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Original poster

Did you miss your old house after you moved?

89 replies

Madmog · 29/04/2014 20:14

I know we are making a good move to what could be a home for life, feels safe around there, have a friend in the road who says our neighbours are nice, but as we're coming up to exchange I know I'm really going to miss my present home and all that's good here. I know not everyone would go for it, but it's ours, cosy and we have such good neighbours (one lot we will keep in touch with, in fact, talking about staying in same place in a year or two together), but ...

OP posts:

catbasilio · 03/01/2016 08:40

I miss my old house even though I moved 9 months ago. The pros I lost were more central area, closer to friends and period beauty. It makes it harder we drive back every day for school, friends and commuting station (it is 2 miles away). We gained a bedroom, good secondary catchment and low maintenance so it is all for good reasons but I am agonizing whether to put my house on the market this year and move back to my old area.

Overrunwithlego · 03/01/2016 08:56

We moved house 8 weeks after Dd was born there - she was a planned hone birth. If I hadn't been dealing with her and 3 year old DS I would probably have been a bit of a mess on moving day! We have photos of me feeding her on a lone chair in an empty living room as the movers packed up around us! But whilst I did miss the house and more so our friends (it was the big move out of London t'country) I also felt straight at home in the new place.

LagoDiComo · 03/01/2016 20:01

I moved last September and I thought I would miss my old (first) flat much more than I have. I think once you move all you stuff, the new place becomes yours. As others have said, there is normally a reason to move or else you wouldn't have even thought about it and there's normally a reason, usually loads, why you have chosen your new property. The act of actually exchanging and moving makes things much more positive than the nasty limbo land during conveyancing where you get far too much time to think about it! Finally, give yourself some time in the new place, it's unrealistic to think you will feel as at home as in your last place immediately. For the first few days, it's basically still someone else's house.

halphgracie · 08/02/2016 16:29

Totally! Moved 2nd July 2016 and it drove me into clinical depression; think about it every day without doubt one of the worst things I have ever done.
I have stopped driving past but still look at it online a fair bit: (

catbasilio · 08/02/2016 22:01

halphgracie why did you move? (you must have meant 2015?)

Cressandra · 08/02/2016 22:21

A little. But considering I loved that house and the current one was completely a head over heart choice, I miss it surprisingly little.

BertieBotts · 08/02/2016 22:23

I miss two old houses, but I don't miss the other four I've lived in. Okay I suppose I miss the view from one of them a little bit.

I don't think I will miss this one but I am happy here, it feels nice.

Wondermoomin · 08/02/2016 22:25

Yes I do miss my old houses and flats. Some more than others - it depends on the memories that were laid down in each place. I suppose you'd call it a fond reminiscence rather than pining to live there again. I love where we live now.

bibbitybobbityyhat · 08/02/2016 22:25

Still miss the house we moved out of in 2004 .

It was "finished" more or less and didn't have a thousand jobs still needing to be done to it. We moved out when the dd had just turned 3 and ds was 7 months, so hadn't got to that critical state of children's stuff overload. It was in a better location, but smaller with a much smaller garden. We had to move for space but I do still miss that lovely little house.

Titsywoo · 08/02/2016 22:34

Well maybe a bit different for me because our last house was also my childhood home - my parents rented it to us for a few years as they live elsewhere now and we used that time to save a deposit. So when we left that house (my parents sold it when we bought our first home) I found it very difficult. I wish we could have bought it but it was out of our budget (annoyingly 2.5 years on and we could afford it now!). I often dream about being there and it being really different and finding it upsetting. I loved that house. If I won the lottery I would go and ask the owners to sell it back to me for more than the current rate just to have it back

tingon · 08/02/2016 22:46

My friend woke up on day one in her new house, was overcome with homesickness and just wanted to go home. Her telling me that has stopped me moving for years. I'm terrified I might feel the same.

Ten years later she's back in her old road, a few houses along, and she feels home again, where she belongs.

tingon · 08/02/2016 22:49

That's really sad Titsywoo, did your parents know how you felt?

blueshoes · 08/02/2016 23:21

I only miss the house I grew up in. Since then, I have moved on swiftly and without a backward glance. There can only be one true love for me.

RaphaellaTheSpanishWaterDog · 08/02/2016 23:49

We both still miss the Victorian house we sold in late 2007 having lived there ten years. When we took it on it was four flats and we restored it to a family home. It was too big though and cost too much in maintenance etc, so it had to go.

Since then we've restored another two very lovely period houses (a major & very expensive gut job in the case of the last one) and are now on the third, but we still hanker for the one that we let go

I think we're just going to keep on moving, yet never settling but we can't go back to our original location as we can no longer afford to buy there since paying off our huge mortgage and starting our own business - neither of us wants to borrow that much again!

We have a (potentially) fab home but even when finished to our exacting standards we both know it won't be a patch on that other house.

WhatsGoingOnEh · 08/02/2016 23:59

I moved out of my last house in November 2014 for really positive reasons (getting married, buying own place) but I missed it for AGES! I'd lived there for 12 years and had gone through so much - kids, jobs, a divorce, meeting now-DH - and I'd always felt that house had truly sheltered me. I felt protected there.

