The Difference Between House & Home (Plus 11 idioms and Expressions)

In this lesson of RealLife TV, you will learn the difference between house and home, plus examples and common uses, as well as 11 idioms and expressions using home and house. Enjoy!

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Transcript

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of RealLife TV.

I’m Justin and today I’m going to teach you the difference between house and home AND a bunch of idioms for these two words, so stay tuned.

The Difference

Ok. So, the basic difference is that a house is a physical building, it’s made of bedrooms, kitchen, living room. It’s more objective, while a home is where you live, where you feel comfortable. This can be an apartment, it can be a castle, a mansion, a cave or even a trailer.

A poem that really describes this very well is “A house is built of roof and beams, a home is built of love and dreams.”

So, beams are the pieces of wood you use to build the house. So, a house is build of roof and beams, a home is built of love and dreams.

HOUSE: Physical Building (i.e. bedrooms, kitchen, living room)

HOME: Where you live, where you feel comfortable, where your heart is

Examples

So, to give you a couple of examples of that, “I went to my friend’s house,” or “My friend went home.”

So, there’s… When you say home, there’s no possessive pronoun, but when you say house, usually you have, you have the possessive pronoun.

So, you go home, “I went home.”

So that’s the difference between house and home.

Idioms & Expressions with Home

Now, I’m going to share some idioms with you, some different expressions related to house and related to home.

1. Home, Sweet Home

So, first of all, with home, “Home, sweet home.” It’s when you get home after a long trip and you’re really happy to be home, you might say home, sweethome.

Your home away from home is a place where you feel very comfortable, outside of your house. So it’s not your real home, but it’s your second home, it’s your home away from home.

Another idiom that we have is “Home is where the heart is.” So, where you feel that your heart is, that’s where home is.

“Make yourself at home” is another one. When a guest comes in your house, you want that person to feel comfortable, so you could say “make yourself athome, have a seat here, you can use the refrigerator if you want, there’s food in there…” “Make yourself at home.”

Another one is, in soccer, or any sport, if the team playing at home has the advantage, which generally this is always the case, this is called home team advantage. So, the World Cup is going to happen here in Brazil, and Brazil has the home team advantage.

Idioms & Expressions with House 

Ok, now some idioms with relation to house.

So, first of all, a full house is usually when you have, like, an event or some performance and it’s full. Everybody is there, it’s, it’s filled up. So, this is a fullhouse.

So now, maybe that performance goes really well, like you might go to a concert, or a show, and it goes really well, and everybody is on their feet applauding, and this is when they bring the house down. To bring the housedown is when they, the performance is so good that everybody is celebrating and it’s almost collapsing it’s so good.

The next one, “It’s on the house.” If you go out for a drink, or if you go out for dinner or something, and the establishment, or the restaurant pays for something that you consume, then that’s on the house. So, “That beer was on the house.”

Next one, “to do something in house.” Usually, going back to this whole example of the house being the organization, to do something in house is to do something within that organization. So, an organization might hire for a new position, they might hire a new CEO in house. This means that they are hiring somebody from within that organization.

House of cards. This is not just a famous TV show now, this is actually when you build a house out of playing cards. And this is usually not very stable, so it’s a situation that can collapse very easily.

And the final idiom with house is to get your house in order. This is like maybe sometimes you might be complaining about  somebody, or criticizing somebody, and the idea with “to get your house in order” is you can’t really criticize somebody else until you have your situation in order, until you have your house clean and in order.

Conclusion

So, those are the expressions with house and home, and a really simple explanation explaining the difference between the two.

Thank you very much.

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