite veneer because we are not fancy lol
We go by bedrooms. As in the number of them.
Yes we do all have a microwave in British homes.. & the wall between the hallway & living room is designed to keep the heat in the living room.. most houses were build way before centre heating so it kept the room warm.. hence we have smaller rooms x
Everyone I know has a Microwave what are they talking about.
A lot of people I know have a Dishwasher.
Yes most of us do have ether a Washer/Dryer (a single unit) or separate Washer and Dryer.
Yes loads of kitchens do have Granite Work Tops.
I will say again, What Are They Talking About ?
When was the last time they came back to the UK 🇬🇧
I don't know anybody here in the UK that doesn't have a microwave, but never for making tea!
Most of the traditional semis are over a hundred years old. Most rooms would have been heated by a coal fire. Separate rooms kept the heat in. Most have had some walls removed now. We still like an entrance hall or vestibule as you don't let the cold wet British winter in every time you open the door.
I don't think that most traditional semis are over 100 years old. The Victorians and Edwardians often did build semis but I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority were put up in the period 1930-1960 both in private housing estates and council estates so they would only be 60-90 years old. There is a remarkable uniformity of design up and down the country during that period which encompassed major building schemes energised by slum clearance and the destruction of housing stock during WWII.
@@MrBulky992 suppose we base our assessments on where we live. A semi built in 1922 IS a 100 years old. ALso Short of architectural students, historians, lawyers and estate agents I do not know who would quibble about so few years. Compared to the housing stock of the USA any housing that old IS old. The examples of British housing he was shown and asking about were not newer developments.
@@anitaherbert1037 I was querying use of the word "most" for purposes of accuracy. The classic semis we recognise today were not being built in the greatest numbers in 1922 and the years preceding (you said 'over 100 years'). The heyday of the semis was later, during the housing booms just before and after WWII.
@@MrBulky992 where I grew up the better terraces and semis were by one builder and then there was a boom in the 60sand in the 70s with the introduction of new industries.
In the UK you would struggle to find a house built of wood so the deviding walls are of brick or in older houses stone so noise doesn't tend to be a problem, plus the houses tend to last for hundreds of years.My house is 120years old I think of it as quite new.
Alot of old terraced housing in the UK have a coal cellar. Its not a full size basement, but is bigger than a crawl space.
In the UK we build our houses out of brick rather than wood and plaster. Brick makes for great sound (and heat) insulation so we rarely have problems with noise from neighbours. (Before anyone gets triggered, yes, I know it can happen, but I'm talking in general and compared to US apartments)
About the hallways in UK, having a separate hall/living room is a lot more heat efficient. Without the hallway your heat will be escaping up the stairs and going god knows where rather than just heating the single living room.
The emphasis is the other way round as regards Microwaves and making Tea. Both The USA and The UK use Microwaves to heat up food or cook quick, convenient food but 1% or LESS in The UK use Microwaves to make Tea though I have, personally, heated up a cup that I forgot about, and have gone cold.ALL Social gatherings in The UK are either inside or in the back garden. I have rarely (never ? ) seen a gathering on the front lawn, which is, usually, small.The London House prices are ridiculous and for 8 million + Londoners the average home costs £600,000 or $834,000. A large Broom Cupboard, in Kensington, went for over £200,000.
In the UK when looking at house sizes you go off the number of rooms and the general size of those rooms. A large house in the UK may have 5 bedrooms, an average house 3 bedrooms and a small house 2 bedrooms or less. We don’t use the total square feet or square metres fi the entire house as it’s just a number and most people don’t have a clue how much room that actually is!
I'm not sure I understood the video's point about Microwaves. I've never been in a UK house that didn't have a Microwave
We are minute compared to the u.s. , houses are compressed together I've lived in a semi detached built in the 50s and a terraced house built in the early 1900s . Some people live in cottages dating back hundreds of years .
