15 Differences Between British & American Houses 🏠

hey guys i'm eric and grace we're the wandering ravens we're an american couple with a deep love for all things uk so today we're drinking yorkshire tea and exploring the differences between british and american homes shout out to our friends jeff and connie from the uk for sending us this delicious tea this is a really exciting episode because we've lived in nine different british houses and dozens of american houses so we've compiled a rather modest list of differences between british and american homes but before we get into those if learning about how we provincial yanks live causes you to cackle with glee then make sure you click subscribe because we release new uk versus usa videos every single saturday also make sure you give this video a like to promote it on youtube and because if you don't i will put this tea bag back in my tea okay the first thing we need to talk about are the differences between the way brits and americans talk about the places we live in the uk we would call this a terrorist house but in the united states we call this why are you australian am i australian yeah you have to sound like you're from the south south in the uk we call this a terrorist house in the united states we call this a townhouse i did it again you did you sounded australian again i'll just i'll just say it in my normal voice okay up next we have a semi-detached house which of course we would call a duplex or triplex in the uk this is a detached house and here in good old yankee land this is simply a house and last but not least of course we have a flat which here in america we call an apartment or condominium or condo and we've heard a lot of people express confusion about the terms apartment and condo so let's clear that up real quick basically an apartment building is where all the units are owned by the same company or person and they're leased out individually but a condo could be the same thing as an apartment building and look and appearance except that all of the units are owned individually from what i understand in the uk there is no distinction between those two it's simply a flat everything is a flat yeah now that we've defined our terms let's talk about who lives in what so kicking things off with the yanks seventy-two percent of americans live in houses twenty percent live in apartments five percent live in mobile homes or trailers and three percent live in other accommodations such as rvs vans and boats across the pond the numbers are fairly similar with a little over 79 percent of brits living in houses 20 living in flats and less than one percent living in other housing like vans rvs igloos and old shoes there was an old woman who lived in a shoe she had so many children she didn't know what to do when it comes to houses the big difference here is that while 61 of americans live in detached houses only 24 of brits live in detached houses this difference is easy to explain though given that american suburbs can basically roll on forever and so there's a lot more room to build detached houses yeah that was something that really gave us a culture shock when we first arrived in the uk was just the rows upon rows of semi-detached or terraced houses they're really cool though they look very nice they are i kind of feel like i would like to live in a terrorist house terrorist a terrorist house now let's roll into our next difference look at the floor plans and talk about house size something that surprised us was that in the uk the average house size is 76 square meters or for our yankee friends that's 818 square feet which is not only smaller than the average american house but is also smaller than the average house in australia denmark france spain and even ireland american houses on the other hand are nearly three times larger than british homes coming in at an average size of 214 square meters or 2 303 square feet that's huge that is that it is nice yeah that is really big now let's talk about flats the average one bedroom flat in the uk is 46 square meters or 495 square feet while in the usa the average one-bedroom apartment or condo is 70 square meters or 757 square feet here's another really interesting thing i discovered while doing research for this video if these numbers that we're shouting off the square footage size of the house and all that if that if those mean nothing to you don't worry you're not alone because a recent study by barclays bank found that 57 percent of brits don't know the size of their home don't even know how big their house is the square meter age or footage and 25 of brits don't actually know what a square meter or foot even is this makes sense because we have looked for properties in the uk before homes in the uk when we're like what if we immigrated to the uk we've looked at homes for sale and it's very rare to have the square meterage listed at all so you're like how big is this place i have no idea this is true because if you're shopping for homes in the states which whenever we move to a new city because we do house sitting whenever we pop up in a new city we always go on and look at all the real estate to see what housing costs there and if you look at a housing website here in the states it's going to list everything by size so you can sort by square footage you can say i want a minimum of a thousand square feet or i want to place between 800 and a thousand square feet and most americans will know the size of their house so i think this difference between real estate in the uk and the us and listing square footage is probably why most brits don't know the size of their home but if you're british do let us know do you know why british real estate companies don't mention the square footage because it is very frustrating when we're looking for homes in the uk which we do rather regularly um and we don't know how big this house is so i'm like oh that you know this this house only costs 200 000 pounds but i don't know