Military house

[Fullofquestions1]

Just wondering how military housing works
does everyone get offered a property?
is there a choice of property?
do they come furnished?
if you had a children while living there can you move to a bigger property?
do you pay rent/mortgage?

Just curious, if anyone can offer any answers please 🙏

Married couples are entitled to military housing.
Couples who aren’t married but meet certain criteria may be eligible (but not entitled to) surplus housing if there is availability.
Housing for non-commissioned married couples is based on your family size - how many children, ages of the children, sex of the children etc, kind of like how the council work out number of bedrooms etc.
Housing for commissioned officers is based on both rank and family size.
The serving person needs to apply for housing. Depending on availability, you’ll be given a list of available properties that you are eligible for (based on the above criteria) and you can choose which one you want from that list. Sometimes housing availability is in short supply so you’ll just be offered one and it’s take it or leave it.
Every one I’ve ever lived in has been unfurnished, decorated in the standard military magnolia that we all know and love.
Furniture is available to borrow from base stores if you want/need it, but it’s very basic.
Rent comes directly out of the serving person’s pay before they get it.

Thank you so much for answering my questions.

So if you were a couple (no children) that had been together years but not married there’s a chance you wouldn’t get a house?

are you allowed to decorate? Do they have to complete repairs say the boiler stopped working?

You might not - depends on if you meet the criteria or not.

If things break its not up to you to fix it. You call whichever maintainence service the housing estate falls under and they do it.

You can redecorate but it all needs to be put back to the original when its time to move out, so people generally dont bother.

The Families Accommodation Model allowed for long term couples to be eligible (not just when there was surplus housing) I’m not sure what happened with the full roll out after there was some whinging from officers about junior ranks and senior ranks mixing, shock horror. The roll out was paused I believe.

I know the new accommodation model was rolled out as a pilot scheme to see how it went at a few bases but definitely not all - that’s the test scheme that opened up housing entitlement to all couples not just married ones, but @piehj is right, it seems to have fallen by the way side.
So as it stands at the vast majority of bases, couples who meet the criteria for “long term relationship” are eligible for surplus housing if it is available. But even if you do get surplus, it’s not a failsafe - if a married family receives orders to your base who have entitlement, then a non-married couple in surplus housing can be given notice to vacate if there is not sufficient housing available for the family who have entitlement.
You can decorate, but everything has to be put back as it was before you leave, so for most families who move every few years, it’s simply not worth it! Most people stick with the standard magnolia and then bougie it up with nice curtains and rugs etc
(FYI the houses do come with curtains…..but they are an affront to curtains everywhere 😵‍💫😂 It’s almost like the military have a contract with The Ugly Curtain Company 😂 Most people take them down, store them somewhere and then put them back up when they leave! One of mine got damaged in storage when a pipe burst, and I used the information on the label to track them down to try and get a replacement…..turns out the curtains were significantly older than me and not made anymore! 😂😵‍💫)

My parents were in naval housing a LONG time ago (45 years) so this may not be relevant. He was a Commander so got a 4 bedroom house. It was completely furnished (but they may have paid for that separately) and everything, EVERYTHING, was listed down to every teaspoon and saucer! No decorating allowed. It was only for about 6 months after they came back from a posting in Australia while they looked for a house to buy.

Sometimes if there is not enough military houses on your base, you may be accommodated at a nearby base (that said I live in RAF Lincolnshire, so Waddington peeps could be housed at Cranwell, approx 10 miles between them) Occasionally if you are lucky and there is no spare military housing, you could be housed in a private house which is rented by the MOD (which won't have 1980s fittings and crap curtains)

The only time we had furniture was in Cyprus... over overseas (but not Northern Europe) is the same. Howevwr, you can't go abroad if you are unmarried.

The furniture was as interesting as the curtains and the carpets.

😂😂 I have heard some horror stories over the years of stores furniture 🫣🫣
But my personal favourite had to be moving into a new house when I was 6 months pregnant….house was as dated as usual, but with a perfectly reasonable 1980’s era kitchen. It wasn’t what I’d ever choose in my own house, but it wasn’t hideous. I’d made my peace with it, unpacked everything, I was all set. Then not even an hour later, one of the contractors knocked on the door and said “You’ll have to re-pack your kitchen, the lads are coming to rip it out Monday morning” 😳😳😳
My kitchen was a building site for the next 3 months 🫠 Kitchen ended up being lovely once they were finished, but trying to look after my very young toddler with just a microwave and a slow cooker in the living room for 3 months was interesting 😵‍💫

70s RAF brat here - I remember our houses being due for redecoration and
we had a choice between pale lemon, duck egg blue and strawberry milkshake paints...pretty sickly!!

