The one word I hate when house hunting

Currently, my wife and I are looking for an appropriately appointed bungalow to buy and move into, so that I don't have to keep negotiating umpteen stairs or lifting her ladyship on and off a stairlift. We are now both older than we care to admit and, with age, come struggles associated with fitness and wellbeing. I have already mentioned several times in various postings and articles that 'the lady of the house' is disabled. Little has been revealed about my struggle with angina. Gone are the days when I could clamber up the stairs here in our semi-detached house two or three at a time; those days have been replaced by me carefully placing my feet on those stairs in a very steady manner. On occasion, I also find myself holding onto the banister, just in case there is a small chance that I will lose my footing.

So, the time has come for me (on behalf of both of us) to seek out that elusive bungalow that has everything we need in later life and sell this semi to pay for the transfer (people over a certain age don't seem to be offered a mortgage), yet there is one word that I keep coming across on the estate agents' websites and leaflets that is doing my nut in. It's not 'bijou' or 'compact' or any of that nonsense agency talk for 'small' and 'cramped'. Maybe you use the word to describe the one room in the home that is generally always occupied most of the day. I am talking about the 'living room' or 'front room' being called a 'lounge'. For goodness sake, why don't estate agents realise that they are not trying to sell a pub or hotel?!

A 'lounge' has no connection with a private or rented house, unless the owner or renter is trying to be posh. I am not posh. I do not claim to be posh and I do not aspire to be posh. My parents could not afford a mortgage in their lifetime and so they rented council houses, more commonly known nowadays as 'social housing'. Many people lived this way when I was growing up but sometime in the 1980s our country's first female prime minister decided to sell off all the council houses 'on the cheap' to budding homeowners who wanted to take on such a responsibility as a mortgage and, ostensibly, to garner political votes to help keep her in power. That scheme came too late for my parents who, after renting from the local council for getting on for 40 years (maybe even longer than that), eventually found that their pensions didn't cover the rising cost of renting and utility bills and took up my brother and sister-in-law's offer to move in with them. If you knew any of the two parties involved you would quickly realise that the situation was never going to be a match made in Heaven!

But, I digress. The council house I lived in with my parents for 15 years of my life is now privately owned. I believe it has changed hands several times since the early 1980s when the family my parents swapped with took advantage of buying the house 'on the cheap' and a couple of years down the line sold it for a massive profit. Such opportunism. Yet, I bet the estate agent who had a hand in flogging it stated that our old 'front room' was a 'lounge'. It was never called that in all the years we lived there.

I guess it will be the same when we finally find that bungalow in a million; our home for the past 26 years will no doubt be listed for sale with a 'lounge' when we have only ever known it as a living room, sitting room or even a front room. Maybe the use of 'lounge' on the house description leaflet might attract one or two time wasters but, generally speaking, the eventual buyer will be the one who has always called a 'lounge' a 'front room' or 'living room'.

Trevor Mulligan