Your first purchased home - how do you remember it?

First house with my now ex husband was a relatively new 3 bed semi in Hampshire, I think 1977, for £24,000. It was a relief after a rented ‘cottage’ which only had coal fires and was in need of significant work as well as being freezing in winter. Not a happy place for me, we split up in 1985. I’ve been back as we get on very well with his wife, the house is probably worth about £370,000 now.

Our first house was a beautiful Glasgow tenement flat...2 bedrooms kitchen, lounge & bathroom that we bought for 9k before we got married in 1980...So many happy memories....I often dream about living there and always wake up with a happy feeling.

First house was an end of terrace with bay windows, early 20th century and still in its original condition with outside toilet (but a bath and washbasin inside). It was in Belfast, 1974, and cost £1600. The mortgage was about £15 a month and putting in an inside WC was a condition of getting it. We had next to no money as DH was still training. I was pregnant - an accident! - and DD1 was born in hospital in 1975 and taken home to a house heated only by a coal fire with a back boiler to heat the water, and a convector heater to take the chill off the bedroom. The WC was finally installed by DH during the hot summer of 1976 - he had to dig a trench for the sewer pipe in the brick-walled backyard and use a blow torch to fit new copper pipes onto old lead ones.

DH also repaired all the sash windows and I did a lot of painting. I painted the mouldings of the internal door panels in a deeper shade of the main colour - what a fiddle that would seem to me now. We kept the lovely old fireplaces, cornices etc, The mangle that had been left in the back yard came in handy for wringing the terry nappies (no washing machine).

We loved that house and our friendly neighbours and were unphased by the sound of helicopters hovering over a more troubled area near the city centre at two in the morning. Our area was relatively quiet but we were well aware of what many families faced in other parts of the city and outside it (as shown by Kenneth Branagh in his film ‘Belfast’).

We were sad to move, due to DH finishing his training, in 1977, when DD2 was on the way. We sold our little house for £3000 and bought a new car. The new owners ‘modernised’ the house and we were heartbroken ?

Tiny kitchen, tiny hall and a small living room, plus two bedrooms. Coal bunker and outside toilet. We were very happy there.

Ours was a small 2 bedroomed in a village. It was fine when I still worked, but lonely as a young mum with a first baby, with my family and friends miles away. Even back then ( early 80s) , we could not afford to buy where we would have liked. We stayed there three years. The positives, it was easy to heat and easy to clean. There were lovely walks round about to take baby in the pram and a really nice park. We stayed 3 years, but it was hard knowing no one.

Never bought a house built on a hillside again, always a house on the level.

Our first house was £3250 in 1968. A 1940's terrace with 2 bay windows it had a lot of steps up to the front door, and steps up to the garden at the back.
It was ok. We only had carpet in the living room and joined up carpet strips around the bed [nothing underneath it!]. Laundry was done at the laundrette.
No central heating but I loved the Parkray solid fuel stove in the living room.
When our first son was born the steps were a problem with the pram. We moved out in 1971 to a new build house in a village 12 miles away for cleaner air and few hills. And heard some years later that our first house had a subsidence problem!

We rented an old detached three or four bed house with a massive entrance hall , the living and sitting room had floor to ceiling Georgian windows which let all the sunlight …. And all the wind ! A Doric solid fuel cooker smouldered and sulked , but if I opened the dampers the chimney caught fire , certainly gave out heat then
We were not the only tenants ! Mice in the kitchen, rats in the basement , and bats in the roof and in the shutters ,!
I didn’t find these delights at first , the Doric being a let down , the first time I put the kettle on it got look warm in 20 mins , where upon I had enough , yelled at poor OH in a fit of drama … either a gas cooker is here tonight or I go home to Mother!
The cooker and keg of gas were there when I got home from work , it had two rings , an iffy grill and an even more iffy oven OH had a very wary look on his face !
It was in the depths of the country , the bus a good trot down the lane , went one direction in the morning and came back in the evening !
We had to stay for ten years and had 4 kids by the time we left to move into the family farm house with oil heating ! Bliss , then came the oil crisis …. …..

Ours was a doer upper. Paid £15,000 for it. It was in a beautiful spot looking out to fields. We always feared it wouldn’t stay that way though. Did up half the rooms when 10 months later DH got a new job and we moved to where we now live. We look back on it very fondly.

It was a brand new 3 bedroom semi in a little cul-de-sac. I actually put our names down for it while my DH was working abroad - he came home and remarked that he'd told me to buy anything I wanted while he was away, but a house was a bit more money than he expected!

I chose it because it was only 10 minutes walk from my job; we stayed there for nearly 20 years and two children later. Loved living there as we were nearly all young marrieds, all having families at the same time; the children grew up together, went to the same schools, played in the quiet cul-de-sac and were in and out of each other's houses.

It was a smallish house, open plan downstairs, two fair sized bedrooms, and a small third bedroom. Eventually moved because the children were growing, nearly teenagers, and we needed more space.

We bought ours in 1965 about 8 months after we got married. It was £3245, a new build, a 3 bed semi, quite spacious rooms but the downside was no fitted kitchen, just a sink unit, there was no gas on the estate so we had a solid fuel boiler installed in the kitchen which was very temperamental because it kept going out and it created a lot of dust. The other down side was that the garden was on a slope and was triangular but DH managed to terrace it and built a nice patio. We stayed for 5 years and moved to another new build which was our first detached house. We had no idea how to seLl a house so we made a for sale board and put it in the front garden, a few days later a young couple knocked the door, looked around and offered the asking price. Our first son was born in the bedroom of our first house and our second son was born two years later starting in the bedroom but I had to be taken to hospital for a forceps delivery. We also have some great family memories of our first house.

