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Also in Scotland, currently in the final week of living in this house, and I've discovered a few things during my house hunting travels. News from builders is t

Also in Scotland, currently in the final week of living in this house, and I've discovered a few things during my house hunting travels. News from builders is that new builds aren't built to have a 'proper' garage - they're built to have a storage garage, to the point that a modern larger variety car won't fit. Couple that with modern cars being bigger than they were 40 years ago means that your average Wimpey home from the 70's won't have a large enough garage. Builders also resist building out, in favour of building up in order to get more from the tranche of land. My wife and I despise most cookie cutter new builds, but we took a tour around a new build estate for a laugh one day... postage stamp gardens, no hammerheads for turning a car, and a driveway large enough for one car. We had to use someones driveway to turn the car around... and these are 'spacious 4 and 5 bedroom homes' on offer for £400+k Housing in the UK really is pitiful. We have some of the smallest homes in the world these days.

fennecfoxen 10y ago
> Housing in the UK really is pitiful Eh, I'm trying out London myself these days... and San Francisco makes the flats here look spacious. And Scotland... Driveways! Gardens! Wow.
- arethuza 10y ago
  The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet. I was amazed to see brand new build lovely houses on sale that had no broadband availability - and this was maybe 20 mins from Perth.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet. That may be asking for too many mutually exclusive interests. If you want a large house then you're going to increase the commute. If you want a lot of high tech jobs then living spaces nearby are going to be at a premium.
    - arethuza 10y ago
      Och yes - nothing specific to Scotland about those trade-offs. Availability of decent Internet bandwidth is completely unpredictable though - one house in a rural area might be 2Mbps and another house 1km away (and no closer to a town) might, in one extreme case we found, get 450Mbps and nobody could explain to me why this was the case!

fennecfoxen 10y ago

> Housing in the UK really is pitiful Eh, I'm trying out London myself these days... and San Francisco makes the flats here look spacious. And Scotland... Driveways! Gardens! Wow.

arethuza 10y ago
The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet. I was amazed to see brand new build lovely houses on sale that had no broadband availability - and this was maybe 20 mins from Perth.
- flukus 10y ago
  > The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet. That may be asking for too many mutually exclusive interests. If you want a large house then you're going to increase the commute. If you want a lot of high tech jobs then living spaces nearby are going to be at a premium.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    Och yes - nothing specific to Scotland about those trade-offs. Availability of decent Internet bandwidth is completely unpredictable though - one house in a rural area might be 2Mbps and another house 1km away (and no closer to a town) might, in one extreme case we found, get 450Mbps and nobody could explain to me why this was the case!