Where did you live when you were newly weds?s

I'm tempted to start off by quoting Monty Python, " luxury we lived in a ....... "

For the first year we lived in a caravan in the garden adjoining a friends house. It wasn't like the modern ones! There was an outside toilet just down the track but no shower. Fortunately our friends had a basic shower off their front porch so we were allowed to use that. Looking back we could never have imagined then the houses we would go on to buy.

Top floor flat of a three-storey Victorian semi in South-West London.

Bath in the kitchen, with lid for when not in use. Toilet downstairs and shared with the flat on that floor. No heating, just extra jumpers or blankets on the bed.

All floors "wonky" and huge sash windows stuck shut. No fire escape ! School playground directly opposite and husband on nights.

We loved it!

Moved to 3 bed semi 30 miles outside Central London after 23 months. Husband left, 7 years and 2 children later. I'm still here.

When we were first married we rented a one-bedroom flat in a house near Alexandra Palace. We had a living room and tiny kitchen on the first floor and a bedroom in the attic. We shared the only bathroom in the house with the family who owned the house. Every Friday evening we knocked on their living room door and went in to pay our rent (in cash).
In our 55 years of marriage we have moved eight times and lived in England, Scotland and Wales, but we have never forgotten the excitement of packing up our few belongings in that tiny rented flat and moving into the first property we bought (a first-floor maisonette in Enfield).

3 bed semi provided by DHs employment in 1960s

We lived with my in-laws for 18 months whilst we were doing up a terraced property ( husband was a builder). We paid £2,800 back in 1975 with either a 16% or 16.5% mortgage. We moved 5 years later to a large semi, where we still live. The mortgage rates then, were a killer. Thankfully the mortgage company used my wages as my husband being self-employed didn’t have enough years of accounts to really verify his earnings. Good times but hard times, too.

We lived under the canvas cover of the engine we had put into our otherwise empty narrow boat. We both worked full time and continued the renovation at weekends.

We bought a derelict cottage five years later as the midwife refused to deliver our baby on the boat. We did, by that time, have running water and a functioning bathroom with loo but the cottage did not!.

I moved over 200 miles away to a 'tied cottage' on a farm, it was the shepherds old house so used to get phone calls about escaped sheep! still all the bills were paid including the oil for heating and saved up enough money to buy a new car and a large deposit for one of the old Doctors houses which went with the old Isolation Hospital in Altrincham Cheshire. Lived there 10 years, marriage split and moved around the country and abroad. Now in Blackpool and its a great place to live.

phoenix

Windsor Castle, yes, really.

King George 1V Lodge,
Lancaster Tower
Windsor Castle

Lovely view down the Long Walk from the dining room window. Sentry box (complete with occupant) beneath the sitting room window.

Sounds lovely Phoenix! Do you have any photos you can show us please?

2 up 2 down terraced house in our Co Durham mining village, with kitchen and bathroom extension bought in 1977 for £4500 with a fixed rate mortgage of £37 pm from the District Council (an initiative from the then Labour Govt). Small yard, front garden, coal fires, no central heating and mostly secondhand furniture. Moved to a renovated pre-war semi 5 yrs later costing £21,500 with a monthly mortgage of £121 and only sold that 6 yrs ago. The couple who bought our first house in 1982 are still living in it

My first home with my (now ex) husband was on a Dutch Barge moored on an Island close to Hampton Court. Perfect (apart from the marriage

A lovely three bedroomed bungalow in Salisbury S Rhodesia as it then was. Our honeymoon had been the voyage from Southampton to Cape Town. We spent three fantastic years there.

Half and half in a rented one bedroomed attic flat and a bedroom that came with DH job when he had to sleep in. We did this for four years but ran a mile when it was suggested we buy with parents.
DH was adamant that the first house was a"Box" we could easily sell and he proved right.

We rented a ground floor flat in the Old Kent Road in what were then known as slums with a toilet in the back garden and no bathroom. Had to go to in laws for a weekly bath! They were knocked down to be replaced with brand new social housing concrete flats which have subsequently been declared slums and knocked down again. Those Victorian houses which weren't knocked down are now worth millions. We moved to Kent and didn't take up the offer of a flat.

3 weeks before I was getting married my boss called me in to ask for an update on name change and new address for HR to prepare. I told him we still had found nowhere to live all though we were searching frantically. The following day he called me in again to say his wife owned a house that was converted intp 2 flats that her mother had owned and if we wanted to do the ground floor flat up we could have it. 6 months after we moved in the couple upstairs moved out and friends of ours moved in. all the while we were saving for a house but prices were rising fast and we seemed to be getting nowhere. Then a friend of ours was made redundant and he offered us all his redundancy money at no interest to make up our deposit! We soon found a 3 bedroom terraced house which got us on the housing ladder.

