Home sweet home

Home, sweet home. It doesn’t matter what your home is like – a country mansion, a more modest detached or semi-detached house, a flat in a block of flats or even a room in a communal flat. Anyway, it is the place where you once move in and start to furnish and decorate it to your own taste. It becomes your second ‘ego’.

Your second ‘ego’ is very big and disquieting if you have a house. There is enough space for everything a hall, a kitchen with an adjacent dining-room, a living room or a lounge, a couple of bedrooms and closets (storerooms), a toilet and a bathroom. You can walk slowly around the house thinking what else you can do to renovate it. In the hall you cast a glance at the coatrack and a chest of drawers for shoes. Probably nothing needs to be changed here.

You come to the kitchen: kitchen furniture, kitchen utensils, a refrigerator (fridge) with a freezer, a dishdrainer, an electric or gas cooker with an oven. Maybe, it needs a cooker hood?

The dining-room is lovely! A big dining table with chairs in the center, a cupboard with tea sets and dinner sets. There is enough place to keep all cutlery and crockery in. You know pretty well where things go.

The spacious living room is the heart of the house. It is the place where you can have a chance to see the rest of your family. They come in the evening and sit round the coffee table in soft armchairs and on the sofa. You look at the wall unit, stuffed with china, crystal and books. Some place is left for a stereo system and a TV set. A fireplace and houseplants make the living room really cosy.

Your bedroom is your private area though most bedrooms are alike: a single or a double bed, a wardrobe, one or two bedside tables and a dressing-table.

You look inside the bathroom: a washing basin, hot and cold taps and a bath. There is nothing to see in the toilet except a flush-toilet.

You are quite satisfied with what you have seen, but still doubt disturbs you: ‘Is there anything to change?’ Yes! The walls of the rooms should be papered, and in the bathroom and toilet – tiled! Instead of linoleum there should be parquet floors. Instead of patterned curtains it is better to put dark plain ones, so that they might not show the dirt. You do it all, but doubt doesn’t leave you. Then you start moving the furniture around in the bedroom, because the dressing table blocks out the light. You are ready to give a sigh of relief, but…suddenly find out that the lounge is too crammed up with furniture.

Those who live in one-room or two-room flats may feel pity for those who live in houses. They don’t have such problems. At the same time they have a lot of privileges: central heating, running water, a refuse-chute and…nice neighbors who like to play music at midnight. Owners of small flats are happy to have small problems and they love their homes no less than those who live in three-storeyed palaces. Home, sweet home.

Task 2.

Read the Text “A Room of my Own”. Then tell the group what kind of place you live in and what your favorite room is. Give your reasons. Discuss whether rooms reflect people’s personalities and in what way you would decorate and furnish a living room or a bedroom.

A ROOM OF MY OWN

Ivan Steward is a window cleaner. Not only is window cleaning his bread and butter, it is also his inspiration, because some of his ideas on interior decoration came to him by looking through his customers’ windows. He once saw a seaman’s chest looking splendid in someone’s room and he set his heart on finding a similar chest. He finally came across one in Bermondsey market. ‘They told me it was an old chest that had been washed up on the shore – I wanted to believe that, so it’s true as far as I’m concerned.’ Now it’s in the sitting room of his top-floor flat with its panoramic view of London.

If the room has a faintly Continental air, that’s because while cleaning windows in Holland he noticed that Dutch people tended to have wooded floor rather than fitted carpets. ‘They have all these different color woods, so I decided every time I came back I was going to bring back some wood.’

Ivan, now 41, just under two meters tall, long-limbed – ideal window cleaner’s physique – and soft-voiced, with a gentle manner but a considerable degree of drive and enthusiasm. As well as being a window cleaner, he is also an actor. Before he was either he was a fireman.

Ivan bought the Persian rug in a carpet sale out of the money he was paid for playing Ambrose in the TV series ‘Robin of Sherwood’. His role of Simkins in the film version of ‘Porridge’ paid for the sofa and the Victorian farmhouse chair. His mother, who died some years ago, gave him the cheese plant, and most of the other plants he bought in Columbia Road flower market. The television set stands on a cut-down Victorian table that he bought in Bermondsey market. He is devoted to dogs, and his girlfriend gave him the carved wooden dog on the television set. He also has a retriever called Sidney.

The African figure on his coffee table is one of three he bought in Dar es Salaam when he went to stay with a fellow drama student who lived in Africa. He came across the pair of boat paintings at a Sunday jumble sale in Essex.

Ivan keeps all his tips in the big gin bottle and is hoping to buy his flat from the council.

Task 3.

Most teenagers’ bedrooms are a rich mixture of what they want, what they used to want, and what their parents think they ought to want. Some teenagers are lucky. Their parents don’t fuss about their rooms. Kate McNair-Wilson wrote to Streetwise about her room. Read the description and carry out the tasks below.