5 Questions to Ask Before Buying a Home With a Bad Floor Plan

You’ve found the house. The street is right, the light is good, the price is almost believable — and then you walk through it a second time and something nags. The kitchen is stranded at the back of the house. The only way to the laundry is through a bedroom. The living room has four doorways and nowhere sensible to put a sofa.

Here is the part most buyers don’t realise: a bad floor plan is the one fault your building inspection will never flag. It isn’t a defect. Nothing is broken. The house is doing exactly what it was drawn to do — it was just drawn badly, or drawn for a family who lived very differently to you.

I get asked about these houses constantly, usually with photos attached and an auction three days away. So here are the five questions I’d want answered before anyone signs anything.

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First: a bad plan isn’t automatically a dealbreaker

Before the questions, some perspective — because “bad floor plan” gets used as a reason to walk away from houses that were perfectly fixable.

As I put it in a project submission once: a key part of my practice is layout planning and solving awkward floor plans, because good design starts with how a home functions day to day. Most of what I do is making an existing plan behave, not redrawing it.

So the real question was never “is this plan bad”. It’s is this plan fixable, and what does fixing it cost. That’s what the next five questions are for.

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Question 1: Is it the plan, or is it just the furniture in it?

This is the cheapest question on the list and almost nobody asks it.

A good half of the “awkward” rooms people send me aren’t awkward rooms at all. They’re normal rooms holding a sofa that’s 400 mm too long, a rug that’s two sizes too small, and every single piece of furniture shoved against a wall. The room isn’t fighting you. The furniture is.

Open homes bend this the other way. Styled furniture is often deliberately undersized — a two-seater where a family needs a three, a 900 mm dining table where yours is 1800. Rooms photograph bigger than they live. The only honest answer comes from a tape measure, not a feeling.

Measure the two rooms you care most about. Write down where the doors and windows land, because that’s what really decides where furniture can go — a 4 × 4 m room with one door is generous, and the same room with three doors and a window seat is close to unusable. Then go home and see whether your own furniture fits. I’ve written about the specific traps in living room layout mistakes and how to solve them without buying anything new.

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Question 2: What is actually holding this layout in place?

Every plan is held in position by something. Some of it is obvious — load-bearing walls, the staircase, where the drains run. Some of it is invisible until a builder tells you about it.

So at the inspection, look for the rules. Where’s the meter box? Where’s the hot water unit? Which walls have plumbing behind them — bathroom, kitchen, laundry — and are they stacked above each other or scattered? Is there a wall between the kitchen and the living area that looks like it was added later, or does it look like it’s holding up the roof?

A plan that needs one non-structural wall taken out is a completely different purchase to a plan that needs the kitchen moved to the other end of the house. Both might be described as “opening it up” by an agent. They’re not in the same universe financially.

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Question 3: Where is this house wasting its space?

Most bad plans aren’t short of floor area. They’ve just given the area to the wrong rooms.

The clearest example I’ve ever worked on is the Fourty-one ensuite. The old one was bigger than what replaced it, and it was a mess: the toilet sat at the door, so it was the first thing you saw; a large window cut straight through the middle of where all the utilities needed to go; and the shower was jammed into a dark corner you could barely get to. We made the ensuite smaller on purpose and gave the space back to the walk-in robe, which is what that client actually needed. Smaller room, better room. Turner went the same way — an upstairs powder room was given up to gain a walk-in robe and an opened-up ensuite with a spa bath and a double vanity.

So walk the house asking which rooms are bigger than the life that’s going to happen in them. Formal dining rooms nobody in your family will sit in. A hallway wide enough to be a room. A fourth bedroom that’s really a study with pretensions. An ensuite eating the robe.

Wasted space is good news when you’re buying. It means the fix might be a redistribution rather than an extension — and redistribution is the cheap end of renovating.

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Question 4: Which way does it face — and when would you actually use each room?

You can move a wall. You cannot move the sun.

Orientation decides how a plan feels far more than most buyers expect, and it decides what you can do with it later.

Open homes are almost always Saturday mornings, which is the most flattering hour a house gets all week. Go back at the time you’d actually be in the room. A west-facing living room is charming at 11am in September and a furnace at 5pm in February. A south-facing kitchen you cook dinner in every night will need a lighting plan, not a paint colour.

Open the compass on your phone while you’re standing in the main living space and write down which way the biggest windows point. It takes ten seconds and it’s free, and it will tell you more about living in that house than the second bedroom’s built-in robes ever will.

