Or did you ever?
I’ve been going to college for a few years, with visits back home every few months. I mostly live in the college town and when I’m here, I refer to my house here as my home. But when I go down to visit my parents, I also call that my home. This makes sense since my room is still there and I’m always welcome to come and stay. But I’m wondering at what point, if any, will I stop thinking of it as “home” and more “my parents’ house”.
Pretty much as soon as I moved out when I was 22.
I stopped feeling like it was home about when my last boxes were shuffled off to my first apartment. It was weird. It didn’t look any different, but it felt different right away. I was 23 at the time. Now, 8 years later, my mom has completely redone every room in the house, and put siding up and a garage outside, so it doesn’t even look like my childhood home. Every time I’m there, I notice how much it doesn’t feel like home, and it sorta bums me out.
I was 26 when I bought my first house. I guess that was when. They had lived in the same house for 23 years so even when I was gone 4 years in the Navy and 2 years in the first Apartment my Wife and I shared, I thought of their house as my home. I lived back at home for about 2 years between the Navy and my apartment.
Jim
I lived at my parents home every summer in college, and I went back there about one weekend per month. Even though I had my own apartment it never felt like home until I started making stronger ties here in this city. Specifically when I started dating my now-fiancee, I started going back less frequently and one day I walked into my parent’s and realized that it no longer smelled like “home.”
I might break a record here. For me it was 2 hours, I was 18 years old. My sister took my waterbed upstairs, my brother took over my room. I’m pretty sure I never went back into the house. It wasn’t a real pleasant place to be. I moved from Illinois to Florida within about 3 months.
By the time I could afford to fly home to visit, they moved on me. I guess I should be grateful they gave me their forwarding address.
The first summer I was home from college. My mom and brother had developed their own habits and routines, and made no effort to include me in them. I felt more at home in my dorm, and that summer I started the countdown until I could move out – which I did 8 months after graduation.
When my parents got divorced and my mom sold the house. I guess I was maybe twenty and had been living on my own since I was 18.
My mother sold the house I grew up in just before I turned 18 (I lived alone in the house (well, with my son) until closing, which was just around my 18th birthday.) I got my own apartment, she got hers. So once I left, it was never ‘home’ again, and honestly, stopped feeling like ‘home’ even while I was still living in it. My mother has owned the same house now for 13 years or so, but I never considered that house my home. I never really lived in it.
I moved away from New Jersey to PA when I was 27, and then here to CA when I was 30. I will still occasionally call NJ ‘home’, but it really stopped feeling like home for me a year or two after I left, and even more so since coming out here.
At 19, when I got married. My folks moved a lot though, and I never got particularly attached to any of the places we lived when I was growing up.
After I got my first apartment, I stopped refering to my parents’ house as “home.” Even so, it still felt like home whenever I visited.
My parents moved a year later, so there was no way to think of their house as “home” after that!
Well, my case is different. My parents threw me into other homes when I was younger. I lived with my aunt until I was in 4th grade, then moved to my parents…
When I turned 15, they caught me drunk and kicked me out. I’d say that was prolly when it happened. I lived with my sister and bro-in-law, but I never called that home either. I refer to my house now as my home. It’s simply where I belong.
I do make reference to “going home” as in going to my hometown. Since I live in the town that I’m in for college, it makes sense to more people if I say that than much else.
Brendon
To me, “home” isn’t… where you come from. It’s where you feel comfortable. I feel strange calling the town where I spent most of my childhood and where my closest relatives live “my hometown”: it fits the official definition, but I fit much better with the people of the town where I was born.
“Home” was my bedroom at my parents’ between ages 12 and 18. I’m slightly claustrophobic; while I have had only an attack in my whole life, I just don’t feel comfortable in small, dark places. My previous bedrooms had been both. That one was large, airy, I could see the sun rise from bed all through the year and the sunset as well in the winter and I liked the furniture (except for the table, too small and with these horizontal rods between the legs which constrain leg movement).
When I left for college and in revenge for having managed to go to a place 5 hours away (that is, too far to come back and do the ironing every week, or for her to “drop by” any time she wanted), Mom moved me to the smallest, darkest room in the house. She didn’t tell me; I found out when I went “home” in Christmas. Only, that room has never been “home” for me; it’s dark, it’s narrow, and I dislike the majority of the furniture.
The living room in my new flat is painted dark strawberry red and it’s a tad too narrow; I’ll have to repaint it something lighter.
Pretty darn early. Dad rented out my bedroom when I went to college at 17. I still thought of it as home for a few more years, though, because I spent my summers there in one of the other rooms.
What drives me out of my mind is that my mom continues to refer to her house as “home,” as in, “When are you going to come home, dear?”
Mom moved out of my home when I was nine, has moved several times since then, and now lives in a state a few thousand miles from where I grew up, yet she refers to her house as “home” in relation to me. And 100% of the time when she asks me this I say, “I* am * home mom,” and she says, “Oh yes, of course, I know, but I think of this as your home,” for some damn reason. She’s been doing this, and I’ve been correcting her, for twenty years.
Hasn’t happened yet, despite the fact that I live in two other apartments at different points during the year and my parents’ house not at all.
Pretty much as soon as I moved out. However I do say “I’m going home to see mom this weekend.” But I don’t really think of it as “home.”
For as long as I can remember - I’ve never felt that my parents’ house is my home.
I’m 26 and have lived on my own since I was 18. I still consider my parents’ house “home”.
I also consider my own house “home”, however. I have to be pretty specific when I refer to either of them in the company of my friends.
I’m 27 and have my own home - in the same neighborhood where my parents have lived for 30 years.
My caller ID is programmed to show their number as “home” and my cell phone’s phonebook lists them as “home.”
My brother called the other day to ask if I was a home or at mom and dad’s. I had to think for a second as to what the difference was.
I think I’m lucky in that regards. Some of your stories are making me feel sad 
So far my house is just my really expensive and work-intensive bedroom down the street.
My parents’ house was never really a home for me. As Nava says, home is where you feel comfortable, not where you are. So I stopped thinking of it as home as soon as I went to college, to be honest, but my terminology didn’t change until I moved out at age 20.