We choose our houses by the number of rooms - how many bedrooms - does it have gardens or a garage etc - square footage is irrelevant
Detached just means it's not attached to another property 👍
I live in a detached 3 bedroom house with gardens back and front - the next houses on either side are only feet away we are separated by fences
I have 2 supermarkets within walking distance plus a pizza place a hairdresser a chemist 2 garages (for filling up with petrol) a park with woodland and swings and slides for kids - there are also a couple of infant/junior schools a doctor's surgery and a hospital - I can walk into town in 15 minutes and to a beach in 10 minutes 👍
I mainly use my microwave for heating up ready meals
I have a separate washer and drier in the kitchen - also a dishwasher I love it
Hi Ryan, these 2 stayed in various homes in the UK (I think they were 'House sitting' and 'dog sitting'), one of the places they stayed in had a dungeon.
When tornadoes and hurricanes are tearing up and destroying American wooden houses, I often wonder why more aren’t constructed from brick or stone etc. Surely they would provide a more resilient home for your extreme weather conditions?
"What did they expect?" , we say
18:59 that'll be all the rain. Grass is very easy to keep green if it rains every other week. But yeah, hanging out in the front garden unless you're working in it - watering plants, weeding, washing your car, etc is considered really weird. The back garden is where you chill out, on the dozen days a year where it's warm enough and not raining.
4:32 - There definitely are mobile homes in the UK, but they're called "static caravans" (caravan is British English for 'RV' or 'travel trailer'), and they're usually vacation homes.
Im from the uk and don't know anyone who doesn't have a tumble dryer, microwave and most people have a dishwasher!!
Older terraced houses in the UK have thick solid walls between them, and have very minimal sound transference. Some newer build terraced houses can be a bit noisy, but still better than a flat.
On property listings that have floorplans, they typically do have the total square footage at the bottom of the floorplan (sometimes its above).
UK estate agents will tell you how big each room is on the website and usually have a floor plan. Plus you can also see from the size of the house how big it is as they will have lots of pictures
Hallways - since it's a closed area you save on heating costs; it's practical because you don't have to heat the hallway, just the room you're staying in. If you have stairs in the hallway it's especially important to have a hallway because if not, all the heat will dissappear to the 2nd floor. That's why, in old houses you'll often find a door at the top or bottom of the stairs. Also, if there is a hallway with doors to other rooms, the gail that comes in when you open the front door will not reach the other rooms. That's the reason in old houses you often have a small hallway between the outer door and the inner door, it creates another barrier.
Traditionally, in Norway we operate with 'heated areas' (i.e. roms we stay in often and keep warm) and non-heated areas like the cellar, the hallways and just under the roof. Because of the difference in temperature you can use the different areas for varios purposes, e.g. storing root vegetables, jam and plants you need to keep frost free in the cellar, whereas dry things that are not damaged by the cold (e.g. smoked dry meat, summer clothes and the like) are stashed in the space just beneath the roof.
I don't live in the UK, but in Germany. But the situation with the hallways is exactly the same as in the UK. Most homes has it. And there are some good reasons to have it. There is always a place to hang your jacket or other things you need if you go outside. Your shoes,your bags, umbrella, keys and so on.
Another point is that you have less room to heat,when it's cold outside. So you can close the door of every room an heat it seperate. Most of Germans, and I think it's similar in the UK,don't warm their hallway or their bedroom. At least not so much as they would do it in the livingroom
AND WE DO USE MICROWAVES THERE JUST NOT OVENS, WE USE THEM FOR READY MEALS BTW WE DON'T USE THEM FOR TEA IF IT GETS COLD, WE TIP THEM OUT AND RE DO IT JUST TIPPING MOST OUT AND ADDING HOT WATER MAKES IT TASTE GROSS.......
Neighbours can be a big issue, I bought our semi detached specifically because it has a big extension, on the opposite side to our neighbour, in which our bedroom and lounge are situated, so we can play our music much louder without annoying the neighbour and rarely hear from him anyway as he's fortunately very quiet :) You hear a lot of horror stories about 'neighbours from hell' in the UK!
The walls in the entry might be load-bearing OR (and most likely) it's about containing heat. The bigger and more open the area, the harder to heat. I live in Australia and our homes are much more open-plan usually. That's because (in Queensland especially), the goal is to cool rather than heat most often.
In large parts of the US and Canada we are stuck in the middle. We need to retain heat in the winter and dump heat in the summer. We do this by insulating the shit out of everything and then using HVAC to get the temperature that we want. We heat and cool a 4,500 square foot open plan with 20' ceilings in half of the house with two heat pumps. If the great room (20' cube and open to most of the house) feels a little cool we throw another log on the fire.
