The very moment that I left at 18 to go to college. I did live back at that house for the next two summers but it was just the place that I stayed until I could go back home to school.
I don’t remember when I stopped thinking of it at home. I don’t think there was an actual moment; it just kind of faded into not-home.
When I moved away to go to grad school, my mother had already moved away, but we still owned the house and rented it to a friend, so I would stay there when I went home (as in the town where I’m from) to visit friends.
Eventually, we sold the house and I had more and more ties here, and wherever I happened to live became home.
Now, when I go back to Michigan, it’s odd, because I recognize lots of it and know how to move around and have places I want to go back to, but it looks so much smaller, and the distances seem much different, and I definitely feel like a tourist. (Staying at a hotel helps…)
GT
I guess my husband had it easiest - after his parents passed away, we bought the house he was raised in. So it has always been “home” to him, and now is home to me, too!
My parents moved right after I graduated college. That was the last time their house was ‘home’.
Home was always “Stately Mercotan Manor”, where I was born. Over the years, my folks lived different places (with and without me) but the Manor remained “our home” over the decades.
Since “Pops” Mercotan’s passing, I’ve been “The Mercotan” residing in Stately Mercotan Manor for over a decade now.
So I guess it’s always been home.
My parents helped me move into the dorms on a Thursday and on Monday, the moving van showed up to move them to Chicago. While all my friends were excited to be going back home for Christmas vacation, I was visiting my parents in a state/city/house I’d never been to. It really doesn’t feel like home when you have to ask your parents where the forks or washcloths are. It really was a immediate change from home to parents house.
I went to college in my hometown. I moved out of my folk’s place when I was nineteen. Though I was still in the same town, I started considering my apartment as home. My folks sold the house I grew up in when I was thirty. They moved to a small house out in the country. I don’t blame ‘em for selling the “homeplace” cause after all their five kids were gone, it was really too big. So, I guess nineteen is my answer. I’ve always considered where I lived, be it apartment or my own home, as “home”. In five years and four months now, my current home will be mine all mine! You’ll hear a big “YEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAA” comin’ up out of south Georgia, USA. That’ll be me with deed in hand. 
It was sort of an amorphous time after I left the dorms. I think it was about six months after I moved into my first apartment, after a year and a half in the dorms. Maybe it was the first summer I didn’t go back to my parents house when school was out. They redid some of the house after I moved out and that helped to make it not “home” anymore.
The house I grew up in burned to the ground a few months or so ago, So here’s what it looks like now. It wasn’t really “home” any longer (my parents had moved out a year and a half ago), but it was MY house, you know?
Filmgeek–that’s terrible. How are your folks doing now, and where are they living?
When I moved out of the dorms in college and into an off-campus apartment, I knew my parents’ house wasn’t really home anymore, but my apartment didn’t feel like home. When I moved in with Only Mostly Dead after graduation, our apartment was my home, and it really helped that my mom turned my childhood bedroom into a computer/sewing room. Now when I go home and spend the night, I stay in the guest room.
The house I grew up in stopped being “home” when I was sixteen, the day I came back from playing music on the road to find out my mother and the kids had escaped. The doors were locked for the first time ever. I never saw the inside of the place again, nor a single thing I owned growing up.
They had moved out a while back, (and the people who now own it are, pardon my french, batshit crazy), but my Mom had a hard time with losing “the house I raised my children in”. We lived there for 20 years, give or take.
No one, kids or pets, was hurt in the fire, but several firefighters were treated for heat related illnesses (it was in the triple digits that day).
I’ve got a suspicion it was arson.
I left home at 18 for the Navy. Four years later I came back and my Mom was sick so I hung around and never left. Both my parents are gone now and it’s just me and the cats.
I don’t see leaving any time soon. Or later. Neat having the same phone number for all but four years of my life.