40 Essential English Collocations with HOUSE & HOME!

This is a house, but is it a home? This is a home, but it might not necessarily be a house. It could be an apartment. English learners often ask, what's the difference between house and home? They seem similar, but we use them in different ways. Today, I'll explain the difference and teach you common expressions like house hunting and home improvement, so you can use them naturally. Before we jump in, I'd like to give you a free gift. You can download the PDF of this lesson by clicking on the link in the video description. This makes it easy to save the lesson, read, and review it later. Okay, first the difference between house and home. The word home simply means a place where you live. This could be a house, apartment, condo, a tent, etc., and where you feel an emotional connection to staying in that place. The word house usually refers specifically to the building. A house is an independent building, different from an apartment, which is one unit inside a shared building. All right, let's learn some collocations with home. A broken home refers to a family in which there are serious problems that separate the family, like divorce, abuse, or a parent being in prison. The opposite is a secure, stable, or supportive home, a family in which the relationships are healthy and it is a good environment for children to grow up in. There are special types of homes for older people. A retirement home is a place where people can live after they retire, after they stop working around age 65. Retirement homes may be apartments, or they may be individual houses close together. They might often include activities and social events. People living in retirement homes are usually still active and independent. For older people who need more medical care, they can live in a nursing home. This is a place where old people live and have access to nurses, doctors, and aides who can help them with the tasks of daily life. We often use the verbs come, get, go, and leave with home. Note that we never say to home, go to home. We say, when are you coming home? I usually get home from work around 6. We went home after the party. If you leave home early, you can catch a less crowded train. The same applies with bring or take somebody or something home. We don't need to use to. If you don't eat all your food, you can take the leftovers home. I brought my kids home to change their clothes. Now let's look at collocations of home plus another word. If you bought your own place, you do not pay rent, then you are a homeowner. Homeowners might want to do some home improvement projects, repairing and changing things about the house to make it nicer to live in and also more valuable. Your hometown is the city where you grew up and your homeland is the country where you grew up. A lot of people really enjoy home cooking, a meal that has been prepared at home instead of at a restaurant or purchased pre-prepared. You can also use the adjective homemade to describe foods that were made at home. For example, I'm going to my grandmother's house for some home cooking. She brought some homemade brownies to the office. Alright, now let's learn some collocations with house. You'll see that most of these refer to features of the building itself. So we can describe a house as a single-story, two-story house, etc. to say how many floors, how many levels it has. We can also say it's a one-bedroom, two-bedroom, three-bedroom house and so on to describe how many bedrooms it has. Some positive adjectives to describe a house include a luxurious, magnificent, splendid, lovely, delightful, comfortable, and spacious house. Some negative ones are a dilapidated, shabby, dingy house. That means the house is in bad condition and probably rather dirty. And a cramped house, meaning the house doesn't really have enough space. A neutral way to say a house is regular and not super fancy or expensive is to call it a modest house. A neutral and positive way to say a house is small is to describe it as a cozy house. It means it doesn't have a lot of space, but that space is kind of comfortable and nice. If no one is living in a house, then it is an empty, unoccupied, or vacant house. Some verbs that go with house. You can buy a house and sell a house. If you are paying money every month to live in a house, then you are renting the house. If you own the house and someone else is paying you money every month to live there, then you are renting the house out. Construction companies build houses and also demolish houses, meaning destroy them and knock them down when they are old and no longer safe. If a homeowner borrowed money from the bank to buy the house, but then has financial difficulty and stops paying the bank back, then the bank might repossess the house, Other ways to talk about home improvement, again changing things about the house to make it better and nicer to live in, include redecorating, refurbishing, remodeling, and renovating the house. When you are looking for a place to live, you are house hunting. After you move into a house, you might throw a housewarming party to celebrate the fact that you entered your new residence. A married woman who takes care of the house and kids while her husband works can be called a housewife. If the situation is reversed, the woman works and the husband stays home, then he is a househusband. These people can also be called a stay-at-home mom and stay-at-home dad, if they have children. Now you know tons of collocations with house and home. Make sure to download the lesson text by clicking on the link in the description. And you can learn a thousand English collocations in 10 minutes a day when you get my eBook. Learning these expressions really helps you speak English more naturally without sounding strange. You can find the 1,000 Collocations eBook at EspressoEnglish.net or again in the video description.