Missing my old homes.

Sometimes I look at my old homes on google earth , happy and sad memories

I have had 14 during my married life and some I loved more than others. We gradually moved up the property ladder and lived in different parts of the country before moving abroad for a time and then coming back to Oxfordshire where we live now.

The one house I always dream about, though, is our first home. It was an old mid terrace in Lancashire with an outside loo. The old man that sold it to us had lived in it for 70 years and left us most of his Edwardian furniture. It cost us £1,500 pounds. The mortgage was £10 a month and the rates £10 a year. That is the house that is still in my heart.

I think the reason we bought our cottage when we downsized, was because it reminded us of the house we had when our first DS was born. We had completely renovated it and on reflection were obviously nesting.

Annie I do that, too!

Squiffy do you get annoyed if the front gardens are untidy ?

I downsized about six years ago to a new-build which is in a cottage style.

Although it was eventually too big for me I'll always hanker after our garden which we had with our bungalow. The kitchen was nice too - just big enough to have a table and chairs in and it always seemed sunny.

I do that too Annie! I spent a very happy hour recently ‘walking’ round the village I grew up in courtesy of Google Earth - a few changes but the majority of it hasn’t changed a bit. I’ve very happy memories of that village and my childhood home

I absolutely adored my grandparents' house. I lived with them for various reasons when I was young. If I was ever stressed or upset in life after that I'd revisit it mentally going from room to room. I always thought that I'd know I'd died because I'd be back at G********d.
Imagine my distress to find out, too late, that it had been flattened and 6 townhouses were to be crammed on to the site. I gathered that neighbours had fought a spirited battle with the developers but to no avail. Greed won out. I'm still, frankly, devastated.
I wrote a short story in the People's Friend about it and how it might have been saved and put to a better use. Fiction of course but it made me feel a little better about it.
I hope the developers go bust!!

I get annoyed because my parents and the neighbours (in the house I lived in when first married) went to the trouble of taking down the fence and putting a driveway between the houses, and building garages. We used to even drive a largish LandRover motorcaravan down there.

But now they either park in the front garden (not much room) or in the road (not much room there, either). I think that they haven't worked out that you have to reverse in (carefully!!) and drive out. If you drive in, you can't get the lock on the steering to get out again.

What a waste of time and money putting in the drive and garages!

SirChenjin I do the same, ‘walking’ around the streets, seeing where my school friends lived, where my large extended family lived , the hill where I fell off my bicycle when learning to ride it. ?

As a child, I remember playing happily for hours under the lilac tree growing at the bottom of our first council house. I want a woodland burial so have asked for a lilac tree to be planted.

We have lived in a rented flat, a basement flat in the first practice we bought, a bungalow, a new build, the flat over a second practice in a Georgian house, a modern house in Australia and a rented house when we came home.

I was heartbroken when we sold our house near the centre of our local town. It was a 6 bedroomed Edwardian semi with a big garden. It was far too big when our eldestv3 children went to university and the area was being taken over by students.

But, our current house is my favourite by far. It is the bigger 'half' of a Victorian Board school, near the middle of our busy, lively village. We have a small manageable garden, lots of light and space and somewhere to install a lift when the time arises!! We also have a leaky roof and a perplexed slater!

Annie I was upset when I saw that they'd got rid of all my beautiful shrubs and plants in the front garden. How dare they?!!

In my parents' old house, the new owners got rid of the fruit and veg plot and replaced it with a trampoline!

Yes Anniebach - I do that too! I saw the old Victorian school which has had a couple of extensions added since I left, the creek where we played, the church, the childhood homes of all my friends, the streets and fields we all played in, the memorial hall and the village green where all the events were held (including the annual ‘bowling for a pig’ competition!). Happy days

It's funny isn't it that it's changes to the garden that are more upsetting than changes to the house. I can remember being furious and quite upset when I saw that the new people had removed a beautiful and unusual magnolia tree that I had planted.

