What mundane item/experience was a luxury in your childhood home?

[FirstFallopians]

I remember being jealous that mum and dad had pillow protectors under their pillowcases. I thought they must be the height of decadence until we got an IKEA and I saw they were literally £1.50 each.

Real butter instead of margarine.

Ordering a takeaway and getting it delivered instead of picking it up. Debauched.

Buying any food whatsoever from Marks and Spencer’s was akin to doing your weekly shop in Harrods Food Hall.

Middle income family in the 1990s, no money worries and not otherwise frugal.

Anyone else grow up thinking very normal things were real luxuries?

When we got our first video player. There was a rental shop nearby where you could rent as many videos as you wanted for £2 per week 😂I watched so many films. Saturday mornings there used to be some kind of music show on and I'd sit there diligently pressing record on all my favourite songs. It was a revelation!

Colour telly.
Central heating.
Double glazing.

We didn’t have a TV until I was 11, and I was 17 when we got a phone. All of our furniture was excellent quality (Ercol and G-Plan), but horribly unfashionable, as we’d inherited it from my grandparents.

When we got anything new, it was an occasion. I remember my grandfather buying me a Binatone radio cassette player for Christmas (we shared a love of music). It was the most wonderful present I’d ever had because it was chosen for me and it was brand new.

Other things were orange juice, and a roast chicken on a Sunday.

This resonates with me, Storage heater on the landing and in the hall. Coal fire in the living room. (There were blocked up fireplaces in the bedrooms which we heated with electric bar fires ). I remember getting proper wet central heating in the mid seventies after the North Sea gas came along.

A telephone, we had to use the phone box down the road before we got one.

Drinking soft drinks with your meal (only allowed on birthdays)

Eating shop made /supermarket deserts

Eating white sliced bread, luxury!

Crisps (only for birthdays or if we had guests)

Nutella (only allowed in the summer holidays for some reason)

A whole mars bar to yourself (only after a sports tournament about 4x a year)

Yeah I was a kid in the 70s 😄

Another Ferroro Rocher or Pringles!

Bought cakes
Ready made drinks ( we had squash made in Tupperware cups with lids)
Any sort of ready meal or freezer food (I was very envious of the Birds Eye Crispy Cod Balls on offer at my friend’s house.
A toaster. Toast went under the grill.

We still only buy strawberries in the summer! Makes them more special that way.

Ribena was only for when you were poorly.

Milk was a precious commodity, we never had a glass of milk to drink it was for tea and cereal.

Shop bought clothes, my mother made all ours, a phone, any food not made from scratch by my mother, takeaways and eating out was unheard of. But most of all, I was green with envy at my friend and her sister who were taken to the pub with their father, where they sat in the car with a bag of crisps and some pop, while he drank, then drove them home! To me this was the very height of sophistication, and I begged my father to take up drinking also we could do the same 😁.

Home phone
central heating
a bath more than once a week
a shower
colour tv
Making cocoa with actual milk rather than water.

The time we got a new TV with both a remote control AND Teletext/Ceefax/Oracle. Boujie.

Being allowed to have a small glass of Coke (not due to financial constraints but because Coke is full of sugar).

Central heating
Freezer
shower
going away on holiday
biscuits (though mum kept a 'secret' supply which we found)
new clothes, being younger all were hand-me-downs
fizzy drinks
shop bought fruit or veg

Same here. Feeling thirsty is one of my main childhood memories. Even now my parents still drink a minimal amount of liquids, and never water.

Probably why I cart a ridiculously high number of water bottles around in the car and whenever anyone leaves the house!

We had money and all of the things people have listed here (central heating, showers, dishwashers, phones, cars) in the 70s but because my Dad didn't like travelling too far on holiday with 4DC we only ever had Scottish holidays visiting castles and museums and art galleries (I'm Scottish). I would read my Jackie magazine and be so jealous of people who went on package holidays to the beach in Spain and had a holiday romance.

Phone (didn't get one until 1987)

Indoor toilet (1985)

Holidays (never had one as a child, in my 40s now and still never been on holiday)

Central heating

Takeaways

Winter shoes

A car. My dad learnt to drive when I was at secondary school. We walked eveywhere!

A bottle of coke. My mum would buy one a month and keep it on the side and dish it out like it was liquid crack.

They used to get a pounds worth of chips for us a family... there is six of us.

Being off work/ school all at the same time. My dad worked at a factory which had set holidays, and those were not the same as our school holidays - and my mum was a teacher. So apart from Christmas and Easter (and even then the easter holiday didn't take any account of the school holiday, only the bank holidays) we only ever had weekends with dad.
Also, showers, fizzy drinks, biscuits apart from mixed broken boxes, crisps, takeaways (one chinese a year, fish and chips maybe twice), drinks out of any sort. Marks and Spencers food was impossibly posh, and buying some picnic eggs and chocolate biscuits on a shopping trip was the height of luxury

Snap!

Branded trainers. Always had BSH or equivalent, and I really wanted a pair of Reeboks.
My kids wear Nikes, my mum can’t believe that I’m buying kids branded trainers 😂. I did point out that there wasn’t a big price difference.

Fish & Chips and Arctic Roll.

I was born in 1983 in a middle class family. We had quite a lot of disposable income I think. But one of the things which we weren't allowed as it was considered reeeeeeeeaaaaally extravagant and hard work too was a Christmas wreath on the door and Christmas lights outside. Grew up and realised neither of those things are difficult or extravagant at all!

Also, never had a blanket in the living room as that was considered a bit slobby! Always have one now

crisps