What normal things did you not have or not have in your house growing up?

[Fairypowder13]

We ran out of kitchen roll today and it got me thinking, growing up we never had kitchen roll in the house. I can remember visiting people who did and thinking that it was quite posh.

I grew up in a very poor home and we were always warm, clean, clothed and fed, but also lacking so many basic things. My parents always had money for cigarettes and alcohol though 🙄

I can remember having to have my hair washed with washing up liquid at times, I had very long hair and my mum never bought conditioner so you can imagine how knotty my hair would be. I did eventually get access to hair conditioner after begging my mum after I’d seen it advertised.

No cushions on the sofas.

No family holidays or day trips. Didn’t see the sea until I was 16.

No fabric softener for washing.

Never had a bed or mattress of my own, had one that was given to us until I was old enough to buy my own, it was all broken in the end but it didn’t occur to my parents to buy one.

No birthday cake or celebration, we’d get one small cheap present but nothing beyond that.

No stocking for Christmas. We’d put out one of our socks.

No winter coat, I had to wait to be given one by my older cousin.

In the 70s we had no heating (none, not just no central heating), TV, washing machine, sofa, car, microwave, freezer, hot water (used to wash doing strip wash from kettle), vegetables (I am the product of a largely baked bean diet in childhood), shower, hairdryer, duvets - and obviously no hair conditioner or kitchen towel! We had meat once a week, fried mince and onions (sometimes liver) on a Saturday.

Once we had a chicken but after that it was judged too expensive.

I do not recall ever eating fruit at home as a child - though there was milk at school in the pre Milk Snatcher era!

It was a different world then! We did have a house phone, which I do not have now, ironically.

In the end actually we did get a form of heating- the church lent us one of those gas heaters with some sort of gas canister (?) in it, and paid for replacements. Strong communities in those days.

No TV til I was 9 years old
No fridge or freezer
No phone
No car
No double glazing, or central heating, so you froze in winter
No sofa or cushions

Life's so much better now

As a young child:
No central heating, so frost on the inside of the windows in the winter. We did have a coal fire in the lounge, and a couple of wall mounted electric heaters but their use was limited as we had electricity on a meter which required coins to be inserted.
No washing machine - we had a weekly trip to the launderette.
The relatives who lived with us didn't have a fridge - they had a larder which had a square of marble in it to keep milk cool.
No telephone.
Shared bathroom in a shared house - we lived with relatives, so you had to wait your turn for a wash.
No shower in the bathroom. You either had a bath or washed at the sink.
Hot water was limited - we had to put the immersion heater on, or boil the kettle.
No hair conditioner, and no fancy washing unguents, just shampoo and soap (Vosene and Pears, Sunlight or Coaltar soap)
No duvets - we had blankets and 'candlewick' bedspreads.
Certainly no kitchen roll and no paper hankies - cotton squares for blowing your nose.

As an older child we moved to a house where we had more room, central heating and a washing machine. This meant we had constant hot water. We still never had an actual shower, just a hose attachment on the bath taps, but we didn't have to share a bathroom with relatives.
got a telephone, We got duvets ("Continental quilts").
In my teens the bathroom then started to fill with fancy soaps, bath pearls, conditioner and all sorts, usually courtesy of the Body Shop.
Our relatives moved with us, and enjoyed most of the same but they never bought a fridge!

We never had a toaster either, or a microwave.

Although our eye level has cooker did a great job.

We had no handwash. A bar of soap in the bathroom and washing up liquid for hands downstairs.

My kids definitely don’t know they’re born.

I do find I’m still very grateful for small luxuries and conveniences. Dh thinks I’m weird because he grew up much more well off.

I get what you mean about paper towels. My mom used a dish cloth and tea towels. If there was a mucky spill there was a pile of rags in the cupboard. Basically they were really old towels that had been cut into smaller pieces or pieces of tshirts or whatever. And after being used they were washed. But most people did the same at that time until paper towels became standard at some point.

The thing we always laugh about is store bought biscuits. Mom made her own which were very nice but we'd see an ad in a magazine and ask for the store bought ones. So once she bought some lemon puff biscuits and they were vile. No one wanted to eat them but she swore that she wouldn't buy anything else until we ate these ones. That lasted several months - a miracle with a family with 4 young children.

We didn't have a bathroom in one house we lived in. This was 1970/71. We had a tin bath that was hung up in the back yard, an outdoor loo, a bucket to use during the night, and a little heater on the wall near the kitchen sink as a hot water source. Ice on the inside of the windows, black mould all over the bedroom walls. The toilets at school were outside in the playground and used to freeze over in Winter! We moved from there to a new build which was sheer luxury!

Sellotape or pritt stick/glue.

My year four teacher laid into me in front of the whole class because I used staples on a piece of homework instead which culminated in the following exchange:

"Do you have a fridge?!"
(Yes Miss)
"Do you have a bed?!"
(Yes Miss)
Then you must have glue!! Go and sit down you insolent little girl!"

It was the first time I realised not having thise things on tap at home was not normal.

I’ve only just realised that I never had a birthday cake . Quite odd as my Mum was very good at baking, and a generous person, a loving Mum. I wonder if it was because she never had one growing up so it didn’t occur to her ? I didn’t have birthday parties, I think she would have made one for a party. Perhaps they weren’t generally made apart from for birthday parties, for my generation (mid 1960s), I will have to ask friends !

