Every time an upmarket home is bought in the UK, the new residents seem obliged to rip out the kitchen and install two bathrooms where there was only one.
It is almost a cast-iron rule that walking across the threshold means paying builders to rearrange what was there before, almost for the sake of it.
It is the same in government when Whitehall departments are merged or broken up. The difference is that the refreshed home will probably have extensive new plumbing to accompany the latest appliances and the state will not.
It’s that female nest-building thing. New kitchen, new bathrooms, this is my nest not that bitch before me. The answer to the government problem is not to elect women, obviously.
To me, let alone MrsBud, an en suite to our bedroom is a non-negotiable.
An alternative answer might be to have men with balls enough to say No.
See also : buggering about with the schedules when a new controller takes over a wireless station.
It’s not a female thing, all humans do it. Give a programmer some existing code to look after and the first thing they’ll do is make a piddling cosmetic change that has no effect on the code’s function, just to show it’s theirs. As an old boss of mine remarked, it’s like dogs marking their new territory.
When Whitehall departments are broken up, everybody involved should be immurated.
Given the parlous state of much of our housing stock, we ought to be bulldozing the houses and rebuilding them. But since the planning system doesn’t allow that, we have to make do with re-jigging the interior.
For kitchens specifically, nobody is going to install a new kitchen knowing that they’re (a) planning to move out in a few years’ time, or (b) expecting to die in a few years’ time. So most houses on the market will indeed have kitchens that are falling apart.
Feline Arthur,
I doubt that I was ever your boss but I have long described “painting the trains” as scent-marking.
“So most houses on the market will indeed have kitchens that are falling apart.”
This. Though we did put a new kitchen into a house in which we only ended up living for 2 years. What we did, however, was so good, that it was still there 2 or 3 subsequent owners and 20 years later…
More pertinently, this is a bigger problem, the higher up the market you go: one flats tend to have shorter tenures that 6 bed mansions. When you buy one of the latter, you’re inevitably looking at a kitchen put in 30 years ago…
What are the chances of there being a house set up to a person/family’s requirements for sale in the required area? More-or-less nil. “How much will I need to spend to get this how I want/need it?” is part of the equation of purchasing a house. Kitchens seem to be designed/installed by squirrels on speed because I’ve never bought a house where it’s laid out in a way that makes any sense to me. Optimise distance between kettle and fridge? Somewhere to stack up the plates/bowls after you’ve taken them out the dishwasher? Somewhere to put a hot tray out of the oven, even if you’re using the hob at the same time? Extractor that actually works? Nah, but look at the 25,000 spotlights, each with a mean time to failure of 45 seconds.
Plus, two toilets minimum. I’m not waiting for somebody else to finish having a bath just so I can have a dump.
Thing is, I’m spending my own money on sorting a house out. If someone else thinks I’m wasting it, sorry not sorry.
If the Minister wants to spend his/her own money then good luck to them. If they want to spend mine doing it then they ought to have some reasonable justification.
Oddly enough, something similar applies to anything secondhand: someone either didn’t want or need it any more, or there was something wrong with it that fixing was similar or more costly than replacing it. Cars for instance (although Matt, I suggest, isn’t looking to take a shit in one while someone in the family is driving – although you never know).