The prime requisite in a house is that it be adapted for home life, be a comfortable place in which to sleep, cook, eat, rest and read, talk and laugh, and play and pray; in a word, in which to do all the work that enables these necessities and pleasures to be obtained. Next to the comfort of the family comes that of the outside world. It is desirable, though not essential, that the home contain facilities for entertaining.
CHAPTER V
THE HOUSE
Essential Parts of a House—Double Use of Rooms—Utility of Piazzas—Landscape Gardening—Water-supply—Water-power—Illumination—Dangers from Gas—How to Read a Gas-meter—How to Test Kerosene—Care of Lamps—Use of Candles—Making the Best of the Old House.
The parts that are desirable in a well-ordered house may be enumerated as follows: Cellar, the kitchen, the storehouse, the pantry, the laundry, the dining-room, the living or sitting-room, the lavatory, the parlor, the hall, the library, the nursery, the sewing-room, the bedrooms, including guest chamber, the attic, the piazzas.
Where economy of space must be practiced, storehouse and pantry may be combined, and nursery and sewing-room; and one of the family bedrooms may be devoted to the use of the occasional guest. The hall may be thrown into the parlor. The parlor may be properly converted into a library and music room, although when the father is of retiring literary tastes, he should have a "den" of his own, where he may read and smoke in peace.
The parlor is too often wasted space in a house. As the "best room," and very often the largest room, it is reserved for reception of guests, weddings, and funerals, and at other times shut up in gloomy grandeur from the family, except, perhaps, as the place of banishment for a naughty child. Except when used as a library and music room, it should be one of the smallest in the house, and may, indeed, be entirely dispensed with. The family living-room is not an improper place in which to receive a guest, especially one whom it is desired should "feel at home."
Of the rooms for the family, the nursery is the best to dispense with, the very young children being kept under the mother's oversight in her sewing-room, or the attic, or a loft in an out-building being fitted up for the elder ones as a play-room. In the case of the loft, it is well to equip it as a simple gymnasium.
It is mistaken economy to use the living-room as a dining-room, since this interferes with the orderly work of the house, no less than with the comfort of the family. It may with propriety, however, be made also the sewing-room, and, in general, the mother's managerial office. Here she should keep her desk and her household account-books, and meet the tradesmen and other business callers. It is also more suited than the parlor for use as a family reading-room and working library. Disorder that betokens use, such as magazines on the center-table, or of papers on the desk, is here not inappropriate. Indeed, it gives a homelike appearance even to the social guest.