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Question 5: Would you fix it in year one, or year five?

This is the question people answer dishonestly, and it’s the one that decides whether they end up resenting the house.

Almost everyone buying a compromised plan says “we’ll fix it later”. Sometimes that’s true. Often the deposit, the stamp duty and the moving costs have eaten the renovation budget before the keys change hands, and “later” quietly becomes year eight.

So be blunt with yourself. If the fix is five years away, you are buying the plan as it is for five years. Is the thing that annoys you something you’d stop noticing by the second winter — or is it the daily walk from the car to the kitchen bench with an armful of shopping, past three doorways and around a dining table?

The first kind you live with happily. The second kind gets worse every single day.

It’s also worth separating “fix” from “renovate”. Plenty of plans improve a lot with furniture positions, one door removed, a joinery run rethought, or a room swapped with the room next to it. That’s what my Fix My Floor Plan service is for — a layout recommendation for a room, not a building project. If what you’re weighing up is an actual purchase decision, a design consultation is the better call, because I can look at the plan and the photos before you bid rather than after.

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Your building inspection won’t answer any of this

Get a pre-purchase inspection. That isn’t in question — ADF Consumer’s guidance is that inspections typically run somewhere around $200 to $700, that they’re looking for structural defects, leaks, rising damp and pests, and that you should book an independent inspector with professional indemnity insurance rather than one arranged for you by the agent or the builder. Their line is a good one: “There are so many things you won’t see at that inspection.” They mean the open home.

But notice what’s inside that scope. Is the house sound. Not: does the house work.

Nobody in the buying process has the job of telling you the plan is wrong. Not the agent, obviously. Not the conveyancer, whose interest is the contract. Not the inspector, whose report is about condition. The one person whose opinion would cover it is the one nobody thinks to call until after they’ve moved in and found the fridge door hits the island.

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The plans I’d walk away from

I’m not neutral about this, so here’s where I’d actually say no.

When every fix is a wet-area fix. Moving a bathroom, a laundry or a kitchen to a different part of the house is the expensive end of renovating, because the drainage has to follow and it has to fall the right way. If the only path to a decent plan runs through relocating plumbing, price it properly before you fall in love.

When a bedroom is only reachable through another room. You can style around a lot of things. You can’t style around walking through a child’s bedroom to reach the fourth one. Circulation problems like that usually need a wall, a hallway, or both.

When the main living space has no borrowed light and no wall to take it from. A dark room with a neighbouring window wall is solvable. A dark room in the middle of a plan with rooms on all four sides is a skylight at best, and skylights are a roof job.

When the budget is already fully spent on the purchase. This is the honest one. A fixable plan you can’t afford to fix is not a fixable plan.

And the flip side, which I’ll say just as firmly: I would rather buy a plain house with a sensible plan than a beautiful house with a broken one. Tiles can be changed. Kitchens can be changed. Carpet, paint, tapware, lights — all changeable, and most of it is cheaper than people fear. The plan is the bones. You’re stuck with the bones unless you have real money, and by the time you do, you’ve been living in the house for years anyway.

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What I’d do at the second inspection

If you’re serious enough to go back a second time, go back with a job to do rather than a feeling to confirm.

• Take the agent’s floor plan, and don’t trust its dimensions. Most are drawn roughly to scale and few are dimensioned properly. Measure two rooms yourself and check the drawing against them.
• Photograph the corners, not the vignettes. Every corner of every room, plus the ceilings and the full window walls. You will want these later and you won’t be allowed back in.
• Mark north on the plan while you’re standing in the house.
• Walk the shopping route. Car, front door or garage door, kitchen bench. Count the doorways and the corners. Then walk the laundry route, and the route from the main bedroom to the bathroom at 2am.
• Count the power points in the kitchen and the living room. Nobody does this. Everybody regrets it.

That’s twenty minutes of work and it’s the difference between an opinion and a decision.

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Where this leaves you

A bad floor plan is not a reason to walk away. An unexamined floor plan is.

The houses I’ve enjoyed working on most were nearly all compromised on paper — fixed services, retained heating, a kitchen that couldn’t move, an ensuite that needed to shrink. What made them work was that somebody looked hard at the plan before deciding what to spend. If you want a sense of how much a layout really controls, the open plan kitchen myth and the kitchen mistakes I see most are both worth a read before your next Saturday.

And if there’s a specific house and a specific auction date, don’t guess. Send me the plan.

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