how big it is so i can't tell if this is a good deal or a terrible deal it's probably just like one of those little like stick huts in the backyard it's the shoe it's the old lady's shoe now let's step through the front door and talk about the next difference between british and american homes which is rooms so kicking things off with british homes the average british house will have a living room the kitchen a bathroom or two a couple of bedrooms the dining room and of course some homes will have the odd conservatory or dungeon and we're probably gonna get some flack for the way we said that because we would say conservatory but you guys would probably say conservatory that's it yeah conservatory concern i would love to have one in my future probable home someday which might be a british home if we ever figure out the square footage now let's jump across the pond and look at the bog standard american house the box standard american house will have all of these rooms that we just listed except for conservatories and of course dungeons but the american house will have some rooms that we don't see in the uk very often these rooms include the laundry room or utility room the food pantry where you store food the garage the basement and the den or office of course we understand that some british homes the ones on the larger side do have these rooms as well but we've only seen them in one or two out of the nine homes that we've stayed in so far now let's talk about house construction one thing we noticed while we were in the uk was that most homes seem to be built out of brick or stone whereas across the pond in the u.s most of our houses are built out of wood and this is a question we've received from a lot of brits both in person and in the comment sections why are american homes made out of cheap flimsy wood would you build your ship out of rocks that is my question would you build it out of rocks i think not yeah that's true case closed no but seriously wood is cheap strong it's renewable and it also lasts forever there's uh i think the oldest american house that's made out of wood dates all the way back to the 1600s and in the uk you guys have wooden houses dating back to the 1300s another misconception that we hear a lot is that american homes are only made from wood but there is a lot of regional variety in some places in the states wood is really rare and most houses are actually built out of brick and masonry and in parts of the states where there are wooden houses they're generally a compilation of cinder blocks bricks stones steel beams sheetrock i think the difference here is that throughout the history of the uk there's been this long history of deforestation and so lumber hasn't been a plentiful resource so it just makes sense brick and stone houses make sense there whereas in the states we have lumber everywhere and so it makes sense that houses are made out of wood so i don't think one is like better than the other i think a stone cottage is better than than the other that's true i like the stone cottages but i also like the half-timbered houses like tutor houses and stuff like that okay yeah those look really nice you don't like tutor houses no i like them but i wouldn't want to live in one i would want to live i would want to live in a stone cottage all right now we're going to start talking about some of the fun miscellaneous differences between british and american homes starting with washing machines so it's common for british people to have their washing machines located in their kitchens which was quite a surprise to us because here in the u.s we have a separate room that is dedicated to washing your clothes along a similar vein 80 of american households have a clothes drying machine while only 58 of british households do we uk when we house it we have to get used to air drying our clothes and it's always such a pain because because the uk is a little bit more damp i feel like it takes a long time for anything to dry it'll just stay perpetually wet for days it makes sense that in the uk where you guys are more environmentally conscious in general than here in the states you guys would forego having a drying machine although i would put this in the category of accidentally environmentally friendly kind of like the house size like it's not intentional it's more a consequence of size constraints but it's a positive consequence the next difference between british and american homes is closets closets are another feature of the american house in fact in standard real estate practice it's common to not actually list a room as a bedroom unless it has a closet across the pond in the uk we never saw a bedroom with closets from what i remember all of the homes we stayed in either had a wardrobe for clothes or they had those fitted wardrobe things that go over the bed which at first we thought were really nice we walked into a room with it and we were like this looks so great but the friends we were staying with quickly informed us that it's considered quite tacky and poor taste it was news to us have you ever seen one of those in the states i haven't have me neither no i haven't so you guys let us know is this poor taste or is this the the height of fashion another thing about the closet craze is that it's a huge status thing to have like a walk-in closet like if you have a walk-in closet you're like making it yeah you need to have to be able to display your thousands of pairs of shoes and pants and clothes and anyways thousands of pairs of pants the next big difference is porches in the uk we didn't really see any houses with porches especially wrap around porches a feature that is almost ubiquitous with american homes porch furniture yes porch swings porch swings are really common instead of having a porch brits seem to opt for a backyard patio or garden patio and this reminds me of another difference that we noticed you guys can confirm or deny this for us but it seems that british people prefer