What normal things did you not have or not have in your house growing up?

No microwave.
No electric hob.
No tomato ketchup.
No fizzy drinks.
No ready meals or shop-bought snacks.
No fast food/takeaways.
No gaming consoles.
No duvets.
No tissues or paper napkins.
No track suits or trainers (unless for sports).
No wall to wall carpets.
Only one TV, phone and computer in the house.
No shower.
Only bar soap in all the bathrooms, never liquid. (We did have shampoo, conditioner and hairbrushes though.)

Love and warmth

Oh, they were lovely.

I'd just started work. My boss rigged up a car headlight attached to a car battery so that we could see!

My husband is 10 years older than me and used to like pork chops with the kidney attached (the idea makes me want to vomit)

My mum hoarded food too, I thought it was a reaction to being skint when I was a teenager but maybe it was growing up in the 50s. When she died my stepdad threw away about 20 bin bags of food from their spare room that had shelves crammed with bulk bought stuff like flour that was 10 years old and a chest freezer filled so much it wouldn't shut

No these were scheduled regular power cuts. They had to ration electricity due to a miners strike and an oil crisis in the middle east.
I only vaguely remember them but the candles were quite a novelty

As a kid (late 70s) I can remember going to Savacentre supermarket and they had a wall of different designes of doorbells and id spend ages pressing them to hear the sounds! They were so posh in my mind ( we never had one at home )

mains gas, central heating, carpets (downstairs was quarry tiles, upstairs wooden floorboards)
Got a telephone and TV when I was nearly 16
Holidays were always camping or staying with relatives
Never went on a plane
Very few clothes - Sunday best, school uniform and a tracksuit, t shirt was about it

I have lots of food in (tins) for similar reasons.

No central heating. It was a radiator in the hall only. It still is a cold house that does not hold much heat.

No double glazing. Ice on the inside of windows in winter.

Baths once a week in the bathroom and occasionally midweek in a baby bath in front of the fire.

No colour TV. 3 channels

Phone in the hall.

No parent at home after school. Let yourself in.

No microwave.

No wall to wall carpet.

Occasionally no toothpaste. Soap instead.

Packed lunch: sandwich, ribena, apple.

Little variety in food. No snacks apart from bread. Breakfast was good but everything else was mainly unappetising with the occasional bright spot.

No unleaded petrol.

No seatbelts or car seats for kids.

No safety surfaces under slides or climbing frames or the witches hat nor the roundabouts.

No lift to school. You walked from age 5. Alone or with a friend also age 5.

Hair Conditioner, Mum had short hair her whole life and didn't see the need for it.

Dish washer - still never had one 😭.

Tumble Drier - no need when you can drape clothes over the fire guard to permanently smell of smoky coal.

Fizzy juice except xmas

Fruit, nothing vaguely exotic e.g pineapple or kiwis.

No central heating or double glazing (no idea when that was invented?).We had a coal fire in the living room and one would be lit in the parlour if we were expecting company.Nothing in the bedrooms apart from a tiny fan heater.We slept under a ton weight of blankets and eiderdowns with a hot water bottle and flannelette sheets.

We had a massive tub washing machine with a mangle,to be replaced much later with a twin-tub.

I remember going to a friend's house for tea and having crinkle chips.I'd never seen them before and thought they were terribly posh😆

We never had a shower until we moved house when i was 16- only a bath.
Im 41 now and still feel like a shower is a luxury.
A trivial one but we never ever had ice cubes in drinks!
My parents were very health conscious and had some odd ideas- my father wouldn’t let us buy crisps or fizzy drinks and we never had fast food in the house. No garlic as they couldn’t abide the smell.
I didn’t have a takeaway of sorts until i went to university at 18.

I'm with your Mum on salad cream, though I do love mayonnaise. My Dad liked Sandwich Spread, which I also find disgusting.

Yeah we never had kitchen roll either. My mum said it was wasteful?! Like you can use loo roll?! My auntie questioned the lack of it when staying and since then she buys loads of it. But this was only about 10 years ago.

We never had a couch. My parents had a chair each and I sat on the floor! That does seem really weird now I look back at it.

