[kylegordon]

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]

> 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]

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]

> 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]

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!