## Step 2 - Reading

Building our dream home
You are going to read a story about a family who are building their dream home.

- Work together with two or three classmates and do exercise 1.
- Read the questions of exercise 2.
- Read the text and do exercise 2 by yourself.

#### Exercise 1

Discuss the following questions in your group.

- Would you rather build a house or buy an existing house? Why?
- If you were to build a house, where would you build it?

Building our dream home You’ve probably heard people saying it before, on social media or in real life: “We are building our dream home!” Or “we have built our dream home!” Most of the time what they mean by this is that they hired an architect to design a home and a contractor to build the home for them. We, however, really mean it. We are building our dream home as a family, all by ourselves. In the last few years we have moved from rental home to rental home. Although we liked the houses we’ve lived in, they never really felt like home. My husband and I have had this dream of building our dream home ever since we got married fifteen years ago. So last year we took the plunge and bought our dream property: two acres of land in East Sussex and a 20-minute car drive away from our favourite city, Brighton. The process of designing our house was incredibly exciting. My mom is actually an architect so we asked her to help us design our dream home. We decided on a 5-bedroom detached house with a large kitchen and two bathrooms. We want the house to look like a typical English country home so the outside walls are going to be made from brown-reddish bricks and large windows will let in lots of natural sunlight. I have always loved the look of houses with a thatched roof, so we incorporated that into the design as well. We also got the kids involved because we want this house to be their dream home too. They got the freedom to choose what their bedrooms would look like and we took their hobbies into consideration. Sam, our oldest, loves to swim, so we decided to build a pool in the backyard. Our little girl, Penny, is very creative. Nothing makes her happier than painting or drawing. So, we added a craft room to our building plans for her. Last Saturday was a big day for us. We officially started building! It really is a dream come true. Building the house will take at least a year. So, until it is finished we will stay in the rental home that we live in now. I’m sure the built is going to be difficult and I’m certain we are going to have to deal with disasters. But we are so excited and we can’t wait until we can finally move into our dream home.