What kind of house did you grow up in?

[Houseofvelour]

And has it affected how you keep your own house?

My childhood home was very messy and chaotic so I keep my home ridiculously clean and ordered, even with two toddlers.

Edit:

...there was a huge amount of land...

House kept tidy by my mum and cleaner, DH ditto. Our house is a bit of a tip as I don't have the time and energy and DH tends to do intermittent spurts of loads of cleaning rather than regular help. Think maybe neither of us was involved enough in house cleaning as kids, trying to get ours more involved!

Our family home was clean, mostly tidy, extremely happy.

My home now, is mostly clean, mostly tidy, not as happy as I would like it to be. But, circumstances can't be helped.

My sisters home is filthy, extremely messy, and she's happy as anything / doesn't care.

🤷‍♀️

Our home was always clean and tidy and the garden was kept lovely but as both DM and DF worked full time all this was done on the evenings and weekends so we never spent any time with them doing fun things and they didn't have time to take us to any extra curricular activities. My house is a mess but my kids get to spend time with me and DH and we take them to all the activities they want to do.

The house I grew up in wasn’t the cleanest, my mum had a stroke when I was young so wasn’t really her fault. She could do the basics but couldn’t do a deep clean so now I’m a bit of a clean freak. Hated that feeling of embarrassment when someone came to the house and it wasn’t clean. Spent my teenage years helping her so learnt a lot.

My dad worked full time , didn't do any housework except washing up sometimes , they both did the shopping. Mum worked part time. House was spotless. Proper dinners , always at the table .
My house more messy than tidy .

Large very tidy house that was kept that way by mum.

My house by comparison is very messy, but it’s half the size with the same amount of people in it.

Interestingly, my parents first house was similar to the one I live in now - but they moved when my sister and I were toddlers, and also just had less stuff to manage!

I grew up in a disgusting house with little food.
There was no washing machine and rarely any soap or toothpaste.
I don't remember ever seeing any cleaning stuff.
My house is clean and tidy and there is always food.

I grew up in a building site essentially. Big sprawling house in Hertfordshire. My Dad built an upstairs granny flat for my grandparents to live in and continued to build on. I remember getting up in the night and walking on wooden planks to get to the loo as he had put concrete down in the hallways to redo the floor levels. It was messy and never completed when I left home at 16. It was always full of tradesmen doing some job or another. All the neighborhood kids came to our house to play. We had a massive triple garage that my dad carpeted and put a heater in and we'd get music on every weekend night and dance with all our school friends. It was chaotic but fabulous at the same time. They sold it to a developer 10 years ago having eventually completed it, he knocked it down and built six townhouses on the land.

Absolute shithole. Hoarder level This Should Be A Reason To Remove Children and Animals For Their Own Safety. Literally carry the scars as a result of how dangerous it was (fucking fishtank hidden in the grass - of course, I got into trouble for my leg going through it).

My house now is tidy, clean and looked after despite DP's best efforts to fill it with crap. Garden needs work, but it's safe.

Definitely have too much stuff that's knackered, but not got the energy to deal with DP panicking that it would be wasteful and expensive to bin something and replace it with something decent.

If the possible big promotion comes through at work, it'll be me paying for it all, at which point the knackered stuff will be gone, though. I have zero emotional attachment to the crap I've had to make do with in the past and certainly won't be hanging onto things when they can be got rid of.

Big old farm house.

Mum is always decorating. Literally. I’d come home from school and rooms would be a different colour. She lives not far from Farrow and Ball and they have a ‘seconds’ shop so she’ll pick up a tin and then decide what room to paint.

Most furniture was from junk shops as they were called then. But she has an amazing eye for style so everything was really good.

As it was such an old house she decided that a fitted kitchen wouldn’t suit so we had a selection of stripped pine tables, dressers and meat safes in the kitchen.

It was always clean and tidy but with lots of stuff. Paintings on every wall but no family photos.

As a teen I was dreadfully messy but I’m really tidy now.

It was too small ( seven of us in two double bedrooms and a single.) and it was unheated, ice on the inside of the windows in winter etc.

Now I have a four bed house for me & ds. With central heating, a log burner, AAA rated double glazing and plenty of insulation.

I refuse to be cold.

I grew up in a small terraced house. The rooms were very small but reflected my parents' personalities, especially my mothers, with the bits and pieces in them. It was always immaculately clean and tidy.

My house is bigger and chaotic.

We used to joke that the queen could literally visit at any time of the day or night and not find one thing out of place or one speck of dust. Mum was pretty OCD about things being neat and tidy. There was about a million kids, cats and dogs so food alone knows this she managed it (imagine the Von Traps).

We are all pretty... not so fussed in general. All but one of us are obsessed with things being ‘straight’ though (cutlery, bookshelves, picture frames, floor boards, labels, things in cupboards, colours...).

A very smokey one. Very neat and tidy, but full of the smoke from two very heavy smoker parents.

I don't allow smoking in my house at all and whenever my parents or DH's (his mother also a heavy smoker) they had to smoke out in the garden or on the drive.

Whenever my parents or DH's visited!!

