Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have a home. You may not have a house, per se, but you have a place where you go to be warm, to sleep, to take your clothes off without risk of being jailed for public indecency. A structure you can, in one way or another, call your own. If you do not fit into this category, if you are, in fact, homeless, then you should stop reading. I believe in visualizing your goals, but reading a blog about home designing in the hopes that you will someday get a home is, perhaps, putting the cart before the horse. So to speak.

Anyway, with that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to give you another. This won’t be a philosophical discussion on the difference between House and Home. Just assume that if I use either of those words, unless I say otherwise or context leans heavily in the other direction, what I mean is a building or something like it.

What this article will be about, however, is the house itself. Where it came from, where it is now, where it’s going. And like other great stories, I’ll start at the beginning. Or as near the beginning as is possible. The introduction of housing isn’t exactly a known occurrence to historians. Obviously being sheltered from the elements was as important then as it is now, we just don’t know when people started thinking about it officially.

With that ambiguity in mind, most of these early examples will be lacking in hard dates and solid facts. Some of it is historical conjecture, based on a look at the society as a whole, not necessarily archaeological findings.

Earliest forms of housing were likely as simple as trees with dense foliage or caves, especially in warmer climates. Provided those living outdoors like that didn’t have to contend with hostile animals or nasty weather, they worked fine. But in those early years, farming wasn’t really what it is today, and to survive, people needed to be close to animals. Unless trees and caves underwent a serious evolution lately, they were as immovable then as they are now.

So it wasn’t a gigantic leap of logic that brought people to the idea of tents. Small, light structures comprised of a frame of wooden poles and animal skins, they went up fast, they kept out the rain and they were easy to travel with. This allowed early humans to protect themselves as they followed migrating herds of animals. This was also the beginning of the concept of architecture.

2 bedroom, 1 1/2 bath, large backyard, low taxes.

It might not seem like much, but it wasn’t long before people were trying to make their tents bigger, trying to understand how to structure the frame in a way that it would accept a heavier load, etc. Within a handful of years, those tents started looking a lot like what we would consider houses, with multiple rooms, some of them even had multiple stories. Yet they were still easy enough to break down if everyone needed to pick up and move. And, as such, there was a definite lack of permanence. But that would change.

The start to housing was, I think we can all agree, pretty boring. I mean, there’s really only so much interior decorating you can do with a tent. There are no Victorian inspired tents, or Tudor Revival tents. But next week, we’ll get into where REAL houses started to take off, with walls and roofs and everything.

For those interested in Home Designing Service-created tents, I regret to inform you that a recent stampede of angry pickles destroyed the warehouse where we kept them. We can, however, whip up one of those fancy houses for you, if you want. I might even throw in a drawing of a tent. These deals don’t come along every day. Call now.