Housing

Choosing a place to live in is a problem which everybody has to deal with at the beginning of his adult life. Te choice is wide – you may live in a village, in a town, in a suburban area of a large city (on the outskirts AmE)or somewhere in the countryside far from other people. There are several types od dwellings in Great Britain you may choose from:a flat, a council house/flat, a house, a terraced house, a cottage or a bungalow.

A flat or an apartment is a set of rooms that are usually all on the same level and are a pat of a lerger building. A council house/flat means flats or houses owned by tehe council which people pay rent to live in. A detached house is a house standeing by itself, not joined to another house and usually having a garden. Detached houses usually have at least three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms upstairs, a separate dining room and kitchen downstairs. Semi-detached houses sometimes called semis are built in pairs and are joined on one side.  Tehy usually have two or three bedrooms and a separate garden at the front and back for each house. Terraced houses are two or more houses jeined together in a row. There is little or no garden and the front door of each house opens onto the pavement. They were small in the past, buy many of them were extended and rebuilt. Cottages are small, very old village houses which have been modernized inside, but have kept the wooden beams an some even thatched roofs outside.For many people a country cottage is a dream house.Bungalows are one-storey houses which are very popular especially with older and disabled people because everything is on one level.They are mostly found in villages or on housing estates.

After choosing the place and the type of your future dwelling,you have to start thinking about money becouse buying a flat or a house is usually very expensive, but you do not need to have all the money. If you work,you may arrange a mortgage with a bank. It may go up to 90% of the total price of your flat or house.Young people who cannot afford to buy a flat or a house often choose to live in rented accommodation.They may rent a bedsitting room or bedsit – a rented room which has got a bed,table chairs and somewhere to cook in. Another possibility is to rent or buy a studio or a studio flat which is a small apartment designet to be lived in by one or two people. It usually has one large room for sleeping and living in, a bathroom and possibly a separate  kitchen. Nowadays i tis quite common for young people and especially students livinsg in large cities to rent a flat or a house and share the costs.

House in Britain and on the Continent may seem small if we compare them to American houses. A typical US house has two storeys, upstairs there are several bedrooms, one for parents(the master bedroom) usually with a bathroom attached and bedrooms for each child. There is also a guest room, a study or a playroom. Downstairs there is a kitchen, a dining room, a living room and a bathroom or a half-bath (a toilet and a washbasin). Many older American houses have a porch (a covered area outside the house) where people like to sit when the weather is nice.

Americans are said to be ´the nation on the move´ because they move several times during their lifetime looking for better job opportunities or educational facilities for their children. Finding a new palce to live in is not difficult and prices are reasonable. You may rent an apartment or a house, but also buy an apartment in a condominium (an apartment building in which the apartments are owned by the people who live there). It is comon for young people, students and young professional people to live in apartments near city centres. Later when they get married and have children, they tend to move to houses on the outskirts.

Poor people who do not have much money live in tenements – old building found in the downtown areas of a city, in very small houses or in mobile homes parkes in a trailer park.