Colour choices always made me cringe ....our German flat had battleship grey walls , slightly lighter shade of grey floor tiles ,a turquoise and green square of carpet that sat very sadly in the middle of the room , dark brown short woolly curtains and to top it all perfectly an orange and peach stretchy fabric covered 2 seater settee and chairs all very hippy looking and migraine enducing😲

The colours really used to be something didn’t they?! 😵‍💫😂

My first one had standard RAF grey-blue carpet in the living room, brown in hallway, terracotta tiles in the kitchen…..all finished nicely with curtains of dull rainbow stripes 😵‍💫😂

I was amused to read in the Armys family magazine that in future the walls will be painted white not magnolia.

DH is currently in Overflow Singles accommodation aka houses they can no longer use for families as the quality is too low. Its got the most hideous curtains and furniture and a plethora of fire extinguishers...

Magnolia and floral curtains as far as the eye can see!

When we moved into our first MQ the curtains were the first thing to go into storage. I bought the biggest curtains I could find on eBay and just changed the hems on each subsequent house 😂

You just know that layer upon layer upon layer of magnolia paint is the only thing holding the walls up in some of them 😵‍💫😂😂😂

Married couples, civil partnerships and (recognised / registered) long term relationships are now all ‘entitled’ to service housing - service families accommodation (SFA)

Previously the property type / size was based on rank for officers and family size for other ranks. That is no longer the case, but there is a transitional period - and there is unlikely to be a push to combine all ranks together.
(Prior to the officers change there was the same potential of a private with a large family being housed alongside sergeants, but the classic estate design of size mixes and their allocations would tend to keep a degree of separation

There are numerous policychanges that have happened, are planned / proposed and are in trials.

Where an entitlement exists the property of equivalent being provided - previously married couples / families only, with partnerships and long term relationships having an eligibility which meant that a property could be provided if available
This would mean that if an appropriate property was not available the entitled would be able to have a substitute hiring from the private market but the eligible could not
By changing partnerships and LTRs to entitled they should not be reliant on surpluses

The plethora of fire extinguishers is due to the change over from family accommodation to a ‘house of multiple occupation’
There should be a number of changes made to misappropriate surplus families SFA into alternative singles SLA, mostly under fire regulations

@Fullofquestions1
Is there a particular interest, such as potentially going into the services ? In which case on what basis ? Married/partnershop/long term relationship, soldier, officer, army, air, navy?

Or just generally inquisitive ?

Rules have changed nightingale. My DC is currently overseas for 2 years with their partner and they are unmarried.

They just had to prove they'd been living together previously.

@Tomikka purely inquisitive, watched location program and family on there were looking for their first home after been in military houses for 20 years.

i know I could google but prefer ‘real’ answers to the stock answers that google would give.

thank you everyone for the replies and explanations

My MIL told me that when she wanted to paint in the 80s she would go to the housing officer and they would give her a tin of the regulation pink, green or blue depending on what she wanted!

We decorated a bit… I’m looking forward to covering the Sapphire Salute feature wall with trepidation 🤦🏼‍♀️

Also- housing is done by rank for RAF SNCOs as well, there’s a quirk in the entitlements.

If you are entitled to a house and there are none available, the military will rent you a house in the area from the open market that fits the criteria. You get very little choice in what this is. Our friends had a great house on this basis!

I’m very grateful for the cheap military housing that enabled me to keep my career afloat during the childcare years (we paid no more than £160 a month for a massive house in zone 6! Not as cheap now mind, this was 10 years ago now) but MY GOD buying your own home is next level after living MQs!!!! Don’t miss it one bit.

We unknowingly bought an ex-RAF house (well, we didn't know when we put the offer in) after our 10 years in MQs...it felt right!

For all their flaws, they often had decent sized rooms and good gardens.

My experience of this is through DF. After DM passed he remarried and family spent almost a decade at MTV Heidelberg. That was a very specific (and managed by the Americans) setup, right next to normal residential area, not separated. I was in boarding school for most of the time but loved going there in the summer especially.

Do look closely at the facilities and support for kids, and for the spouse. That was the big issue for us. (My lovely stepmom) just didn’t like Germany.