City Living: Should amateurs - even builders' wives - be let near house design, asks Edel Morgan.

Do you live in the house that Jack built - or maybe the house that Jackie built?

The house I grew up in is on a crescent of six houses that was reputedly designed by the wife of a well known builder in the early 1960s . Local legend has it that the newly wed builder gave his wife carte blanche to design the houses as a honeymoon present.

It's not on record as to whether she was high on "lurve" or perhaps the after-effects of too much champagne when she put pen to paper, but one wonders if a chimp let loose with a crayon could have done any worse.

Whereas all other houses in the estate are of a conventional design, our house had the downstairs toilet facing the front door - apparently so that children wouldn't have to run all the way upstairs to use the facilities. It was a well meaning idea especially in an era when it was mostly families that bought three bedroom houses.

What she didn't consider, however, is that if a member of the family was in the bathroom when someone called to the front door, they were virtually held prisoner for the duration of the visit. Flush the toilet or make an embarrassing "com-motion" of any kind and it could be plainly heard by whoever was at the front door.

The original kitchens - most, if not all , of which were later extended - were too tiny to swing a fully developed cockroach never mind a cat, and as there was no access from the hall, to you had to walk through the living room to get to it.

The upstairs rooms were built at odd angles. While one side of a room may have been perfectly proportioned, the other was sure to be full of curves and recesses..

In all the other houses in the estate the immersion was on the upstairs landing but ours was in sitting room and had to be disguised by timber doors masquerading as a cabinet.

The jury is still out as to whether this woman was a halfwit or a genius. Maybe she was the latter - the first of a new generation of experimental architects thinking beyond the traditional box to present homeowners with a unique challenge.

After years of making the best of the situation my parents eventually responded to the challenge by moving.

At least, however, she made an attempt to do something different - however misguided.

These days most new houses are built in large volumes to a tried and tested formula. When there is any diversion from the norm the tendency is to fall over ourselves with praise for the builder's creative flair.

But even though the same house layouts are being trotted out time and time again, few have been perfected. Many new homeowners will notice design flaws as soon after they get the keys.

These can start outside the house. Driveways are now at a premium and it is becoming more common to build townhouses with parking bays on the road. Those with parking bays beside grass verges - where there is no concrete lip leading from the footpath to the road -  have to trudge from the car across the grass verge to get to the footpath, which is ok in dry weather but a muck fest when it rains.

Lack of storage is another much lamented design fault - which many builders seem unwilling to correct. Wouldn't it be better to sacrifice the understairs toilet for a storage area - especially if the house already has a main bedroom en suite and a main bathroom? Double bedrooms that are only large enough to fit a 4ft bed comfortably - that is if you want to open the wardrobe doors - is another common one . Then there are the minor ones like plug sockets positioned in the least practical spots .

Some homeowners can turn a design flaw into disaster all by themselves.

A few months ago when househunting I went to see a three bedroom house where the owner had solved the problem of a severely sloped garden by putting in a flight of concrete steps.

One woman at the viewing was overheard to say that she couldn't let her young children out in the garden as the steps were too dangerous. Even without children, the thoughts of negotiating the steep steps down to the clothes line in the lower garden was enough to induce vertigo.

Another common problem is the amateur builder turning a perfectly good house into a design nightmare.

At a viewing of another house, the owner, ironically called Jack, was present and proudly showed us the extension he built onto the kitchen. It was dark and rickety with a corrugated roof. At the back of the house he had built a concrete shed which swallowed up most of the back yard. An upstairs do-it-yourself attic conversion had to be reached via a precariously narrow ladder.

Despite all the extras, the asking price of the house was €310,000 - €15,000 less than a house across the road despite the fact the other house had no extensions or attic conversions and was in need of redecoration . It can be so expensive to reverse the damage inflicted on a house by an enthusiastic amateur that in some cases your better off doing nothing to your house at all.