The great window shortage of the late C20th

I’ve been house-hunting for quite a while now.  I know I should just hurry up and buy a house already, but I’m slightly hampered by the fact that, at the moment, the longer I wait the more the house prices seem to drop, and the bigger my savings get, so it’s a weird little gamble.

Plus, I have a roof over my head, and no one is in a hurry to kick me out, so I have no pressing *need* to buy a house, I just want to spend at least part of my adult life being the person who gets to say “I think a deck would look lovely, so I’m going to go ahead and make that happen.”

Also, my mother isn’t getting any younger, her hips are getting dodgier by the day, and she lives in a house with stairs - but she’s not going to buy a low-set house any time soon.  It will be much easier to turn around in five years and say “hey, Mum, why not move in with me in my comfortable low-set house where you don’t have to climb stairs everyday?” than it will be to say “just sell your house and buy a new one, already!”  This is the way it works with my mother.  She rarely takes suggestions and almost never accepts instructions, but occasionally falls for invitations.

One of my problems with the housing market is that I want to keep things cheap (if you take out a loan, you’re basically asking a bank to buy your house for you and then sell it back to you bit-by-bit for twice the price), but the houses in my price range at the moment seem to have be built by weirdos.

I know I’m not going to get a mansion for the amount I’m willing to pay, but is it too much to ask for windows?

It seems like most of the houses I’ve seen that were built in the 1980s and 1990s around these parts were constructed during some sort of window shortage.  I’ve lost count of the number of houses I’ve walked into that only have one window in each of the bedrooms, even if the rooms have two external walls.  They’ll cut a hole to fit in an air conditioner (which is necessary, because without two windows you don’t have any cross ventilation), but they couldn’t see their way to putting in another window.  Not even a small one.

I’ve even been in houses where, of the four external walls available, only two had windows in them.  Two whole walls of a house, completely windowless!

Why?  Were windows so expensive?  Was there some sort of window tax that I’m unaware of?  Do you save money on your rates if you aren’t using up so much of the council’s precious air supply?

What really weirds me out is the location of the windowless walls.  Okay, so maybe you don’t need a window looking out the side of your house and directly at your fence.  Fair enough.  But the majority of windowless walls I’ve noticed have been the wall at the rear of the house – facing out to the garden.

If you were going to pick any wall in your house and say “nah, I don’t want to see what’s outside there” – why, for the love of all things holy, would you make it the wall that overlooks your back yard?  Why would you position the window placement so that you could see the side fence that’s three feet away, but not your garden?  That’s just weird.

Call me crazy (go on, we both know it’s true), but I don’t want to buy a house where I can’t look out over my own grounds.

I might - *might* - end up buying a house that was a victim of the great window shortage (although I’m a big fan of air, so I’d like to avoid that , if possible) but I’ll be darned if I cough up good money for a windowless box that keeps me from seeing my own lawn.