Although I love the bungalow we live in now it is so easy to manage and has just the right sized gardens for our needs I always hanker after our last family home not to far away from where we are now.We often drive down the Road and I say to myself for goodness sake tidy up your frontage and put up the hanging baskets.
It was our 3rd house purchase and we had so much work to do to it when we completed the sale.it is a very large 4 bed house with high ceiling and big bay windows.
Over the years it was renovated to a lovely family home and was always a busy home,I can close my eyes now and walk around that house and visualise every room and the decor.
I loved every brick in that house but it was far to large for us to manage and upkeep after our last child had left home.

I've moved so much, I don't actually hanker after past homes much. But I do have very happy memories of my grandparents big old Victorian house. I mainly remember the garden because I spent so much time in it with my grandad. It was a proper walled kitchen garden like something out of Downton Abbey. My father was a real 'deadbeat' dad but his father, my grandfather, was a wonderful man. Wonderful loving memories. I hope my grandson has such lovely memories of time with me when I'm gone.

Quizqueen

The smell of lilac always take me back to my grans house, I plant lilac everywhere I live, lots of it!

Framilode - I agree! On my tour of the village I walked past our old house and they’d taken down our cherry tree I remember my dad planting it and the blossoms were beautiful. They could have at least asked our permission first!

We've moved so many times that I can barely remember some of the houses! I love the house I'm in now although I'd like to put it in the garden of our previous house as this garden is steep and has too many steps.

I still have nightmares about my childhood home, 50 years after having moved out. It was a tumble-down Regency-era house and it was always leaking and bits falling off. My nightmares involve it collapsing completely. However, it's still there and still lived in!

NanKate sounds like we've lived in some of the same places.

Perhaps because we have moved so much I don't feel sentimental about any of our houses, just bricks and mortar. We finally live in a house which is so 'us' we can't believe it. I think the locations of our houses mean more than the house and we have the perfect (for us) location now. I can't imagine every leaving this house unless I am so gaga I don't realise it is happening!

Were you in Stratford Nonnie ?

Curiously, I drove past my previous house yesterday for the first time since moving four years ago. I don’t miss it at all. I enjoyed driving down the road, past the corner where there used to be a corner shop where the children used to buy comics, and the library, and the railway station where we used to catch the train for a day out. I lived there with my husband and family for over thirty years. It was nice remembering those times, but I’m happy where I live now. I can remember the first house my parents ever called their own, a newly built BSI house designed by Frederick Gifford. I was only 18 months when my parents were allocated it, but I remember how happy they were. Before that my mother lived in one room and a shared kitchen and bathroom, and my father lived in single quarters.

We've lived in 5 houses in our 48 years of marriage but 33 of those have been in our current home which has been extended and remodelled so often it bears little resemblance to the original dwelling. We both know that at some point in the not too distant future we will have to finally move on but there are so many memories here that it will be very hard to leave.

Memories of my childhood home which was a small terraced house where the front room had been turned into a fish shop are still very vivid in my head - from the store under the stairs where the boxes of dripping were kept to the huge mirror in the shop with a poster of Ben Hur stuck on it. The backyard where my dad filleted the fish under a lean to shed and the outside toilet next to the coal shed. I can even remember my pram which was stored in my bedroom - my mum was 33 when she had me and they always said it was too late to have any more but I guess they hung onto the pram just in case. I was only 8 when we left and moved to the seaside but I still think of that town as my home. Sadly it was all demolished years ago and the whole of that area redeveloped - even my school at the top of the street has gone but those memories remain still.

Our first house after living in a grotty flat for 10 months was a 2 up 2 down on a very narrow dead end street - going down there now it's a wonder my husband managed to get his beaten up old mini down it but we only had that for a month after we moved in when it died and had to go to the scrap yard. Didn't get another for 7 years by which time we'd progressed from a 3 bed semi with a dubious bedroom bay window to a 2 bed bungalow where our 2 children shared a room in bunks. We really thought we were moving up in the world when we had to move 60 miles away due to husband's job and managed to buy a 3 bed detached house on a new estate - we'd only been in it a year when he was made redundant and got a job 4 miles from where we'd just left and had to commute back and forth again. Strangely although we lived there for nearly 7 years we hardly remember it.