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No surprises there. New builds have tiny rooms and very thin walls in my experience. The noise from the neighbours in new semi's and terraced houses can be unbarable.

I visited a friend in a new build in Oxford recently, and I was very impressed by the quality of the actual build. The walls were so well insulated they needed hardly any heating even when it was -10 outside, and the insulation was also fantastic sound deadening.

It was bloody tiny though.

An 850 house estate is currently under construction, on the island. Christ knows who they're going to find to fill them all - a matter of much discussion and concern, at the moment.

They've already been dubbed the Pan Meadows Breeding Boxes.

New houses tend to be quite dark inside now too, what with guidelines on the size of windows allowed on newbuilds - smaller windows specified to improve on insulation, and make them more thermally efficient. Great, you just have to turn the lights on during the day!

A 3 Watt light bulb uses less electric than a 20,000 Watt boiler.

Yeah, I got that.

My point was it seems counter-intuitive, daft even, to have the lights on during the day.

Yes but it depends on who will be living there. Working people will be out during the day. So lighting will not be needed during the day. Though even if they have to use extra lights if it means less or even no heating bills then that might be a reasonable offset.

My house is terraced, built in the 1920s. My room is the smallest (used to be the largest but at some point was divided to provide an upstairs bathroom). Despite it being the smallest, it's still quite sizeable - I could easily fit three double-sized beds and still have room to walk between them (just about). In some of the more modern 3-bed houses I've seen, the smallest bedroom really is a tiny box room.

In the news, a chap from some building industry stated that the reason for smaller rooms was essentially money. Less floorspace = less building material required = less cost. But I wonder how much of a saving there really is, and how much is passed on to the buyer. It wouldn't surprise me if the reduction in floorspace meant a reduction in cost that was not passed on to the buyer.

I completely agree with the fact that builders are skimming buyers with smaller houses yet still asking the same for an equivalent roomed house in the area.

As for bed rooms people spend years of their life in their bedrooms so they now want bigger comfier beds in them. Longer term government regulations should mandate that house sizes are not shrinking, and penalise builders very heavily for doing so. Other wise they will just accept the fines as a cost of trading.

rules of thumb says area of glazing should be at least 20% of floor area. And ceiling around 6.4? I can't remember exactly but there are guidelines on comfort for this kind of things. Housing developers make enormous profits. However most of them have to please the stock market as the are quoted. I think housing development such as these should be a non for profit business led by council consortium where
houses would be sold just over actual cost. Or even better, let people buy land ans build their own houses!

Edit: Bovis, housing builder, commented last month that its profit went up 230% this year.... the industry isn't dead for everyone...

We don't really have estates over here, in the way that the UK does. Generally people buy a plot of land, design their dream house and build it / have it built for them.

Large windows are generally a "must" for people over here, but if you use the right sort, they are well insulated. Our lounge window is 1,5M high and nearly 5M long. We replaced the single pane of glass that was in there, when we bought the house with 3 double glazed units, that made a big difference to the heating bill!

Our house was built in the 40's. The smallest bedroom is a lot bigger than the poxy box rooms you get on modern builds.

Can I have mine tiled instead? I use want to be different.

The wife and I have been looking at houses. Some of the new 3 bedroom houses feel like they have less room than my 2 bed flat, smaller rooms all round. My flat was only built in 2004 so is not so new but it has 2 good size bedrooms and a very large lounge/dining room. It feels spacious.

The thing is that this has been a trend for many years. I was house hunting with a girlfriend some years ago and the rooms on the new builds were smaller then. Go to some older homes and you can see the difference.

Hands Off Our Land: the 300,000 new homes already 'in the bank'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/hands- ... -bank.html