First Home Stories Please

Ok I'll start.

My first proper house of my own was in the worst council estate EVAH! I couldn't hang out washing or it got nicked. All the furniture was second hand, we had old road signs on the walls to cover the holes, the carpet didn't quite fit the room and was patched at one end...the bathroom suite was ORANGE and the walls were ARTEX but it was home....;0)

My first flat was a studio in a CONVERTED BREWERY. Despite all its faults, I loved it just because of that.

Did it smell of hops?

No, students. I might have liked it better had it smelled like an actual brewery, rather than a bunch of wasters who got kicked out of dorms, i.e. the metaphorical brewery.

Bet you didn't have ARTEX though, hmmm?

What is ARTEX, pray tell?

None of the walls were straight, regardless. There wasn't a true right angle in the place. No regular floorplans, either, just odd HUGE closets and passages to nowhere and the like. That was great, actually, come to think of it.

You know, the giant swirly textured stuff on bathroom walls, very popluar in the seventies, very difficult to remove...

Ah! They had that at the B&B on the Isle of Wight and I was admiring it!

My first place was a 2 bed house with a front garden (on which we regularly sunbathed & had bar-b-q's much to the joy of the neighbours!) which I shared with my best mate. It was a great house & I loved it. I was sad when we had to leave it, but then we moved just round the corner to a practically identical house, so not too bad. It was getting a bit shabby by the time we left, but it holds some great memories. Most of the things we had were donated, like the sofa was a 20 year old brown affair that had seen plenty of action prior to us owning it! *shudder*

PinkP - my first sofa was brown, made out of what looked like cord or something and well past it's best - perhaps it was the same one...

Heh, if it used to belong to my best mate's mum, then it prolly was!

Maybe the sofa has travelled the world.....anyone else have a yucky brown sofa story they'd like to share?

Horrible horrible student house. Peeling wallpaper, broken washing machine, leaky kitchen. The place was a dump when we moved in so nothing inspired us to clean it up. Memories of playing "Bintris" (like Tetris but with ordures in a kitchen dustbin) was the lowest point. The rip off property agents tried to claim our deposit because we hadn't shampooed the fucking curtains. We got it back in the end.

Our second house the following year was absolutely lovely though. I really miss it.

Horrible yet fantastic student house in York. Psychedelic flowers painted on ground outside (not by us). Dark green carpet of death imbued with 20 years' worth of alcohol residue and general grime. Brown velvet curtains in my room (the smallest). Living room adorned with empty wine bottles and evolving art projects based on tin foil and club fliers. 70s wallpaper (orange and brown flower design) and underneath that about 5 more layers of grim paper, as we discovered when asked to strip it and repaint by the landlord in lieu of a month's rent. Good parties.

First proper apt with my wife was in Brighton Ma. A studio apt with red floors and a leaking heat pipe.

My first owned home, which is what we are in now is a nice condo in Worcester with shiny new ceramic tile floors in the bathroom which I just put in a few weeks ago.

I live in a 'studio apt' at the mo, one room and kitchen with (thank God) a seperate bathroom. Bought a loft bed from Ikea which is basically a double bunk bed with no bed on the bottom, so I have to climb a ladder every night to get to bed. Due to the precarious nature of my sleeping arrangements I've stopped peeing during the night, it's just far too risky trying to get a foothold when you're tired :(

The first flat I ever had in London was a studio in the dilapidated Gray's Inn Buildings, which had been one of those creative squats in London (Sade and Seal and Finley Quaye had lived there, among others) but latterly became a housing association turning a blind eye to sublets. If you look hard you can find mentions of it in Dickens and similar. It was at the beginning of Clerkenwell and the end of Bloomsbury and was filled with fashion and club types, couriers, drug dealers (spliff, coke and worse) and quite a high number of casualties.

I sublet it from a friend who was moving to a larger place with a boyfriend and when I arrived it had never been properly decorated and had a paint-spattered sink unit from the '50s. After workmen repaired the wiring and changed the sink, I painted the walls, woodwork and floor of the studio room white, the front door, bathroom floor and fire surround blue, and the passage between the studio room and the bathroom a bright yellow. I hung red blinds on the studio room window, and used a rescued black wood Post Office sorting shelf as a partition between my sleeping area and the rest of the room. There was one source for heat and the flat was often cold, but I loved being no more than 15 minutes from Soho or Shoreditch and there were Italian delis on the doorstep.

Last year they began rehousing the residents of Gray's Inn Buidings elsewhere in Camden and the block I lived in will be razed on 17th May. However, the building's facade is Grade II listed so will be preserved when the block is turned into council housing.