Owners destroyed the soul of their own house
3 years ago by Striker to c/mildlyinfuriating
And a public good. They keep things cooler when it's really hot out, keep things warmer when it's really cool out, mildly improve air quality, reduces noise pollution, provide measurable mental health benefits, and so on.
Around here removing big trees is illegal, on your property or not. I'm a fan.
Open soil instead of pavement also helps reduce flooding during heavy rainfall since the ground absorbs water instead of just making it run off to somewhere else.
The reason is probably "raking is work." I see this shit all the time in Florida, where we really need more shade trees.
To keep the grass from dying. Many trees (nothing like that in these pictures) can drop a huge quantity of leaves that are quite effective—both physically and chemically—at killing off surrounding grass, even out from under the shade of the canopy. Leaves can make great vegetable garden compost. But in huge quantities they are not kind to grass.
Considering they also took out the shrubs I’m betting not, though that tree closest to the house the roots may have been affecting the foundation I guess.
It legit looks like half of the weed dispensaries in my city. Who tf would actually do that to their home tho
Ah yes, the rare parking without any car access.
Wow, it's even worse than I imagined on the inside. Not one ounce of good taste.
But yeah, none of that pavement is accessible to cars except for the ramp where the range is parked.
Yeah but the concrete is elevated. I don’t see how. Car can get up it.
To the right of the bottom picture a sign(guessing the business) has been cropped out of view.
I was just thinking who needs this much parking space.
If I can walk two minutes and get to a park, I wouldn't mind not having a lawn. I imagine such a situation is unthinkable for people who are reacting strongly here. I personally live seconds away from a green space.
Just steal the image and put the source in the body text. That way you're not redirecting everyone to reddit. Sort of defeats the purpose of the protests.
all better
why? people have the right to do what they want with their property.
if you don't believe that, they join a HOA and setup their bullshit regulations that require your lawn to be perfect and green or you get fined hundreds of dollars.
HOAs can be absolutely awful, with power tripping board members and management companies that steal collected funds. But if you want to live in a manicured, upscale, gentrified suburb that's the best way to get ahead of crappification, salvage grade cars on blocks in the yard, appliances on the porch and meth houses.
Me, I'd rather a large buffer of land between me and my neighbors. I do realize those with commuter jobs can't practically get tens of acres to live on, however.
personally i like seeing salvage cars in someones' yard next to a home that is upscaled mcmansion.
that's why i live in the city. variety and no bullshit regulations about how your house has to look.
i also feel i have no right to judge or condemn anyone else's aesthetic choices with their property. personally i removed all my lawn bullshit and i put in low/zero maintenance flowers and shrubs and i let it grow wild. my neighbors fucking hate me, but they are miserable lawn worshiping types who make passive aggressive comments out of 'neighborly concern' because they think I'm a meth-head for not walking a manicured water-wasting soul-sucking lawn. I also drive a regular $10K car and not a $60,000 SUV, which also pisses them off.
It's like they heard lawns were bad for the environment, but stopped listening at the part about replacing it with native plants.
Yes, I feel like a good idea was taken in a very strange direction here.
Capitalism has drained their soul. They don't think artistically. They don't think about nature. They don't see beauty. Their art is corporate art.
Man I don't know, that's weird. Maybe they just prefer it this way? Some people don't like the cottage/nature kind of aesthetic. I think their house is ugly as sin but it's just a matter of personal taste.
Thats okay, but then why buy a cottag-y in nature house and then change it instead of buying something more fitting from the get go.
Even if the house was a good bargain, I cannot imagine the added cost of tearing out all those trees, paving the front yard, and remodeling/updating the interior would be cheaper than just buying a house that was already like that.
Chad Soviet architecture enjoyer
Just before the previous owners of my house decided to put the house on the market they painted all wood inside (stairs, doors, door frames, window frames, skirting) pitch black.
Yes thanks, I enjoy living in a cave. Removing, sanding and painting all that will take me 100s of hours.
Oh, and it was done with the cheapest paint possible while painting over all hinges, locks and sometimes windows.
They're covering the blood spatters. And needed to do it fast and cheap.
Aah yes, the landlord special.
I would have left the trees alone, but removed the grass and covered it with small black and grey stones. That way the trees would still look nice, and the rain water can still pass through the rocks and prevent flooding, unlike this mess. This looks like a business now, it’s not a home anymore.
pass through the rocks and prevent flooding
Yah, that doesn't work that way. Water needs to get pulled into plants or water channels created by dead plant root systems, or it just runs off. This is why deserts have flash floods.
why deserts have flash floods
I had to look that up, interesting!
