To ask what the strangest thing is that you've seen in a family home/life...

[purpleworms]

...that to them was completely normal?

I have just seen someone asked this on an AMA on their Instagram. Their reply was walking around fully naked in front of parents/siblings/any family members.

While this is obviously okay for some, if it happened in a home I was visiting I'd be but that's just because it's not the norm in my family.

I'm racking my brains but I don't think I've ever noticed anything! But people have such different ways/customs within their home lives and routines. We all regard our own as normal without ever really knowing if what's normal to us is strange to others!

I went to someone’s house for dinner a while ago and they didn’t sit down at the dinner table, at all, at any point in the evening

Weirdly, they had already eaten by the time we arrived so it became some sort of very awkward dinner service where they just served us, refused to sit down for fussing, then spend lots of time in the kitchen washing up

Really really weird

I had a friend when I was a teenager who lived with her parents in a small new build house with 2 bedrooms (one en-suite), a living room and a kitchen which I'm sure was classed as a kitchen/diner but was only just big enough to fit a small table and a few fold up chairs. Friend had the (bigger) en-suite bedroom and the living room was also designated as her space. As such the living room was decorated to her taste and full of her stuff (80s so tapes, tape players, video player/TV, bean bags etc). Her parents spent their evenings in the kitchen watching a small portable TV.

At first I assume that this was just an arrangement for when her friends were over but she claimed not and the state of her rooms plus the fact that eventually she was allowed to have a lock put on the door suggested not.

This reminded me of another one
My other Aunty washes up everything the moment it’s used. So as you eat she’s washing up, she takes it all as you finish and runs the tap and uses one of those sponges with washing up liquid inside. She has a dishwasher but she doesnt like making it dirty

Not at all unusual really, but when I was 16 I went to tea with a new friend from the sixth form. Her family were quite well off professional people who lived in a naice local village; her Dad was a scientist. I was very much working class.

Her family were really lovely but her Dad cooked our dinner. Despite considering myself a feminist leftie at the time, this absolutely blew my young mind. I had never seen a man cook, wash a dish, or even make a cup of tea before. I remember going on about it for ages, probably drove my family mad.

This was 1980, by the way, not Victorian times or anything.

When we bought our first house we viewed a terraced house which had a toilet in the master bedroom, not an ensuite, actually plumbed in next to the bed.

DP could have done naked pooing while I had a chat from the bed.

Cats on the worktop and litter trays in the kitchen. Both these things are awful and I wouldn't eat in a house where they were doing that.

My family also did this...mainly the women...

Being 'bath buddies' to each other, sitting on the toilet seat and having a chat/catch up while someone is relaxing in the bath 

People who never open the windows in their house.

I have been in two houses recently where, as you walk in the front door, you can smell the smell of unwashed sheets, dirty laundry, human beings, stale cooking smells and generally just old rancid air.

Don't get it at all.Nice folk otherwise, prof jobs, nice houses. Just very smelly.

The only thing near to a naked poo would be when I was bought a Christmas onesie, dutifully wore it and needed the loo. Even then my ankles were at least covered.

Apart from that the lovely offer of sharing someone's bath water 🤢.

I remember being very surprised the first time I went over to a friends house and discovered she shared bunk beds with her mum, and her dad slept in the other bedroom.

mystified I think some people have a poor sense of smell.

When I was a teenager I went to a friend of a friends house. I found the whole thing unnerving because basically the family had photo frames of dicks and key rings of dicks. I am glad I never had to 'pop' in there with my friend again.

Went to a family home once on a professional visit. The front room had page 3 Sun newspaper ( in the day - topless photos ) ripped out and taped to the walls. In another house, the male of the home, rebuilding his motorbike - in the kitchen.

Coralnails the family glasses cracked me up.

I had a friend from college who did the bath buddies thing with her mum, step dad and step brother! Mum I could sort of understand but letting her older step brother come in and have a chat whilst she was naked in the bath was too weird for me. I used to walk to work (2 minute walk from my house) to use their loo if I was desperate and someone was in the bath/shower!

My two step sons used do this too though that's because the youngest didn't like being upstairs on his own, it's now filtered down to eldest sitting in the bedroom whilst youngest showers instead of being in the bathroom with him.

We had neighbours who had plastic covers over everything, including the lamp shades.

I've never known that to be a feature of a family that didn't have multiple MH issues across several generations but that might just be the cases that I know about for various reasons.

Friend of mine started a story with 'you know when you're shaving your mams legs?' never heard the rest because no no I don't know about that, he's never heard the end of it

@ShirleyPhallus I think you went to a restaurant....