1980s and 80s. WC, council estate til I was about 12, both parents working. But we didn’t have a house phone, didn’t have a car, electric was on a coin meter, most clothes were hand me downs - had a lot of cousins!- or 2nd hand. No central heating. We didn’t have duvets or bedding like that, just blankets. We didn’t have many shoes! Bit random but I basically had school shoes and a pair of trainers and a pair of wellies. I have so many shoes now for so many things!
No holidays, no over night stays anywhere but parents would take the same week off in summer and we’d day trip places.
One telly - black and white. Washing machine was one of those twin tubs that had to be pulled out to middle of the kitchen and the hose out in the sink to drain. My poor mum.
Never ate out, and when people came over it was for drinks only, there was no feeding other people. But that was the same food everyone.

really happy childhood though. 2 parents who loved us, spent time with us, valued education, worked etc lots of family around. Lots of freedom. I’m sure the lack of money was stressful for my parents but everyone we knew had similar circumstances so it didn’t feel like we were poor.

Me and sibs were 1st to Uni, and now have big salaries, fancy lives in comparison. My kids don’t know they’re born, quite frankly.

Thanks so sad, both father and brother. Did she ever confront them? It sounds like would have had severe trauma.

We weren't poor but society was just less materialistic I think. At about nine I was upset because my bedroom just had the decor it had when my parents bought the place in 1976. Grannyish carpets, curtains etc, frilly nylon bedspread etc. Went to friends' houses where the curtains and duvet cover matched and it seemed so posh. Brought this up with my mum in a slightly tearful way and she quite happily redecorated and got me my bedroom set of choice - duvet and curtains and lampshade all matching! I can see them now, pink and grey stripes, so eighties, I loved it. She was totally happy to do it but a bit surprised at the request, and perhaps a bit upset to learn that I was embarrassed when friends visited. The idea that you might decorate a room especially for a child just hadn't occurred to her.

It is very generational though - many of the things that people take for granted now weren't even invented or in general circulation when I was young. So we had pretty much the same as everyone else had in our neighbourhood. But no telephone, car or central heating and it wasn't unusual because very few others had either. Microwaves weren't a thing, anything other than a twin tub machine was only for middle class people.

Then technology caught up, a lot of household appliances got cheaper, food got cheaper and suddenly everyone has ten feet of plasma screen in their living room.

Coal & wood fire in the lounge only, no central heating

Black & white fat TV in the lounge only with no remote control

No fizzy drinks

No kitchen roll

Same here. In the winter the inside of my bedroom window was frosted. I don't think we had a fridge until I was about 11 or 12. I did have a hot dinner cooked from scratch every day, home baked cakes and a mum who was home all day and able to do these things. She taught me to cook,sew and knit, as well as respect for other people and right from wrong. Until I had a home of my own, I didn't realise how hard she worked for us all. Sadly, I was unable to pay her back and thank her properly because she died of cancer when I was just 18. I miss her very much.

When I was a child (60s) I remember my mother washing clothes by hand in the kitchen sink, although my father's shirts, towels and sheets went to the laundry. A parcel was delivered every Monday with the clean items - they smelt so fresh and nice! In 1966 she became the proud owner of a Bendix washer/dryer (both in one). She was so happy to be liberated from the kitchen sink! I also remember having a tiny icebox in the fridge which just about held a packet of fish fingers, a bag of peas and a block of ice-cream, which I used to bring back from the shop wrapped in thick newspaper to keep it cold.

We always had a car as my father was a doctor and needed one to visit his patients. I can still recite the reg numbers of all the cars he had!

I was a 70s/80s child. We didn't have a microwave or a video recorder for about 10 years after they became commonplace (my parents were always late adopters of new technology). Likewise we were watching black and white TV until sometime in the 80s.

We didn't have anything matching eg matching towels or luggage because you used what you had until it wore out and it always did that at different times. To this day I find it hard to throw out old towels or bedding.

We didnt have salad cream either because my mum was a foreigner and thought it was a barbarous invention. All salads were dressed and always with vinegrette.

Proper heating , metal windows ,frost inside windows ,wooly hats and clothes in bed ,seeing breath on waking.
I don't undertsnd why my parents never got it sorted.

Middle class house would be worth over a million now.