A MUM of 12 has opened up on the reality of living in a six-bedroom council house with her bumper brood – and the £100-a-month she has to spend to make it work.
Zoe, 46, and Ben Sullivan, 48, are parents to one of Scotland’s biggest family and live in a council house with six bedrooms.
The pair are parents to Elizabeth, 19, Olivia, 18, Noah, 15, Evangeline, 13, Tobias, 11, Agnes, 7, and Joseph, 6, two sets of twins, Charlotte and Isabelle, 16, and Leah and Erin, 8, and baby Flo 2.
Taking to YouTube, the family gave followers a home tour of their council pad which they’ve lived in since 2023.
In the past, the couple has been supported by military accommodation as Ben worked for the Air Force.
But after he left his job, they were forced to look for alternative digs.
They said it took them two years to find a suitable property to house them and their children but finally got offered a council house in Burghead, Moray.
But the couple revealed that their new home is much smaller in size than their previous pad, despite having six bedrooms
While there are more rooms, they are a lot smaller which has meant Zoe has had to be creative with storage.
It has even forced her to fork out £100 a month on a storage unit for their excess belongings.
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In a recent video, she said: “It’s taken a long time to settle and to find places for things. We’ve come from a house with a bigger area especially downstairs, like our dining room was twice the size of this one.
“So we’ve had to try and fit things in. Basically we have got a storage unit because we don’t have a garage or anything here, we used to have a garage.
“So we have got a storage unit where we keep stuff that we are not using at the moment or old memory stuff and all those sorts of things, clothes.
“We had a lot of storage in our old house as well in the form of cupboards and under the stairs, all those sorts of things.
“So that’s [the storage unit] kind of like our garage if you like. We pay about £100 a month for a really big storage unit which is fantastic because we get to keep all that stuff in there like Christmas decorations.
“We can’t use the loft here because there’s no boarding in it at all so it’s all those things that you would keep in your loft really basically and storage units are great.
“I mean the one we’ve got it’s a 24-hour access, it’s all secure, you have to have a special app and it has to be linked to your phone and all those sorts of things.”
Despite freeing up the clutter with the storage unit, the busy mum admitted the family home is still “not aesthetically pleasing”.
But she is proud of the space she has managed to create for her children, and hit back at any haters who judge her over it.
She said: “This is a house with 14 people living in it and it looks like a house with 14 people living in it. It’s not going to look perfect.
The reality of living in a council house
LEANNE Hall, Digital Writer at Fabulous, has discussed what it was like growing up in a council house, and why those living in such properties are often judged…
When I was a child I grew up in a council house, and was blissfully unaware of the discrimination that came with that, until I became an adult.
My younger years were spent running up and down the stairs of my flat, meeting with other friends who lived there and making the most of the communal garden.
But now, it seems no matter your circumstance, everyone has something to say about why you shouldn’t be there.
Living just outside of London like I did, rent prices are still high, and as my mum was at home raising three kids at the time, it wasn’t easy to find a job that fit around that.
People in council houses are often labelled as ‘scroungers’ or ‘lazy’ but it’s nothing of the sort.
Most families in council homes experience overcrowding, and let’s not even mention the horrendous amount of damp and mould that comes from living in old social housing that hasn’t had work done to them in 50 or so years.
It’s not ideal for many, but it does provide a secure home without the fear your rent will shoot up every single year, which I would argue is vital to children growing up on the poverty line.
“We have stuff, we have people. I have a feeling that even if we had a much bigger house maybe it would be a little bit tidier as we could put things away more, we’d have more spaces to hide things probably.
“The majority of people that you see on social media especially, they’ve hidden their stuff if they have stuff.
“They’ve just got enough space to hide it which is fantastic and I really hope that one day we will have that too but at the moment we don’t so our house looks like there are 14 people living in it because there are.
“We take every piece of space we could use and we try and use it the best we can.
“We’re always getting told [by trolls] that our house is cluttered, we should get rid of all of our stuff, all of that sort of stuff but the fact of the matter is 14 people come with 14 people’s stuff so everything in the house we use.
“Everything that’s in the house we use which is why it’s in the house but it isn’t a huge house.”
Zoe was also eager to squash any claims that they don’t pay their way – an accusation she often faces from trolls.
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She said: “There seems to be this stigma that if you live in a council house you have a free house and you get loads of benefit money.
“Maybe that’s the case for some people but for the majority of us we pay our rent we pay our council tax.”
