My main pet peeve in the annoying house file are guest towels. If you want the bathroom to look nice, that's fine. But this is not usable. Nobody will dry their hands because they don't want to mess things up. I used to know a lady who had very nice towels in her bathroom. She made everyone use an old beach towel to dry off. That means the beach towel had to be found before each shower and immediately after it had to be placed in the laundry basket because there was nowhere to hang it up. The towel rods will filled with expensive towels everyone was afraid to touch. Just buy some brightly colored towels, let people bathe and dry off, and replace the towels when they start to look worn. Buying something you will never use is a total waste.
This leads me to the good china, the plates you only use once a year or on 'special occasions'. Again, it takes up valuable space as you try to store it. People are afraid to touch it. It often requires special care which means it is not easily cleaned. If you have to wash all those dishes by hand or if you have to polish the silverware after Thanksgiving dinner (and you just polished it BEFORE the meal because of the tarnish that accumulated over the year of sitting in the drawer) then you are just creating more work. It's already plenty of work preparing the fancy meal. And anyway, everyday should be special. If you're going to have nice things, enjoy them.
Unused rooms. The formal dining room, the formal living room, and the guest room. Let's think about this carefully- you are spending money to heat and cool a space you do not enter. You are cleaning a room you won't let anyone into. You bought some really nice furniture that in 30 years will still look brand new because you never let anyone sit on it. At that point, it will be donated to charity because it will be hopelessly outdated and it is probably too large for any of your adult children to put in their houses. I couldn't find a good picture of a guest room because all the search results looked like hotels. Which is where you should send the guests anyway. The guest room is pointless unless you have at least one guest per month. At which point, your guest/tenant should be contributing to your household expenses.
Wall to wall carpet annoys me to no end because it traps allergens and is not easily cleaned, but white carpet is the absolute worst. Every. Single. Stain. SHOWS. Even if you mange to keep the carpet as clean as possible, over the years it will gradually take on the color of dust. I don't know what fool decided white flooring was a good idea but he needs to spend all eternity in Hell cleaning a white floor in a house situated in a geographic region with red mud. And his cleaning tool shall be a toothbrush.
The two car garage you can't park in. The garage's purpose is to protect the car. Not only will the paint job on a garaged car last decades longer than a car left in the elements, but you won't have to wash the car as often. It's protected from thieves, safe in the garage. The cement garage floor allows to you do maintenance on the car without crawling on the ground where you will become covered with bugs and dirt. Your garage is meant to store your car not your junk. If there is so much stuff in the garage that you can neither open the door or park the car then you need to get rid of stuff. That's what you should have done instead of hauling the furniture out there. If it was broken you should have fixed it or thrown it out. If you no longer had a use for the item it should have gone to charity. If you are using the excuse 'these are things I must save because it's important' why are you putting in a place exposed to the elements. Most garages are not heated. Are your items too fragile for the changing temperatures? If it wouldn't be safe on the porch, the garage is not an ideal storage solution. There is often a good bit of humidity in the air because while garages keep out rain (usually) they are not sealed against moisture. But this goes back to my whole peeve of keeping things we can't use. Please, stop with the waste.
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