Heating
Food
Love

No fridge until I was a teenager. No freezer.
No central heating. A coal fire downstairs and nothing upstairs.
I was 10 when we got a TV, 14 when we got a phone and 18 when my dad got a car.
No washing machine.
No microwave.
We had a week at the seaside in the summer.

Various things, but for some reason it's the tissues that really stand out to me. Instead the whole family would use looroll. Bits of looroll doubled over and stuffed in our pockets. Sometimes whole swathes of looroll if we had a cold.

What gets me is that I have no idea why. We were on a fairly tight budget, but honestly I can't believe that cheap tissues would really have been more expensive than the amount of looroll we got through. We could certainly have afforded tissues. And the looroll was just so much more inconvenient (given the size/shape and the way it fell apart), and must have looked awkward to everyone when we (including my mum and dad) fished our trailing lengths of looroll out of our pockets in public.

I barely registered that tissues even existed until I'd left home. Then I never looked back. Even as a student I could afford them, and they just seemed like the last word in luxury to me for ages.

We also didn’t have cushions, I’d never thought about that either. Maybe my Mum didn’t like them , she never had them. We didn’t use kitchen roll, it didn’t exist when I was little, so I don’t use it either, I never have.
The world has changed so dramatically since I was small. We always had an indoor loo and a bathroom (as did my grandparents), but many houses didn’t have either in the 60s and early 70s. We also always had a car, and a telephone, but until the 70s most children I knew didn’t have a phone at home and not many had parents with a car. In 1976 my best friend had parents who had a car each, which I hadn’t come across before.

I grew up in the 70s and money was tight.
No washing machine but a twin tub.
No phone
Black and white TV
Clothes were bought from jumble sales (apart from shoes and underwear)
Every year my sister and I would choose one nice dress from a catalogue and that dress would be used for best for the year.
No central heating.
Sweets once a week after Mass on Sunday and sometimes if we were lucky my auntie would bring us some.
We had a few holidays but not every year. When we didn't have a summer holiday, we'd use a local coach company for a couple of day trips.
I had a really happy childhood and my mom and dad were very loving and affectionate.

We didn't get double glazing and central heating until I was 8. I remember the rubber pipe and funnel contraption on the bath taps instead of a shower too.

My children are bought (and purchase for themselves) many more books than I received as a child. I'd only get them for birthdays or Christmas. Now, we buy both new and secondhand books at least every two months. My parents did take me to our local library weekly though, whereas I only take my children every three weeks.

Loo roll. Most of the time we'd use newspaper.

I used to steal loo roll from school and sneak it back home. It was that tracing paper stuff so notrealyly much better!

I buy loo rolls in bulk and store them in my loft. I have issues!

My parents never had central heating. There was no heating at all upstairs unless there was one of dad’s fan heaters available. We had coal then gas fires in the lounge and dining room. Didn’t have a fridge till I was about 10. No landline till I was about 18

I was born in 1961. Apart from things that hadn't been invented (microwave, kitchen roll etc.) we didn't have central heating, dishwasher, tumble drier or even a fridge until 1971 (we had a cool cupboard). We had a washing machine and a radiogram. My dad had a good, well paid job and we had new clothes, nice holidays and birthday parties. Looking back we had much more than many of my friends but compared to these days we didn't!

We didn’t have a colour tv until I was 6.

I was a teenager when the council put radiators in. They ran off the back boiler behind the fire in the living room so we were screwed if we ran out of coal. Luckily my dad was a miner and got part of his pay in coal otherwise we'd never have had a fire!

The windows were metal framed and froze in winter so a radiator was the best thing ever! A fire even just a couple of hours in the evening really took the chill off.

Arts and crafts. My mum is a clean freak (potentially OCD but never diagnosed) so she’d never allow us to make mess. Even if we brought home art we’d made at school, she’d bin it. I loved Blue Peter but couldn’t enter the crafty competitions unless I went over to my best friend’s house. She had a huge box of crafts and I was so jealous. Always made sure my DC have lots of this sort of stuff.

A real Christmas tree and just actually any decorations with soul. Again, too much mess and mum would only ever put up a fake tree with baubles to match the room decor. Now go to a farm every year to pick one with DC and we have crazy decorations, nothing matches intentionally.

I don’t buy kitchen roll fwiw, seems really wasteful.

A mum

We had kitchen roll in the 1960s. We had a dishwasher too.

However, we did only have one heated room. Coal fire.

PE kit washed more than once a term.
Threadworm medication.
Regular dental appointments.
Clean school uniform daily.

No central heating until I was 12.
No double glazing until I was 12.
No constant hot water - we ‘put the tank on’ an hour before we wanted a bath.

Also, and this is a weird one, I was thinking the other day that we bought lemons twice a year - pancake day and Christmas. I buy them every week!

That’s so sad OP, some of the things you’ve mention. Especially the mattress and the winter coat 😢

I don’t think we had hair conditioner either - I don’t think my Mum had heard of it either and that’s really weird as she has always been quite into her hair. My hair was very knotty too.