Like most in the US though, we aren't coming in through the front door. You are usually coming in from the vehicle which is either in a garage or parked beside the house, so the mud-room is located next to the back/garage door and the front door has a foyer.
Termites don't eat brick house's they do wooden one's and brick house's tend to keep woodland critters out as well as rodents more than wooden one's
Everyone I know has a clothes dryer, microwave and dishwasher. The microwave and dishwasher are often built-in / integrated into the kitchen cabinetry. And lots of uk homes have a utility / laundry room for the washing machine and dryer. We do refurbish, upgrade our homes - it's almost a national pastime! My 30 year old son's home (shared with his gf now) is a modern town house outside Manchester (15 minutes from Manchester International Airport which has flights to nearly everywhere in the world) which includes 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a utility / laundry room, large sitting room, kitchen-diner, a garage and a decent garden. It's built on 3 storeys so the footprint is quite small but it fits in a lot of accommodation in a very efficient way.
I strongly advise against heating or reheating hot drinks in the microwave as there is a real risk of super-heating the liquid. If a drink is super-heated the water is actually above the temperature at which water boils and introduction of an object that contains multiple cavities (e.g. a rusty spoon) can result in instant boiling to the extent that the cup of liquid resembles a volcano.
Whilst this might sound like a fun idea to play around with, this can easily result in severe burns if the liquid gets on your skin (I actually saw this happen myself once - about 80% of the liquid left the cup).
In the most extreme examples the liquid can actually explode, and all that would be needed to make this happen would be to make the liquid move (e.g. taking it out of the microwave). Additionally, adding sugar or powder to the drink (or using a spoon with either still on the surface) would make the explosive action even more likely.
I live in a 4 storey, 4 bed brick terraced house. A lot of US homes seem to be made of wood, I would worry about the big bad wolf. My home is Victorian and has high ceilings and reasonable sized rooms. Although my hallway and bathroom aren't that large, it cuts down the heating bills. We are a fraction of the size of the US so that dictates home size a lot. My garden is at least 20 meters long and I have a smaller back garden, which is still bigger than many peoples front garden. We do have some people who live in static caravan type homes, usually older people whose children have left home and they want to downsize. I've been in a few they are more like bungalow's than mobile homes. I don't use my cellar space but it's 2 large rooms that could be lived in, if I spent £20,000 to do it up. I just can't imagine living in a house made of wood, when I see hurricanes in US they always seem to get blown away, very strange.
Adding to the talk about it being better insulation to have a hall, there is also the fact as 'mudrooms' are not a thing in the UK the hall is essentially our equivalent. So all the wet and dirty stuff can be contained in that room too. There was a craze a while back in the UK to make houses more open plan but while kitchen diners are fine, I was adamant when we were house hunting that I wouldn't live in home without a seperate hall. And having finally had the time to redecorate it back in 2020, I get a lot of pleasure coming home and entering into my beautiful hall. :-)
The hallways are to keep the warmth in the living room instead of letting it disappear up the stairs.
Usually only the living room was heated.
If you thinkg washing machines in the kitchen are strange take a look at the Netherlands. Most washing machines/dryers there are in the bathroom, something I had to get used to when I moved there from the UK.
House prices around the uk normally relate to location, proximity to public transport and services over actual size. Size matters, but ability to live matters more. That’s why a 4 bedroom house in the sticks will cost less than a studio flat across the road from a train station or within walking distance from a school or hospital. You count how many bedrooms you need, then filter by that, and rough geographical location, I.e proximity to your work or your kids school, then most of us arrange price low to high, then start making calls to organise viewings. Large rooms are a bonus, but unless you are made of money, number of rooms trumps that. Or you just cry coz you can’t afford any of them
80% americans having a dryer vs 58% of brits isn't even a big difference, so it shouldn't blow your mind. its a huge machine that takes up valuable space and the environment angle too
tumble driers make the house so damp, even with the thing you throw out of the window. We use clothes horses and radiators in winter. It's amazing how if you get a clothes horse and run a fan through it overnight, everything is dry in the morning, and fans are very cheap to run
A conservatory is usually boiling in summer and freezing in winter. People are starting to build extensions with glass ceilings or lanterns (ceiling windows) or posher new tech conservatories