Our first home was a flat in Leicester, the bottom half of an old terraced house opposite the blank brick wall at the rear of a garage business.The small living room had an old unusable kitchen range in it,and there was a tiny scullery with a deep stone sink and not much else.The lavatory was the second door along in the back yard, beyond the coal shed,and was shared with the tenants of the upstairs flats who had either to walk through our flat to get to it or go out of the front door and down a little alleyway between the houses. The only bathroom was in the upstairs flat with a hot water tank that took 24 hours to heat enough water for a bath. We were happy there for two years and thought ourselves lucky to have our own place.After two years we had saved up enough to pay the deposit on a detached house with a big garden which was on the market for £3750.How times have changed.
In the same house we live in now, a semi detached victorian cottage on an estate of similar properties in S E London. Bought it in 1972 for £7,750, similar properties being sold on our road for £500.000 now.
We had to move into police accommodation, there was only a
Flat available which the police rented. It was over a grocery shop with a bakery at the rear. On the Main Street opposite a
news agents and fish mongers, this meant very early morning
deliveries. The building was attached to the town hall, the clock
chimed every 15 minutes. A dance held there every weekend , when the drums were hit the china in our kitchen rattled.
We move to a police house 17 months later. Bliss.
Windsor Castle, yes, really.
King George 1V Lodge,
Lancaster Tower
Windsor Castle
Lovely view down the Long Walk from the dining room window. Sentry box (complete with occupant) beneath the sitting room window.
In the house I was born in!
My grandparents had bought it from new & when my Dad was getting married to the girl across the road- my Mum so they bought it from them.
My Mum left us when I was 16 b& Dad eventually met someone else so he was moving & sold the house to us as we were about to get married too. My husband & I lived there until our sons were 5 & 2. It was a wrench to move but we needed more space & the area had started to go downhill so we moved out to 'the country'.
If I am ever in the area I have to go & look at it still but the area is very run down now.
We moved into a brand new property with just a bed and table and chairs. Mortgage rates were high so we slowly saved for carpets, sofas etc. I still live here now 50 years later with DH no.2.
Naval married quarter in Plymouth. Right opposite the dockyard, so close you could hear the ship’s pipes. (Some were quite amusing). £1.01p per day.
We rented a flat above a dry cleaners in town. My dad went mad, saying it was a fire risk. He worried so much we only stayed a week. We then got posted to Germany and moved six times in three years. One flat was third floor. The landlords lived below us. They were elderly and walked in and out of our flat at will. We couldn't complain as the lady sometimes left home made potato cakes on our kitchen table. However one evening we came home and switched on the light and a dozen or so mice ran into hiding! I was horrified down we did all we could to get moved. Another quirk of that flat was that the clothes line was on a flat roof. I had to carry my washing up a ladder. The men who worked on the ground floor would wolf whistle as they could probably see up my skirt!
A flat in the attic of a private school. I think it had been meant for a caretaker but was not used at that time. We had a huge living room with amazing views for miles. Our bedroom was entered through what looked like a cupboard - we had to bend down to go through the door but once inside could stand up in the centre of the room. The kitchen was so small we could stand in the middle and almost touch all four walls. The fridge and a cupboard for food lived outside on the landing. The bathroom was down a flight of stairs. We never saw any of the boys as we had left for work before they arrived and they had left by the time we got home. DH reduced the rent by doing minor DIY jobs around the school at weekends. We lived there almost rent free for six months by which time we had saved enough for a deposit on a three-bed house.
In a hotel in Bulawayo Zimbabwe. I was receptionist there so got free board & Lodging for both of us.
A horrible grotty rented bedsit with a shared bathroom. But only for about 4 months, thankfully.
A rented flat over a hairdressers on the corner of Bramford road in Ipswich.
Bought ( well had a mortgage) on a 3 bed terraced house. After our honeymoon we were left with £5 in the bank. That was in 1970 with first H. With 2nd DH we rented a detached bungalow until our police house was ready to move into. That was 1982.
We lived in my controlling mother in laws front room for four months it was the worst time of my life, she would stand over me when I was cooking telling me how her precious son liked his food cooked.
Hi all. I got married one night stay over at a motel and back to my mums at 19 . As we hadn't got a house but was buying a two bed terrace . It hadn't completed. So stayed separate first few months but we moved in and been together 47 years. No honeymoon as house took up all my savings and my wedding Fund savings too ended up in registry office .
I got married 40 years ago and moved into the farmhouse we still live in. My husband's mother was a widow and she moved into a very nice bungalow- I'd been dreading she would stay here! My first winter here was the 81/82 birthday freeze where temperatures at nearby Shawbury were regularly recorded as the coldest in the country at -26°. I came from a centrally heated modern house to a 400 hundred year old farmhouse with open fires, a Rayburn & no heat upstairs. It was a very difficult winter! We have of course done many improvements since then!