We moved to a completely new town (although it's my hometown and m family are here), and I was like a grumpy teenager for ages. Last week, I was coming back to our new house (that we've actually had for over a year), and suddenly, at LAST, felt a rush of affection for it. I'm going to paint it this spring, and tackle the garden.

Maybe houses take a while to adjust to us, not just vice versa..?

WhatsGoingOnEh · 08/02/2016 23:59

No wait, I moved out in November 2013.

MadisonAvenue · 09/02/2016 00:20

I loved loved LOVED my old house and never wanted to move but the minute I stepped foot into this one, a new build, I started seeing it differently. It was a period house and was forever dusty and cold. We did an exchange sale with the builders and completed in less than 4 weeks so I don't think I really had time to think about it. I'll always remember moving in day and walking around the new house in just jeans and a shirt while there was snow on the ground outside - at our old house there'd be times like that when I'd have the heating on full and still need a two jumpers, hat, scarf and a hot water bottle! Our new house was actually an impulse buy after going out one afternoon to find somewhere warm to pass half an hour before picking up our sons from school and we ended up looking at some showhouses!

What I do miss is the small mortgage and living in the town centre, we're in a village now so it can feel a bit isolated.

MadisonAvenue · 09/02/2016 00:22

I should add that we lived there for 16 years and it was the only home our children knew, and even now our youngest who is 15 says how much he misses it.

echt · 09/02/2016 07:09

I loved our old house in the UK, but was getting little bored with the garden.
I returned to gussy it up pre-sale and felt quite detached. Having said that, I still think of it occasionally, and fondly.

The house was east-facing at the back, west at the front. From the back garden, you could see a huge Australian gum tree, always waving its limbs, even when there was no apparent wind.

Our Australian house has the same orientation, and a view of a huge, always waving Australian gum tree.

I miss our neighbours.

PettsWoodParadise · 09/02/2016 07:59

I miss the house I grew up in and was desolate when my parents sold it to downsize. I was in my very late twenties by this time and had already bought and sold a property myself. It was absolutely the right thing for them to do and we up sized at the same time but I just couldn't afford their house. I'd had a Wendy house in the back garden my Dad had hand built from deconstructed Elephant & Castle pre-fabs, my wedding photos taken in the garden and the summer of 76 jumping through the garden sprinkler. I have amazing memories of hours reading books whilst dangling my feet in the stream that ran through it. I've never felt like that since about a house, not even our house a mile down the road from my childhood home that I've lived in for fifteen years. DD is like me has horrors at the thought of us moving and says she loves her home. We probably won't move until she is grown up and settled too so the cycle repeats itself. I feel blessed to have these memories and to have a stable family home both then and now which I know many don't have.

HolaWeenie · 09/02/2016 08:13

OH does! Our first house he was very solemn once all was packed up, his grandfather (more like his dad) was a carpenter and done quite a lot of work in our house and had passed away before we moved, so a lot of it was that, but then when we upgraded our golf (he had it for 10yrs) to a smax and he was sentimental then too.

We're moving in 10days and I've totally mentally moved out of this house, so many things aggravate me about it. OH has already started to lament about this house and how he'll miss it.

MuddhaOfSuburbia · 09/02/2016 08:19

No, never

And I expected to-I'd been in Old House for 12 years and so had a lot of big memories

I hated New House at times-the sheer amount of WORK it needed brought me to my knees. But not enough to miss Old House, even tho OH was the nicer house, in a way

None of the dcs missed OH either (move to a house backing on to a park, op. Pref with easy access to ice cream van)

tingon · 09/02/2016 08:31

PettsWood I so remember those Elephant & Castle prefabs.

silversixpence · 09/02/2016 10:19

Timely thread for me as we are going to be moving soon (fingers crossed) and I've grown to really love our house. I will really miss the beautiful features and high ceilings but hopefully the extra space/garden/driveway will make up for that.

TheElementsSong · 09/02/2016 12:28

I really miss my old house and my old street and my old neighbourhood .

We relocated due to DH work and just couldn't find anything half-decent in the new city - eventually DH insisted we had to choose this particular house because there was nothing else on the market (and TBF the location is very convenient). I didn't like the house when we viewed it but DH was keen.

We completed on the sale of our old house last week and I couldn't tell anyone IRL how sad I felt about leaving it. In the intervening week I've been trying to convince myself that the new house would turn out to be better than I remembered, that I would feel more excited when we actually got the keys, etc etc.

We got the keys yesterday afternoon and the house is worse than I remember it. Lots of things I hadn't noticed were a bit shit on viewing (poor finish throughout, bizarre pipework, wonky kitchen units and so on). And all the things I had noticed were bad, or had been flagged in the surveys (damp, stupid room layouts, poor decorative choices, a million neglected maintenance issues), are really as bad as I had feared. When I'd tried to discuss all these things with DH during the long-winded buying process, he dismissed them all with an airy wave as the over-emotional blubberings of a hysterical woman. Now I'm angry with him, angry at myself for not being more insistent, and angry at the house.

And there is really nobody I can tell IRL , I'm trying so hard to keep up a positive face for the DC.

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