What makes a house a home?

Well here it is - the much anticipated post on our new house.
We live in one of two on-campus housing communities, called Hasbrouck Apartments. I'm not 100% sure, how you pronounce it, but thus far I've been saying Hass-brook, and no one has corrected me, so let's just stay with that.
The housing community consists of around 40 townhouses (or as they are called in Hebrew - "train houses"), set up in a semi-circle. There are cement paths leading from the road to each of the individual houses, and grass all around. Right now there are a lot of little plastic cart toys all around, I guess once the school year starts, and people will come back from vacation there will be a lot of kids playing around. Just above the complex, there is a golf course, and since we're at the edge of the complex, we can actually see it from our living room window. Since Ithaca is in the middle of no-where, and we're at the edge of Ithaca, the "life in the country factor" is very strong. When night time comes, you can see all the stars in the sky. During the day, there are wild animals of all kinds. Needless to say, there are squirrels and raccoons, but also deer and bunny-rabbits. Two days ago Uri when on his first jog almost stepped on a bunny and also saw a beaver.
The house itself in nice. It will take some work to make it a home. I think our apartment in Tel-Aviv was just so nice, it's hard to compete. The main difference is that while there are ceilings were relatively high, here they are relatively low. If you compare the two, and figure in Uri's size, it makes this apartment seem kind of small. The top of Uri's head is about 10 cm from the ceiling.
Slowly but surely, it will come around. I started with the bathroom, since from all the rooms, it got me down the most. My bourgeois-self kicked in and gave the solution: Nothing can't be fixed with a little bit of money. I bought a match set of towels, bath rug and shower curtain with the thought that if I put beautiful thing in there, it will take my eyes off of the things I hate. Guess what? It worked!
There is of course the kitchen. This was mainly taken care of by Uri's lucky find on Craig's List. We bought almost everything anyone could need in a kitchen Yesterday we already cooked ourselves dinner, and I even made a sort of cake. I had no recipe, but all I wanted to do was make some sort of cake-like dough and stick lots of fresh blueberries in it. The oven is a little strange. It's gas. We'll have to see how that works.

That's all for now. Next time: We're shopping 'till we're dropping!