It should actually be an offence for someone to do this. That change from garden to hard standing will cause issues with any drains and probably cause flooding.
The wife is on point too
People are focusing on the house in the middle, but if you look at he whole picture, it isn't that one house. It's every single house on both streets. It's not just this specific owner. If this were the US, I'd suspect a HOA at work.
Not sure if joking, but councils are in charge of the municipal borough - usually a big town/city and the area around it.
Some people rent their houses from the council - council houses. This tends to mainly be people on low income, as the rates are low.
Because these are rented, the council can make sure you are not doing anything to harm the value of the house. When the houses need maintenance (new windows, new roofs), the council will perform it at no cost to the tenants - usually an entire estate at once, which is why they look alike.
Obviously the council has no say over houses it doesn't own. Unless you are breaking the law in some way (e.g. causing a health concern), you're allowed to do what you want.
I feel like you are the only other person to catch that. The entire neighborhood got rid of their trees. I wonder what the story is here.
It's honestly baffling to me. I expected a lot of other people to be talking about that, but ever comment was acting like it was that specific house.
UK
Yes I know what country it is. It says it right there. Which is why I said, IF it were the US, meaning that I know that it is not.
The house was horrible enough to start with; a characterless inter-war bungalow with fake timbering and fake leaded glass. The conversion is just differently horrible.
For me it's the destruction of the garden that warrants it being here. I know it's the UK so the sun isn't always available (edit: just seen the Zoopla link, it's Bolton, so change "always" to "ever") , but losing shade and shelter like that is a tragedy in any climate.
Never understood homes that pave/block out all the greenery; makes the home depressing af all for saving some 30min of upkeep per week.
there's a common misunderstanding in texas, as well, about cedar trees.
a while back, a ranch owner with ALOT of land, who was considered a great steward of trees, was interviewed for an article and stated that new cedars used too much water and that he tears them all out of areas where he wants to maintain a forest of alternate trees (i.e. oak, elm, whatever, idk)
everyone took that to mean tear out all cedar trees whether there was a forest of other trees or not, no matter how much land you have. they completely overlooked the qualifiers to practice this type of land management. (obviously owning cows are a different story, but almost none of these people own cows)
a ridiculous amount of land in Central Texas (esp the hill country) now is barren save the 1 or 2 odd scraggly oak trees here and there. anytime someone buys land (even a couple of acres) the first thing they do is clear cut the damn place, causing unnecessary erosion, bringing in uneeded heat, and in general, killing the ecosystems that made that area special in the first place.
You don't even need that. Personally a overgrown garden looks better than no garden.
Who hates lawns? 🤔
I do. I'm not sure how much of an issue it is in other countries, but most (if not all) lawn grasses grown in the States are actually non-native (yes, even "Kentucky Bluegrass", which is actually native to Europe). I wouldn't really mind lawns as much if it was normal to use native ground cover.
Lots of people, including myself. There are even "nolawn" communities here and on reddit. The reddit one is very active. Lawns, at least in the US, are practically an ecological wasteland. They use non-native grasses, typically lots of fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides which are terrible for the local pollinator populations (save the bees!), and removing trees and shrubbery in order to have a manicured lawn reduces habitat for birds, bats, and various, essential other species.
It is much better to use native plants in your yard.
Sure they didn't turn it into a shop? Those definitely look like they were made into display windows
In Australia it would be a 15-storey block of incredibly substandard flats lol
That millennials still cannot afford
Honestly, no. At least where I live, they're finally starting to do something against gravel gardens. They are illegal here (have been for decades but no-one did anything against it) and they're absolutely terrible for the environment and destroying green space (additionally to them being very bad for bees and further sealing the floor which is awful when any flood happens). Luckily people shouldn't be able to do absolutely everything they want if it hurts everyone so much.
Gravel gardens seal the ground? I thought it was just gravel on top of dirt.
I would prefer housing authorities don't require manicured grass lawns. They are so expensive to keep up and repair, especially since many don't use native grass species so they need watering in the summer if you don't want them to go brown.
How do you feel about HOAs?
