We lived in a terraced house that was (I guess) built about 1900. I have a feeling that it didn't have cavity walls. The only form of heating was a coal fire in the living room. In winter you could stand in front of the fire and be roasting on the side facing the fire and freezing on the other side. Nobody had thought of loft insulation. In winter water heating was by means of a "back boiler" which to the uninitiated was a cast iron tank at the back of the fire. It heated the hot water tank by gravity circulation. In summer water heating was by means of an immersion heater. We had one bath a week and when I was very young us two boys had to share bath water ~ not together, but one after the other in the same water. In a cold winter the windows used to frost up completely on the inside overnight, and the frost had to be scraped off every morning. The toilet was outside at the bottom of the garden. Toilet paper was torn-up pages of railway timetables hanging on an S-shaped meat hook.
My grandparents small farmhouse had no mains services whatsoever. The toilet was effectively a hole in the ground with a plank of wood across it which had two holes in it ~ the smaller of the two for children and the larger of the two for adults. The solids were periodically removed with a sort of long-handled ladle and put on the garden. Water came from a pond at the bottom of the garden. In summer the pond dried up, and water had to be fetched in milk churns on granddads horse pulled cart/trap from a neighbouring farm. The wireless set was powered by a lead-acid accumulator and a grid-bias battery. Lighting was by means of paraffin lamps. They had candles to see the way upstairs at bedtime. Bathing was in a zinc-plated bath temporarily placed in front of the kitchen range.
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