I've seen documentaries dealing with life in a "typical" Roman city, when the Empire was at it's height, and enough about the Huns, Goths, Vandals etc to sink a battleship, but as an interested novice I know next to nothing about what living just before the fall of the empire in the west was actually like for ordinary people.
What was the standard of living like? How did people live, and what did their buildings look like? How was this all different from life hundreds of years earlier in the west, and to life in the Eastern Roman Empire?
It largely depends on where you were. In Britania, it would be pretty miserable. The dampness, lack of paved roads in major and minor settlements and general squalor made it a undesirable area. The would have lived in thatch huts, much like they did in the middle ages. Coastal villages expirienced constant raiding from norse tribes. Italy and most former Carthaginian cities would have been much better. There would have been good sanitation, markets, trade, food, and many other amenities. Rome and other italian cities were cities of brick and marble. Gaul was a very loosely populated area. Major cities, like Trier and Massilia, would have been Romanized, but the smaller towns would still be celtic for the most part. Most of the land was used for farming. In the east, there were more major cities and the population was more dense. The land was all former Macedonian territory, and so it was very civilized. All in all, little changed in the way on living conditions in each territory. Sure, Rome built provincial capitals, but most of the land was left free for farmers.