We soon managed to pay our friend back and have never forgotten his kindness.

A single end in Glasgow's East End. One room with box bed, and tiny scullery, toilet shared by 3 flats on stair outside. Coal fire. It was bought for us by my mother in law for £85.00. Its wasn't so bad till the baby came along and husband got work doing night shifts and had to sleep during the day.

Where we live now! We bought it as a 3-bed semi in 1975 for £9,200. We didn't think we would be able to afford it but the Building Society accepted my OH's overtime and my student grant as income. Over the years we have extended and reconfigured the rooms, so it now has 4 bedrooms, a bigger kitchen and open plan living area. We brought up our children here and now it is bigger than we really need but we have spent so much money and work on it that my DH refuses to move. The next project will be a lift, I think!

We saved up enough for a deposit on a three bedroomed semi, it cost £6200, a real struggle. This was 1970. We had a new bed and two armchairs, and a kitchen table my MIL gave us. A cooker on the electric bill, no fridge. It was like playing house and I loved it. We stayed for nine years. Coincidentally it was number 18, we are now in our fourth and probably last house, also number 18.

Newly married we invested in a new build two bedroom bungalow with the intention I would continue working to help with the mortgage .I wish
Found I was pregnant so that meant only one wage coming in.

Expensive rented harrow London flat

We got married very quickly - we’d only been going out with each other for a very short time, though we were acquainted beforehand. We never considered practical things like where we would live!
I have no recollection of how he found out about us, as neither of us are Roman Catholic nor churchgoers, but a priest asked us if we would live in a room in a large house that was being renovated to accommodate unmarried mothers. We did. I think that they just wanted people on the premises whilst it was all being sorted out! We were there for about 4-5 months before we moved away altogether and rented a house.

We bought a new build upstairs flat on a new estate in East Bolden Tyne and Wear In 1971. It was all electric and only had wall fires in each room and it was freezing. If we could have afforded an extra £200 deposit we could have bought a semi-detached house but we just couldn’t stretch to that unfortunately even though I was working in an office full time. There were no shops nearby. We eventually bought a fridge but couldn’t buy a washing machine so I had to wash everything in the bath and had to put a clothesline over the bath to dry everything. We bought a colour tv however??? When I say colour a friend had painted her black and white small tv a lovely blue so we carried it on two buses and got it to the flat in one piece and that was our colour tv. It wasn’t a happy time there as my husband (ex now) lost his job and slobbed around the flat for 6 months, in fact it was awful but we survived. Bought the flat for £2,800 and sold it two years later for £5.800 and went back to my hometown Newcaslte upon Tyne. We bought an old 4 bed semi house. No heating but it was good to be back in the land of the living we sold out flat at the right time thank goodness

We lived in a rented wooden bungalow/hut behind a garage for the first year. Half of the hut was a workshop and our half had a kitchen, living room and bathroom. My ex built a tiny bedroom on the side ( with permission) which just held our bed. It wasn't insulated so we'd wake in the mornings to a bed covered in condensation. It sounds awful but it was quite cosy with the open fire. Outside was just a concrete path and a junk heap full ofrubbish from the garage.
We stayed there for a year, then moved to the flat above the garage's office which had no kitchen sink so I washed up in a bowl on the table.
Overnight one night a fire broke out under the floorboards, apparently had been smouldering for years until it reached an air bubble when it burst into flames. My ex had gone to work early but I was woken by firemen running up the stairs and rescuing me before putting out the fire. We carried on living in that smoke stained flat with a hole in the floor until we'd saved the £100 deposit on our first house in a village a few miles away. We just put boards over the hole and a rug on top.
Sounds awful now but we thought nothing of it. This was 1962/63

I got married 40 years ago and moved into the farmhouse we still live in. My husband's mother was a widow and she moved into a very nice bungalow- I'd been dreading she would stay here! My first winter here was the 81/82 birthday freeze where temperatures at nearby Shawbury were regularly recorded as the coldest in the country at -26°. I came from a centrally heated modern house to a 400 hundred year old farmhouse with open fires, a Rayburn & no heat upstairs. It was a very difficult winter! We have of course done many improvements since then!

Hi all. I got married one night stay over at a motel and back to my mums at 19 . As we hadn't got a house but was buying a two bed terrace . It hadn't completed. So stayed separate first few months but we moved in and been together 47 years. No honeymoon as house took up all my savings and my wedding Fund savings too ended up in registry office .

We lived in my controlling mother in laws front room for four months it was the worst time of my life, she would stand over me when I was cooking telling me how her precious son liked his food cooked.