Still in ours, bought in 1977, but dh had a small flat previously, and for 13 years until 1987 we were living abroad so it was usually rented out.
No plans to move! Did try to once or twice when dds were still at school - would have liked a bit more space, but it never came off and it suits us fine now - still plenty of room for guests but we’re not rattling around in it.

We looked at new Wimpey semis and they seemed quite spacious then we realised they had not put the internal doors on which made a difference
So we bought a slightly older semi which had larger rooms. The previous occupiers dug up everything out of the garden and took it with them.

Happy memories but we were ready to move on a few years later.

Our first purchase was a brand new three-bed terraced house in 1972. We reserved it at £7,500 and because inflation was rampant, by the time it was built the cost went up to £8,350. We had to sell our car to make up the difference in price.

It had central heating, though, which was a marvel to me. We could only afford carpet in the living room, stairs and one bedroom and Dh made a carpet for the landing out of the off cuts. We had flat pack furniture from somewhere in London - MFI? Am I remembering right?

We stayed for six years which covered the time when we had our first baby. It was a nice little family community. Nowadays, many of those houses have been turned into student accommodation, which makes me quite sad, really.

Modernish 3 bedroomed semi detached in a rural area. We had no furnishings but were very lucky that the couple moving out wanted to leave all furnishings. Which all looked new. So a pleasant enough first home

We bought our first house, a Victorian terrace, in 1976 for £9.100, the monthly repayments were £84.00 which I took into the building society every month in cash.
We were very fortunate to have a garage, but it was very cold and we couldn’t afford to heat it.
We moved after three years, it had doubled in value.
It was a happy three years, all young families, but it certainly wasn’t my favourite house, mainly I think, because we never had enough money to do anything.

A 2 up 2 down Victorian semi bought for £1750 in 1970.

Cold, damp, inconvenient, no redeeming features whatsoever. Bought by husband as it had a lovely view. Had to stay there for 18 years and hated every inch of it.

We bought a dormer bungalow for £4000 in 1971.
It was brand new and we loved it. Our two sons were 3 and one year old when we moved in and our daughter arrived two years later.
It was a happy time and I was very homesick when we left for a bigger house.

We bought a house with my new inlaws i had no say in it as they paid the deposit we lived upstairs they lived down sharing the bathroom i don't have fond memories .
Nine yrs later we bought a house round the corner it was seriously in need of updating but i loved that house where I brought up my children.

First house with ex, modern 3 bedroomed, we were both quite young at the time, well by today's standards at any rate. I was I think 24 and he was 27, he worked for an American Bank, staff perk 3% interest mortgage. I can't remember what everyone else was paying but I know our friends were envious of that rate. We bought it from a very sniffy middle aged couple who thought we were too young to be buying a house, and told us so, In retrospect I wish I'd told them that was none of their business, but sadly I didn't! Then on the moving in day, after our solicitor informed us that we had completed and could pick up the keys from the estate agents, the previous owners having loaded their furniture on the removal lorry, house was empty, stayed there for another couple of hours. We had arranged for a bed to be delivered which they sent away we had hardly any furniture anyway, so had to sleep on a sofa until we could arrange another delivery date for the bed. However in spite of the teething problems, after a rented flat in a non salubrious part of London, it felt wonderful to have our own home in a leafy part of Surrey and with good rail connections we were still up in the centre of London in under an hour.

Ours was a new three storey terrace house in Bracknell. We saw an advert for it in a housing magazine We went to look at it because I knew the area. and knew the estate was within walking distance of the station and the trains fror Bracknell ran into platform 22, at Waterloo Station just a hop, step and jump from DH's job in Shell Centre.

We lived there for just over 4 years. We moved because the estate was inhabited by parents with young children like us and quite a number of the parents were happy to let their children play outside, in what was a quiet close, when they were only 2 or 3. We thought that was far too young and DS had started looking out of the window, seeing other children outside and asking to join them.

We sold it and bought a smaller house, a Victorian villa in a nearby big village.

We are now in our 5th house. The first four we loved when we bought them, left them with a little regret, but it is the one I live in now, dating back to the War of the Roses, an old farmhouse in a village setting, is the one I will have to be dragged from, kicking and screaming.

We lived in a flat first. It was nice enough. Newly built, co-ownership which meant we got enough back to put a deposit on our first house.
I never like that house. We had a spending limit and it was the best we could afford. We left after 5 years as the neighbours were horrendous. We bought our present home and have been here 40 years.
I always envied people who said they fell in love with a house and had to have it. We always bought what we could afford.

We bought our first house in 1967. Cost £1,500. The mortgage was £14 a month and we were hard pushed to find it at times. We were both nurses not earning a great deal and my then husband considered lorry driving to earn more money. We had a coke fire which was a nightmare to get started, the windows were iced up inside in winter but we did have an inside lavatory. We moved to another town where my husband got a job with a new council house as part of the deal. Felt like luxury.

We bought our little house a couple of years before our first baby was born. It was in a cul de sac where there was a real mixture of ages and families. We eventually moved to a bigger house but I still have very happy memories of our first home.