to hang out behind their house rather than in front of it whereas americans it's a pretty even mix of both in the uk if you go to someone's house you're always going to be in the garden never in the front garden bit i actually prefer that because it feels more like you are in that person's space like you know it's more hospitable yeah in the back as opposed to being in the front where all the neighbors can walk might be like oh i wonder what's happening over it jackie's house today the next difference is microwaves now as you guys probably already know it is very common for pretty much every american household to have a microwave in their kitchen this is for reheating things like coffee or soup or even god forbid tea not just reheating tea but actually boiling the water for tea i've still never done that before my family did like growing up really stick the water in there and like wait for it to boil and then you pull it out and put the tea bag in exactly really but it's really terrible because what it does is it heats up the mug itself so you have to like use a napkin or something to pull it out of the microwave because the whole mug is on fire i've literally never done that i thought when the brits were making fun of us for doing that that that wasn't something any americans did no it's something americans do i'd like to say not throwing my family under the bus they did eventually get rid of the microwave and now exclusively use an electric kettle the next difference is dishwashers around 49 of british households have dishwashers in their home whereas around 68 of american households have dishwashers just like laundry machines and dryers this makes a lot of sense there's a lot less room in a british house so you're not going to have room for dishwasher but on the plus side since you have the clothes washing machine in the kitchen already you can just chuck your your tea mug and plates in there tumble wash tumble wash them pull them out got your pants and your plates clean in the same load nice that's great the next difference is what i'm really excited about because i haven't seen anyone mention this before and so this might be an eric and grace original and this difference is hallways while american homes do have hallways they're not used quite the same way as they are in the uk the big difference is that in the uk when you walk into a house you almost always walk into a hallway of the nine homes that we stayed in i want to say eight of those had you walking directly into a hallway rather than into like we have in the states into a living room into a kitchen or another sort of common area so what i'm talking about is that in the uk you have a house so here's a house beautiful beautiful house and you'll have the front door here's the front door and then when you walk in you have this hallway and then very often you have stairs off to one side so this is an example of a house that we stayed in and leads come in the front door here if you go through the back there's uh some bedrooms back here you go up the stairs to the second floor here if you want but the thing that really tripped me up and the thing that i want to ask you guys about is that here you have this hallway you have these walls and then you have a door and if you walk through here you walk into the living room and what really confused me is why this hallway existed because it seems to me like if you just knock down these walls and this door you would have a much bigger living room it would increase by two to three feet if you build houses in the uk and you know why is it just tradition i feel like you could really maximize on space and have a much bigger house by knocking those walls down now that we've talked about a difference that confuses us about the uk let's hop across the pond and talk about something that bugs the heck out of us in the states so this difference let's just call it stupid granite countertops most american kitchens seem to have what i like to call stupid granite countertops the granite that i'm talking about it has that shine it's almost like it has little bits of silver in it yeah okay literally i know exactly what you're talking about yeah you put a light on it and the counter glitters ah it's so bad you think it just looks maybe a little tacky or a little bit like it's um supposed to look luxurious but maybe it's just yes that's exactly it's an attempt to look posh yeah fails but we never saw those in the uk which was a huge reprieve we needed that and so thank you uk for helping us recover from stupid granite countertops now it's your turn what differences have you noticed between british and american homes and is there anything about american homes in particular that really confuses you if you're not american drop those questions down in the comments and we will do our very best to answer those and if you haven't already do make sure that you subscribe to this channel not only does that help us grow and spread the glory of british culture around the internet but it also makes sure that you do not miss our next british culture video a cheeky thank you to our patrons andrew and simon we really appreciate you guys and your support of our endeavors here on the youtube if you are curious how to join our patreon the link to that is down in the description again i'm eric and i'm grace we're the wandering ravens and we'll see you in the next video ttfn [Music] you

Channel: Wandering Ravens

Views: 64,191

Rating: 4.919786 out of 5

Keywords: Differences Between British & American Homes, British vs American homes, ways British and American houses are different, American vs uk homes, American houses vs British houses, differences between British and American houses, British houses, American houses, British homes, American homes, british culture, uk culture, americans in uk, americans in england, americans react to british houses, two taps, british outlets

Id: 6EF2UqzUshc

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021