My family were probably the family everyone thought was weird. We had a mattress propped up against the living room wall as my dad slept on it. He would lay it out every night once everyone had gone to bed. My mum went to bed at about 6.30/7pm every night. She liked to keep her bedroom door open to sleep which meant we (the kids) weren't allowed any lights on. If we stayed uo, we would have to turn our bedroom lights off before slowly and quietly opening the bedroom door handles, creep /crawl along the landing to get to the bathroom. I'm not exaggerating, if you made one floorboard creak, your life wasn't worth living. We then weren't allowed to shut the door properly as it would make too much noise, weren't allowed to flush the toilet or turn the lights on. Can you imagine what it was like having friends over? My best friend was the only person I invited over as she was the only one I could trust not to be too judgey about all the weird rules. So many other things, but they are too weird to write on here. I had a weird childhood.

My big sister's house.

It was clean.
The carpets felt squishy, soft and extended to the skirting boards. No dust filled things that weren't vacuumed and made bare feet burn.
They had curtains that not only worked, they were used every day.
The kitchen was fitted, had a built in oven and the surfaces weren't covered in junk.
There was heating in every room, so no need to wish for it to snow so that the ice would block the gaps in the windowframes and make it fee warm upstairs.
The garden wasn't full of junk and dogshit.
There were spaces between bits of furniture, so you could move around and it didn't feel like the walls were closing in on you because there weren't tables in front of bookcases of ornaments stacked up in piles in front of other bits of furniture.
There wasn't a rule that you couldn't walk on the other side of the bedroom floor nearest the window because 'that was where the fleas lived' - because everywhere was vacuumed regularly and the cat didn't have fleas anyway.
The bath wasn't doubling as a place to store towels from 20 years ago, stacked on a lump of wood, so you couldn't lie down and relax.
They had toilet roll with flowers embossed on it.
Best of all, they had a shower - and they weren't just allowed to use it once a week on Sunday evening, they were expected to use it. my sister had to show me how the shower worked, as I'd never seen one before. And then she couldn't get me out of it.

It smelled nice everywhere. And they talked to one another, instead of shouting and hitting.

Took me a while to realise that, actually, this was the norm for most people's houses.

some of these are crazy! I've always been bemused by the plastic wrap over carpets people but only just realised now thanks to @PookieDo that it could come from a place of OCD

I remember staying at a friends house for a night, the Mum made me have a bath before going to bed then while I was in the bath she just burst in and used the toilet merrily chatting away to me the whole time. I was mortified.
Dinner was a microwave meal but only one was served at a time, she didn't serve the next until the previous person had finished eating.

Another friends parents house I loved going to because you could basically do whatever you wanted and eat whatever you wanted. The Mum let us graffiti all over the kitchen, they'd offer us cigarettes and cider as though they were cups of tea.
Looking back it was really chaotic but the parents were so friendly and warm, the kind of home you could turn up at anytime of day or night and there'd be food for you and a bed if you needed it.

@ShirleyPhallus definitely a restaurant! How odd!!

We still do bath buddies in my family, but in my family you use so much bubble bath all you can see is the top of your head it's lots of fun and nothing wrong with having a catch up like that. It's not something that has extended past blood family though so BIL's or extended family wouldn't do it but siblings, children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren all do it. The others would only go in if the curtain was pulled and they were desperate for the toilet (most of my family only have 1 bathroom houses).

Theres been times I've visited my sister walked in yelling where are you for her to yell back I'm in the bath, with the expectation that I'd just head up to go talk to her. Only one of my sisters isn't ok with this but she is really self conscious about the way she looks, plus shes a little more removed from my family.

My female friends and I often call each other (not facetime) when we're in the bath. And I have held my friend up while she drunkenly peed in a bush at 4 in the morning on our way home. A testament to friendship right there.

Oddest thing I saw while visiting a friend before christmas was just how 'traditional' they are for want of a better word. Breakfast bowls and cutlery set out at the kitchen table the night before, where the mum would come down early eat her's and then pour cereal for everyone else and make the cups of tea. Lunch and Dinner was taken at the dining table all cooked and prepared and plated at the table by mum. Full place settings and seating position dictated by age and 'rank' in the family. Dad 100% head of the household making arbitrary decisions while mum runs everything. It was bizarre and I found it rather sexist in some way. They also spent very little time away from the dining table in the same room or talking to each other at all. In my house it's noise, noise, noise and constant chatter and excitement and physical contact and yelling at or too each other. And by all accounts we're far happier.

I did have to bite my tongue once or twice when my friends dad made disparaging remarks about him. Because my friend is stubborn and pig headed and acerbic at times but he is lovely, and bright and when not being talked down to or treated like a child very sweet and generous.

@MitziK