Houses

The main difference between British houses and American houses is the building material. British houses are stone or brick. American houses are wood frame. This doesn't seem like a big thing until you have experienced both.

In an American house, you can rebuild and add on whenever you want. You can even just buy a lot and build your own house. The average American with enough ambition, time and money can build a house in a matter of months. Watch any episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. American houses can be torn down and rebuilt very quickly.

In a British house, the house you buy is the house you will always have. You won't be able to expand or add onto it because your house will be butted right up against the house of one or more of your neighbors. On top of that, you can't build a wooden house. All construction has to be stone or brick, requiring the hiring of contractors and stone or brick masons. Laying brick takes a lot longer than building a wood frame. Waiting for the cement to dry is even more time. While American tv shows build entire houses in a week, the British would be impressed at a room addition completed in under a month.

Wood is cheaper than brick and stone, and land in the US is cheaper than land in the UK, so American houses are much bigger. The land that is home to a house and yard and driveway for one family in the US would probably be three or four houses crammed close together in the UK. Kitchens in the UK are small. Bedrooms are small. Closets are rare. It's almost impossible to find a house with more than one bathroom.

On top of all that, the British houses are cold. Stone and brick are really crap insulators. In the winter, the walls of your house act as a heat sink. In the summer, the walls become sun-baked radiators. Because of this, heating and cooling costs are higher.

There are probably some minor advantages of British houses. They are less flammable? No big yards to mow? That's about all I can come up with.

Toilets

I'm not going to go into the terminology and euphemisms inside of euphemisms on both sides of the Atlantic at this time. Whether you call it the loo, the toilet, the bathroom or whatever, there are fundamental differences between the performance of American toilets versus British toilets.

American toilets are a vast pool of water into which your poop falls with a plop, and it sits there on display until you flush. Now, I don't mind the display part. If your poop looks weird it can be a sign of illness, so I don't mind being able to see my own poop. The part of American toilets that annoys me is the lack of power and the slowness. When you flush, the contents of the toilet swirl around lazily and then may or may not actually go down. They clog easily and need several flushes to handle a large order.

British toilets, on the other hand, are powerhouses. On the down side, once you've pooped, it disappears down a magical hole and you never see it in the small pool of water in the bottom. But when you flush, it makes a might "whoosh" and everything goes down. I've never managed to clog a British toilet, no matter how much curry or kebabs I consume.

On the whole, I think that the British have the upper hand when it comes to flushing. When I recently returned to the US, I was disappointed by the reminder of how ineffective American toilets are. It's sad really.

This only applies to home toilets. When you expand to public toilets, the ground is a little more level. But since I do most of my pooping at home, I'd prefer a British toilet to poop in. Points to the British on this one.