Pros and Cons of.....

[TBH]

I live in one of those Philadelphia row homes Steve is describing. Ours is 3BR, 1BA. We have a driveway but no garage. Our yard is definitely postage stamp size, but there are 3 parks within half a mile of us.

Downsides I see to sharing walls with neighbors on either side: My one neighbor has a very shrill voice and I can hear every word when she talks on the phone in the bedroom. My other neighbor shares a kitchen wall with us. We hardly ever hear her, but I can smell what she's cooking. Also, it's pretty hard to get rid of pests unless the other houses are working on it, too. Luckily my immediate neighbors are very clean people, so that helps. We also share a front porch with the neighbor on one side, and a back porch with the neighbor on the other side. We get a lot of ice on the front porch because the neighbor (a pensioner) has a bad downspout which creates a puddle on the porch, which then freezes. Also, if they don't keep their roofs up, we could get water damage in our house because the roofs are connected. So far it's been okay, but we've had some tense negotiations about who was going to pay for porch repair, etc. Sometimes I wish we had a HOA who would negotiate those things for me, so I wouldn't have to go knock on someone's door and say, "my roofer says your roof is shot and there's no point in my fixing my roof unless you do yours too."

On the other hand, our house is very cheap to heat because we're only heating two sides. Our living room is a bit cave-like, though, because there are only windows on the front and back sides of the house.

Another good thing: security. Because we share porches with elderly people who don't travel much, they are really watching out for our house when we're away. When we come home after a trip, our neighbor who shares our front porch always comes to her door and looks out when she hears us coming in, just to make sure it's us.

We do have a child, and I will say that it has been nice not having to work as much because our house is affordable. Low payments, low utility bills. We're looking to move and will probably try to get a twin this time, which in Philadelphia terms is a house connected to another house on only one side. More windows, and more outside space.

[disneysteve]

Downsides I see to sharing walls with neighbors on either side: My one neighbor has a very shrill voice and I can hear every word when she talks on the phone in the bedroom. My other neighbor shares a kitchen wall with us. We hardly ever hear her, but I can smell what she's cooking.

Our living room is a bit cave-like, though, because there are only windows on the front and back sides of the house.

A couple of other shared-wall problems:
Our one neighbor kept the phones all turned up to maximum loudness and tended to get a lot of late night calls. As a result, we were often woken up during the night by their phone ringing.

The same neighbor also smoked. That made it impossible for us to open our windows in nice weather. Even with the windows closed, we could often smell smoke in our house. With the windows open, it was intolerable.

You know, I never thought twice about the window situation because that's how I was raised. There is a downside to lots of windows, though. We thought it was great when we bought our house... until we tried to figure out where to put all the furniture and hang pictures. We found that we were very limited as to where to put things like the sofa or wall unit or bookcases because there aren't a lot of big stretches of wall without a window on them.