The Pros & Cons of Reverse Living

Hi friends! This blog post is all about the pros and cons of reverse living. As many of you know, the current house Luke and I are renting is reverse-living, meaning that the living area, kitchen, and main bedroom are upstairs. Seeing as we've been living here for over a year now, I thought I'd make a blog post about the pros and cons. But I do need to acknowledge my bias here first, if we ever get so lucky enough to buy a house one day, it won't be reverse living and you'll see why as you read on in this post #reverseliving #prosandcons #lifestyleblog

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The Pros & Cons of Reverse Living

I was inspired to write this blog post as today we had an inspection and everything seemed okay.

Pros

• The views - so the views are meant to be great in reverse living homes. However, we're not facing the direction of anything interesting - we don't even see the sunset from our balcony.

• Great lighting - upstairs has great lighting so it's good for photo and video opportunities.

• Upstairs is warm in winter - as I've climatised to living in Melbourne, I definitely get a lil colder in winter so we are always warm upstairs. I don't think we use the heater much in winter because the house is genuinly warm enough.

• Good for people watching - if you like people watching like I do, then the living area is great. I have my desk set up next to a window so I can peek out as I'm working and if we have Benji on the balcony, most people say hi to him so it gives off a welcoming vibe I think.

• It feels like a mini apartment in a giant house - we don't use a lot of the downstairs part of the house. Well, Luke does, because his office is down there and there's a spare bedroom but most of the time I'm upstairs so it feels like a mini apartment inside a giant house (I hope that makes sense).

• Cooler downstairs areas - as heat rises, the upstairs area is a lot warmer than downstairs so Benji loves laying downstairs on the cooler floors. And if we do ever get too hot, we can always sleep in the downstairs bedroom.

• It's meant to be more sustainable and eco-friendly but we pay the same amount for gas and power as we did at the last house so idk how true that is.

• Zoned spaces (i.e., it would be great for families to have a parent area and a children area - this doesn't apply to us).

• It's all open plan, so feels bigger than it is.

• As we live in Australia, less scary bugs in the upstairs area - they still come but when I lived in an apartment on the bottom floor of the building, there were SOOO many giant cockroaches, shivers.

Cons

• It gets WAY too hot in summer. As soon as the sun hits the upstairs windows, we HAVE to have at least one A/C on and that's annoying AF. Like sometimes I just wanna have a window open.

• The view kinda sucks where we are because we're not in the right direction for sunset.

• Having to walk up and down the stairs all the time.

• Taking groceries upstairs (with someone with a slipped disc, this is annoying).

• As we're the front house, we can people watch but they can stare back at us - so one one hand it can be welcoming, but I think it would be better to be the back house.

• If we have guests over, we have to share our private bathroom upstairs and nothing wrong with that, but I do like having a separate bathroom for guests and us. In reality, it doesn't matter because lots of houses only have one and we have three bathrooms, but it would make more sense if the bathroom upstairs was an ensuite.

• Sleeping downstairs can make us feel more vulnerable - when you sleep upstairs you have that extra feeling of security (it's all in your head but ya know).

• If someone is disabled and may have something like a wheelchair or crutches OR just struggles to walk upstairs, then it can be problematic.

• No access to the front yard from upstairs - so can be a nightmare if you have a dog - balcony grass has been great for us but it's not always a solution (like we take it off every time we have an inspection).

• This isn't specific to reverse living plans, but our front yard has a gate and it's not locked but most people think it is. If we have a delivery coming, we always give directions but people don't usually follow it, they just give up and go to the post office. Oh, and specifc to reverse living, if you don't get down to the door in time, the courier might have gone already.

  
  

So in conclusion, we're super grateful to have a roof over our heads for another year but the reverse living isn't perfect. I'm hoping we can add a touch more chic to our home over the next year to make it feel like a sanctuary. If you've got any tips, let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading,

Much love,

Ash x

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