I'm not living in the US. As far as I know, it's something very ridiculous that every house needs to look absolutely the same (I feel the freedom). And no, what I wrote isn't "the same", mandating how every garden needs to look exactly the same is something entirely different to fighting against very specific "garden" styles that combat the environment and are bad for the infrastructure (see floods). I'm fine with people having their garden however they want and doing stuff, but it needs to be in certain boundaries, e.g. that you aren't allowed to seal all ground which is terrible for bees, the environment in its wholeness and dangerous during floods.
If there are some rare edge cases where many things depend on it and there are very good reasons to set a certain boundary but otherwise leave the freedom to do the own garden and house how they want, that's something different to just mandating that there is no possibility to choose anything about it's looks and destroy all creativity and uniqueness.
Got it. HOAs get bad press for requiring every house to look the same, but the basic function they serve also includes preventing stuff like the above. How far they go depends on the HOA, but one that just prevents egregious stuff like the above isn't fundamentally different from one that requires near uniformity.
I just ask because lots of people hate HOAs, but this is one big reason they exist.
I think it depends on where the yard is. A luscious green garden of non-native plants is a waste of water in desert areas. With the kinds of droughts that are becoming more common, replacing yards with rocks and low-water native plants is beneficial. And to be honest, even in areas that aren't in a drought, manicured lawns don't do much for the environment because they get loaded with pesticides and fertilizers to keep them as green and homogenous as possible. No flowers, no weeds, no bugs, no seeds, no diversity.
Yeah I agree but man I personally would have some bushes in front of those windows but I walk around naked.
Some old fart who got tired of yelling at kids, “Get off my lawn!”
People who hate cat poop in their garden
they don't want to maintain a yard. it costs money and time.
now its a gulag
100% agree this is a terrible looking house- I think the function of the raised platform must be because it's on a dangerous corner or intersection, so it acts as a safety structure from vehicles. They would've gotten special planning permission to do something like that.
I suspect that the shrubs and tree to the left of the picture had started destroying the retaining wall. You can see that there are wall-coloured encroachments onto the pavement on that side.
The house isn't at a corner, as such - the street to the side is bollarded off.
So, given that the trees and retaining wall needed replacing, I'm guessing they took the opportunity to build the wall higher and level the whole garden. I probably would try to level it if I was rebuilding the wall too.
I wonder if not backfilling the wall with soil means it no longer counts as a retaining wall, and thus circumvents some planning / structural issues.
Bollards hidden in nice hedgework or a nice heavy duty wrought iron fence would look a lot better and not completely ruin the aesthetic.
I found a real estate listing for the house (yes, you could own this beauty), but I don't know if posting it would count as doxxing per community rules, so I won't. In any case, this is not a business.
They want £300k+. Based on what was written, the whole idea was minimal maintenance and maximum room for parking. The back yard/back "garden" is the same as the front: just a bunch of tile. The interior is less offensive, but just what you'd expect: very modern, lots of black and white and bold shapes.
Lol did you just link to a reddit post from Lemmy?
Yeah they did. it’s hilarious
What a waste. I'm so glad with way to much green in the garden now it's 30c + outside, it's so much cooler.
Just wait till someone finds the safe buried under there and uploads a picture to Re... err. Lemmy.
WTFF. That's terrible
Is that cement? Oof
That's an architect's house right there. Guaranteed. Stark feel, contrasting colors, even geometric lines, minimal but very intentional organic elements ("plants" in the windows - probably fake). I'm in the business and have worked on architect's houses. They are generally split 80/20 between ridiculous modern art and warm, inviting, immensely functional spaces. There is no in between.
Haha what the fuck, that looks absolutely terrible. How did they ever think this was a good idea?
Going for zero maintenance. Zero beauty.
It looks like the whole neighborhood
What a fucking nightmare.
Looks like it ruined the whole area by the looks of it.
Maybe they plan to park cars there.
Or maybe they just don't like cutting the grass. Can't blame them. I hate having to cut the grass all the time.
Grow wildflowers or moss then? So many better solutions to that problem than this abomination.
There are alternatives to having a lawn. The great people over at nolawns@slrpnk.net can help you.
Personally, I've replaced large areas with native plants. They take care of themselves.
Whyyyyyyy, it looks so soulless
Looks like it ruined the whole area by the looks of it.
The only thing that makes sense in my mind is, maybe the owner's permanently on wheels and needs a flat, hard surface for their mobility device?
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Trees are a luxury, growing something like that takes time. I hope they really have a good reason for doing what they did.
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