My DM grew up very poor, with an outside toilet and a tin bath in front of the fire once a week. My DF grew up even poorer (1 of 7 kids and a widowed mum). Both sets of grandparents lacked ambition and followed the path of their own parents (menial jobs). However, my DM had big aspirations and amazing work ethic. She got into grammar school (unlike her siblings), then always worked incredibly hard (day job, then a night job too). Her father insisted she leave school at age 16.

When I was young we lived in small, inexpensive houses that were beautifully decorated and always lovely and clean and welcoming. She set up a business from scratch when I was at junior school. My DF then gave up his job and joined the family business. Their success enabled them to send us to private school, elocution lessons, ballet/piano/skiing etc. In my early teens, we moved to a much bigger, detached house and I had a lovely bedroom and my own bathroom. We also had a housekeeper every day. I’ll always be incredibly grateful to my parents for all of the opportunities they’ve given me. I try to emulate them. My life would have been very very different if they’d followed the path of their own parents. My house now is similar to how my DM/DF decorated and kept theirs. Coordinated, clean, welcoming and organised.

@Houseofvelour

And has it affected how you keep your own house?

My childhood home was very messy and chaotic so I keep my home ridiculously clean and ordered, even with two toddlers.

Same

Cluttered. Ornaments and decorative bits and bobs all over the place. Moving it all to dust or vacuum (bloody tiny footstools, newspaper racks, end tables and statues!) was a nightmare. Even now my parents decorate every room with heavily patterned wallpaper and matching soft furnishings so it feels like a B&B

I hate ‘stuff’ and have a fairly minimalist style. Anything not being used is stored out of sight and rooms are decorated simply with a couple of accent pieces.

A very average one. Late 70’s our first house was a 1930’s 3 bed semi renovation so it was a building site in my early years. My parents were pretty poor (Dad was working, doing up the house by himself and an OU degree). Mum was SAHM and didn’t drive so even shopping was hard. We walked miles and miles. But it was clean-ish and happy and we had what we needed. I had no idea we were poor.

Second house was a big 4 bed modern detached, double garage and en suite etc -Dad had graduated and moved into management. We relocated a 100 miles in the mid 80’s. The house was so posh to us to start with. It was always fairly tidy and clean, my mum worked part time eventually and my Dad is good at housework too so they shared it.
They did get hit by the awful interest rates/negative equity and the interior got quite dated eventually. My Dad says now that they could’ve spent more on it but they had got so used to being frugal that they found it hard to spend. They are both well off now though so paid off.

They weren’t clean/tidy freaks but neither was it dirty/messy. Just pretty normal I think?
My parents did divorce so it wasn’t 100% happy but nothing bad.

Forgot to say, I’m slightly messier and not as clean but I have mainly had a cleaner since my 20’s (not at the moment sadly). I hate housework.

Very authoritarian. My mum and stepdad were extremely frugal. Never had anything new. My stepdad was a war time child so a lot of recipes dated back to the war even though it was the 90s!
Food was always strictly controlled and we were always made to eat every last scrap even if we hated it. They were actually very wealthy even though they were so frugal and lived in a huge house in a lovely area.
I have a tendency to treat my children if I think they would like it which is a a bit of a hangover from my childhood where everything I had was unfashionable and second hand until I got myself a paperound aged 13 and was able to buy things for myself. I also have no qualms about buying myself nice things because i can afford to and don't have to answer to anyone. As an adult I definitely seek gratification from 'things' and nice food and tend to indulge myself because I never could when I was young.
I'm also not very authoritarian and my DC aren't scared of me so I'm pretty much the opposite to them!

I don't know where to start, but nothing is very much the same. I am much scruffier, live in a modern house, no cleaner or housekeeper nor lots of nice things. We never entertain (even in non-covid times)

but we do cook regular hot meals for DC (not what I was raised with).

Our home is a lot more like DH's upbringing than mine.

Until I was 13 we lived in an overcrowded, damp flat (ground floor though, with garden) and every nook and cranny was filled with necessary stuff.

But it was a happy home, filled with lots of love and I have nothing but positive memories.

Moved to a much bigger house when I was 13 and I spent my teenage years / early 20's with lots more space, but house was Victorian and quite dilapidated. It didn't even have central heating when we moved in (mid 90's). Was big and drafty and wonky but again a generally happy home. It was three times the size of of first home and still there was always lots of 'stuff. Not mess but stuff.

It's still my parents house now [well my dad's house, my mum died there recently]

Our home now is very similar to my parents house. It's a period house, a bit run down and whilst I love the big sash windows and the cornicing etc, it's needs a fair bit of TLC. It is full to the brim of stuff, but we try to keep the main living areas clear and minimal. The bedrooms on the other hand

I'd like to think our house is like the homes I grew up in, in terms of love and laughter!

I grew up in a big, well kept very clean and tidy house. My mother worked tirelessly to keep it spotless, I didn't really bring friends round. My Dad worked hard in the garden every weekend.

As a result I have a small house, kept fairly clean and tidy but don't do a full weekly deep clean as DM did. I hate gardening and much rather chill out on a weekend.