What should I look for when touring a house?

Look at what is hard to change. How the rooms connect, where the daily traffic runs, how much real storage there is, and what the floor plan assumes about the person living there.

Finishes are the opposite. They are the first thing you notice and the cheapest thing to replace, which makes them the least useful thing to judge a house by. A tour spent reacting to countertops is a tour mostly wasted.

Here is what I actually look at.

The kitchen, and specifically the space around things

Not the appliances. The space.

I look at whether there is room all the way around the refrigerator — above it, below it, beside it. That sounds like a small thing and it tells you something real: whether somebody stood in that kitchen with a tape measure and refused to let the fridge win, or whether the fridge was wedged into whatever was left.

A kitchen where the appliances were planned tends to be a kitchen where the counters, the walkways and the cabinet doors were planned too. A kitchen where the fridge blocks a drawer or opens into a walkway was designed on paper by someone who never cooked in it.

Also look at where you would put the groceries down. The distance from the door you carry bags through to the first flat surface is a thing you will do several times a week for years.

How the rooms connect

Walk the route you would actually walk, not the route the tour takes.

Door to kitchen. With bags, with children, in winter.

Kitchen to outside. If there is a patio straight off the kitchen through one door, that patio gets used. If it is through the dining room and down a step and around, it does not.

Bedroom to bathroom at night, and whether that route passes through anything.

Laundry to where the clothes actually are. Whether the laundry is on the main floor or in the basement is a real quality-of-life question and one of the few floor plan issues people reliably regret.

The best houses I walk through have a cluster — somewhere near the primary bedroom where the kitchen, the laundry, the garage, the stairs and a door outside all land within a few steps of each other. That is not an accident. Somebody drew it that way, and it makes the house easier to live in than a larger house with worse adjacency.

Where the office goes

This has changed in the last few years and the housing stock has not caught up.

An office right off the front door or just off the main floor is a different thing from a bedroom upstairs being called an office. If you work from home, the question is whether you can close a door on it without walking through the house, and whether a call can happen while the household carries on.

Houses where the office is an afterthought are easy to spot: it is the smallest bedroom, furthest from the entry, with no door that closes on anything.

Storage, honestly counted

Count it rather than feeling it. Staged houses are deliberately under-furnished and under-stored, so a house with too little storage reads as spacious.

Look for a coat closet near the door you use. A linen closet. A pantry that is a pantry rather than a cupboard. Garage space that is actually usable once two cars are in it — how much garage space you need in Utah covers what that means here, where the garage absorbs the snow gear, the bikes and frequently the overflow.

Unfinished basement space counts as potential rather than storage, and it counts for less than people assume once the furnace, the water heater and the stairs take their share.

The light, which is worth more than it photographs

I walked through a house recently and said “lots of light” four times without noticing. That is a real signal.

What causes it is not window count. It is whether the floor plan was drawn so the windows do the work — nothing fighting for a corner, nothing parked in front of anything, no room where the only window faces a fence a few feet away.

Tour at different times of day if you can, or at least ask which way the main rooms face. A living room that is lovely at three in the afternoon can be dark at nine in the morning, and you will be in it at both.

The things you cannot see at all

Three of them, and none are visible on any tour: radon, sewer line condition, and what is behind the walls.

I ask for a sewer scope and a radon test on houses I would buy myself. Whether you should get a sewer scope covers why, and radon in Utah homes covers a risk with a real number attached to it that no amount of looking will reveal.

A tour tells you whether you want the house. An inspection tells you what it is. Do not let a good tour substitute for the second one.

What not to judge

Paint colors, carpet, light fixtures, cabinet hardware, landscaping. All replaceable, all cheaper than you think, and all designed to either charm or repel you.

Furniture and staging. Not included and not scaled to your things.

Smell, within reason. Worth noticing, not worth deciding on, unless it suggests something structural. Smoke is the version that is actually a problem, because it is in the drywall and the ducts rather than in the air, and it is expensive to remove.

The seller’s taste in anything.

What I actually see

Buyers who remember the finishes and cannot remember the floor plan.

After three houses in an afternoon, people recall a kitchen island and a bathroom tile and have no idea which house had the laundry upstairs. How many houses to look at covers why that is a signal to stop. The fix is boring and it works: take photos of the things you are not reacting to. The hallway. The closet. The route from the garage to the kitchen. Those are the photographs you will want later and nobody takes them.

The other pattern is touring in a hurry and deciding anyway. A house you walked through in eight minutes is a house you have not seen.

What to do next

Before you tour, write down the three things your household actually does badly in your current home. Not aspirations — the daily friction. Then walk each house against that list rather than against the staging.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and I will tell you when a floor plan is going to annoy you in a year. Send me what you are touring and I will tell you what to look at in each one.