We lived in a rented wooden bungalow/hut behind a garage for the first year. Half of the hut was a workshop and our half had a kitchen, living room and bathroom. My ex built a tiny bedroom on the side ( with permission) which just held our bed. It wasn't insulated so we'd wake in the mornings to a bed covered in condensation. It sounds awful but it was quite cosy with the open fire. Outside was just a concrete path and a junk heap full ofrubbish from the garage.
We stayed there for a year, then moved to the flat above the garage's office which had no kitchen sink so I washed up in a bowl on the table.
Overnight one night a fire broke out under the floorboards, apparently had been smouldering for years until it reached an air bubble when it burst into flames. My ex had gone to work early but I was woken by firemen running up the stairs and rescuing me before putting out the fire. We carried on living in that smoke stained flat with a hole in the floor until we'd saved the £100 deposit on our first house in a village a few miles away. We just put boards over the hole and a rug on top.
Sounds awful now but we thought nothing of it. This was 1962/63
We bought a new build upstairs flat on a new estate in East Bolden Tyne and Wear In 1971. It was all electric and only had wall fires in each room and it was freezing. If we could have afforded an extra £200 deposit we could have bought a semi-detached house but we just couldn’t stretch to that unfortunately even though I was working in an office full time. There were no shops nearby. We eventually bought a fridge but couldn’t buy a washing machine so I had to wash everything in the bath and had to put a clothesline over the bath to dry everything. We bought a colour tv however??? When I say colour a friend had painted her black and white small tv a lovely blue so we carried it on two buses and got it to the flat in one piece and that was our colour tv. It wasn’t a happy time there as my husband (ex now) lost his job and slobbed around the flat for 6 months, in fact it was awful but we survived. Bought the flat for £2,800 and sold it two years later for £5.800 and went back to my hometown Newcaslte upon Tyne. We bought an old 4 bed semi house. No heating but it was good to be back in the land of the living we sold out flat at the right time thank goodness
We got married very quickly - we’d only been going out with each other for a very short time, though we were acquainted beforehand. We never considered practical things like where we would live!
I have no recollection of how he found out about us, as neither of us are Roman Catholic nor churchgoers, but a priest asked us if we would live in a room in a large house that was being renovated to accommodate unmarried mothers. We did. I think that they just wanted people on the premises whilst it was all being sorted out! We were there for about 4-5 months before we moved away altogether and rented a house.
Expensive rented harrow London flat
Newly married we invested in a new build two bedroom bungalow with the intention I would continue working to help with the mortgage .I wish 
Found I was pregnant so that meant only one wage coming in.
We saved up enough for a deposit on a three bedroomed semi, it cost £6200, a real struggle. This was 1970. We had a new bed and two armchairs, and a kitchen table my MIL gave us. A cooker on the electric bill, no fridge. It was like playing house and I loved it. We stayed for nine years. Coincidentally it was number 18, we are now in our fourth and probably last house, also number 18.
Where we live now! We bought it as a 3-bed semi in 1975 for £9,200. We didn't think we would be able to afford it but the Building Society accepted my OH's overtime and my student grant as income. Over the years we have extended and reconfigured the rooms, so it now has 4 bedrooms, a bigger kitchen and open plan living area. We brought up our children here and now it is bigger than we really need but we have spent so much money and work on it that my DH refuses to move. The next project will be a lift, I think!
A single end in Glasgow's East End. One room with box bed, and tiny scullery, toilet shared by 3 flats on stair outside. Coal fire. It was bought for us by my mother in law for £85.00. Its wasn't so bad till the baby came along and husband got work doing night shifts and had to sleep during the day.
3 weeks before I was getting married my boss called me in to ask for an update on name change and new address for HR to prepare. I told him we still had found nowhere to live all though we were searching frantically. The following day he called me in again to say his wife owned a house that was converted intp 2 flats that her mother had owned and if we wanted to do the ground floor flat up we could have it. 6 months after we moved in the couple upstairs moved out and friends of ours moved in. all the while we were saving for a house but prices were rising fast and we seemed to be getting nowhere. Then a friend of ours was made redundant and he offered us all his redundancy money at no interest to make up our deposit! We soon found a 3 bedroom terraced house which got us on the housing ladder.
We soon managed to pay our friend back and have never forgotten his kindness.
We rented a ground floor flat in the Old Kent Road in what were then known as slums with a toilet in the back garden and no bathroom. Had to go to in laws for a weekly bath! They were knocked down to be replaced with brand new social housing concrete flats which have subsequently been declared slums and knocked down again. Those Victorian houses which weren't knocked down are now worth millions. We moved to Kent and didn't take up the offer of a flat.
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