To ask what the weirdest thing you experienced or saw at someone else's house when you were a child?

I understand it now with adult hindsight but I remember the first time I visited my [then] best friends home when I was 11 or 12 and her house had absolutely no carpets or real flooring down. It was bare, grotty floorboards and they had flattened cardboard boxes, laying them down all over the place for people to walk on. I remember asking at the time if they were decorating (cringe) and them sort of changing the subject.. With hindsight they obviously just didn't have much money for things like carpeting. As I had never experienced that kind of thing in my home I just assumed they were waiting on the carpets going down

I was friends with that girl right through high school and they never once had "proper" flooring. Her family/home life didn't seem appealing for a myriad of reasons such as the standard of living and the way she was treated

My friend's parents took meanness to all new levels. I remember having tea at their house once and the meal was... an onion. A baked onion. Well, we did have one each, but still it was a plain onion. On another occasion it was spaghetti. Just spaghetti. No sauce. I can remember the hot embarrassment of realising I wasn't going to be able to eat it all. Friend's family all cleared their plates and I think I was persona non grata for leaving a big clump of arid, congealed spaghetti.

A friend I had as a teenager lived in a house where anything was ok, we could drink and smoke, climb on the worktops, write on the walls, play music as loud as we wanted, spray paint the living room. I had a friend like that too. The walls in her room were covered in felt tip notes from her friends and her mum let us drink beer (we might have been 13). They used solid silver cutlery, which I had never seen before.

Going to call for a friend at her house and being asked to wait in the kitchen whilst said friend got ready.
Her uncle was sat in there. He was seated on a kitchen chair with his hands turned upwards whilst resting on his knees. Those hands were HUGE and gave me the strangest sensation whilst looking at them.

Years later as an adult, I heard on the grapevine that he was doing time in prison for molesting/assaulting small children.

Oh and I remember thinking it was seriously weird that some families had two meals, the kids' meal (nuggets, beans, chips, it was the 80s after all) served at around 5.30, then the adults ate later (around 7 or 8) and something "proper", lasagne, shepherds pie or whatever.

Every single thing we ate was beige freezer food and we all ate it together on the dot of six.

Some of these are really sad and it seems that a lot of the homes were abusive and parents had mental health issues.

I was about 13 and a friend invited a small group of us to her house for a Sunday afternoon birthday tea. Only didn't tell her mum. When we arrived you could tell the mum was furious and zipped out to the local corner shop to muster up sandwiches, crisps and french fancies. We danced to some records. As we were leaving our friend said "please don't go cos my mum's going to kill me". It tickled my dad when I told him (he knew the family well) to the point 35 years later he still occasionally mentions it and laughs

"Loads of weird stuff but for 'ordinary weird', my best friends family kept the family hairdryer in its original cardboard box in the hall cupboard. When you washed your hair, you went to the cupboard, took the box down from the shelf, used the hairdryer, put it back in the box, and back up on the shelf."

My MIL does this! No idea why! It has never really struck me as massively weird, possibly because there are definitely odder things going on in their house.

I went to a party at a girl's house when we were all 14 or 15. The girl hadn't been at school for a while and I realised why when I saw her - she was massively pregnant. Her parents and older brothers were there and everyone in the house was smoking, including the pg girl. The adults offered all us youngsters cigarettes. This was in about 1979.

It will have been one of Franco's spots, MrShue

A friend I didn’t know very well asked me over. Her mum was at home, daytime, just pottering about but fully made up and dressed if she were about to appear on Come Dancing (as it was known before the days of Strictly).

She then insisted that we “all take tea” sitting round on little hard chairs in their sitting room and poured me a cup despite me saying more than once that I didn’t like or drink tea. I ended up drinking it to be polite as there didn’t seem any other way to get out of it.

@MitziK ♥️
Mine wasn't as bad though visiting a clean organised home as a DC was an eye opener for me. It felt shit.

A neighbour was a hunter, he had a son my age and a younger daughter. There house was decorated floor to ceiling with trophies including a full size zebra skin, complete with bullet holes.

I was invited for 'tea' at a girls house who I wasn't really friends with, she was a bit of a 'loner' so my mum said I should go to be kind.
It was really fun and I was having a great time until 5 o'clock came and her and her mum started to become visibly agitated (very confusing for a seven-year-old) but her dad came in from work.. and demanded his tea, he clipped his wife over the head because it wasn't already made.
I was left alone in the front room with him as he bombarded me with questions, and then when his daughter came back he kept saying "look why can't you be that pretty" etc it was awful!
I asked when we were going to eat because I was hungry and she said when her dad was done (they weren't allowed to eat with or before him).
I didn't go over again, and I did tell my mum but nothing changed.
I heard a few years ago that her and her mum had moved out to the area and I couldn't help but feel really relieved for them.

My school friend’s parents used to go caravanning most weekends, eventually when she got to 16 she was allowed to stay at home but the living room was locked so she could only go into the kitchen downstairs. She tried to get into the living room via the hatch from the kitchen but got stuck!

My BFF's would often nip into their downstairs loo. He would only be in there 10 seconds. He used to go in there to fart!

An adult penis.
My friends dad died we were about 8 her DM went off the rails. We went to get change and her mums boyfriend was naked. The weirdest part I still think of, he said Emerald go outside, friend can stay to get changed, she did.
We are adult friends again I've never brought it up with her.

❤ @mitzik ❤

Carpet that reached to all sides of the room and didn't turn your socks black.

Empty space on the floor.

No flies.

A garden that wasn't full of rotten furniture, bits of motorbikes and assorted shite (including multiple dog turds).

Curtains that closed.

Kitchens not covered in twenty years of grease.

Stairs that you could walk up instead of picking your way through a tiny path whilst leaning on the wall.

Really weird stuff.

Loads of weird stuff but for 'ordinary weird', my best friends family kept the family hairdryer in its original cardboard box in the hall cupboard. When you washed your hair, you went to the cupboard, took the box down from the shelf, used the hairdryer, put it back in the box, and back up on the shelf.

They were weird about telephones too. They put a towel over theirs.

In the east yorkshire village I lived in the houses really were like something from 1890s, incuding ornaments/photos, outside toilets, fires and coal dust everywhere. Seemed normal at the time but would be seen as very weird now im sure. Would love to go back to it but they've all been 'done up'.

When I was 11 or 12 my friends dad forced me to weigh myself so he could compare my weight with his daughters. I think he wanted sons and was keen on her doing sports and gaining muscle weight. We were both slim but I was incredibly embarrassed and didn't want to, I kept saying no but gave in, in the end as I felt pressured. I asked that nobody else see but him but he then told the family after when comparing our weights. I wasn't worried about my weight or anything at that age but it made me really uncomfortable (maybe because I didn't have the sporty muscle he was wanting his daughter to have? I was just a nornal slim child) and I felt like I had too.

A portrait of Stalin

My friend's father was an antiques dealer and absolutely everything in the house had a price label or tag on it so you never knew from one vist to another what furniture, bed or table would be still there. Sometimes there wouldn't be a table to eat at so we'd have a picnic meal sitting on piles of cushions on an exotic carpet.
They were a wonderfully eccentric and incredibly generous family.

The parents of my best friend at primary school had a copy of the Radio Times on top of the TV and an exercise book and pencil. If there was something they wanted to watch they wrote it in the book and the TV would be switched on for that particular programme and off afterwards.

I actually quite like this idea! And the pre dinner drinks.