"Home is where the heart is" - English proverb
"Wherever I lay my hat, that's my home" - song by Marvin Gaye
Home is where you feel you belong. A house can be a home, but a newly-built or abandoned house can't. A home can be a house, but it can also be a country, a city, a nightclub, a shop, a tree or a hole in the ground.
A house is a building, a physical construction - "bricks and mortar" is the phrase we tend to use in English, although of course it could be made of concrete, steel, wood or dried mud. It's a house as soon as it's been constructed, but it isn't a home until someone lives there. At that point the residents can refer to it as "our house" - which is simply factual - or "our home" - which takes the fact of the structure and combines it with another idea - a feeling of emotional connection between the resident and the place where they feel comfortable, relaxed, safe.
When we are inviting other people to the place where we live, we usually say "Come over to our house", not "Come over to our home", probably because we don't want to emphasize our own relationship with the place when we have the idea of making someone else feel comfortable and relaxed there, but our guests might compliment us, saying "You've got a lovely home!" to show that they think the place feels friendly and welcoming. We let our friends know that we want them to feel like that, as if the place were truly shared between them and us, by saying "Make yourselves at home!" If they feel like that anyway, without being told, they might describe the place with the adjective "homely."
So when is a home not a house? When it's the precise or general habitat of a non-human organism ("The African veld is the home of the rhino", "the tapeworm makes its home in the small intestine"); when it's the place where someone or something originated ("Naples is the home of the pizza"); when it's the target destination for something, in real terms (you might "hammer a nail home" - all the way) or figuratively ("he drove the point home" - his argument communicated his idea emphatically to his listeners); when it's the home page of a website like this one, welcoming you in when you arrive; when it's the starting point - and usually the returning point too - for players in a game (a "home run" in baseball takes the batter on a complete circuit of the bases and safely back to the home plate). And talking of sport, when Grindlebury Football Club play at Grindlebury Stadium, they are playing a "home match" or playing "at home".
Home, as a place of belonging, has radiating levels of reference, from our own house, hut, or tree to our town or city (my home town), to our nation, (and our planet, and so on). The Home Office is the British government department concerned with the country's internal (we also use the parallel latinate adjective "domestic") civil affairs, and the Minister in charge of the department is the Home Secretary. The volunteer army formed to defend Britain from invasion in World War II was called The Home Guard.
As a student of English, having conquered the problem of differentiating home from house, you have another problem to cope with: what sort of a word is home? Much of the time it is a countable noun (a home, 2 homes...), but then at other times it behaves like an uncountable noun, with no article in front of the singular form - when it describes home as an idea - "Home is where...", "This feels like home."
Then there's the problem of prepositions: home, when it's a destination, can switch to being a kind of adverb, like away, outside, upstairs or backstage, which is why it doesn't need a preposition when it follows motion verbs - "let's go home", "They came home", "I'll drive home", "Shall we cycle home?", "I usually walk home". Unlike those other adverbs, however, it usually does need a preposition - at - when it describes a fixed location: "I'm at home", "I'll see you at home", "She was sitting alone at home". Notice the difference between "This week Chelsea are playing at home" and "Next week they're playing away." American English compromises here - across the Atlantic it's possible to "stay home."
If that's not enough for you, home can also be a verb. In it's first meaning - to return home - it is only really used in the -ing form: a pigeon trained to return to its starting location is a homing pigeon, and other animals have a homing instinct. The second meaning describes the precise identification and progress towards a target: some missiles have homing devices, and there's a phrasal verb to describe what I do in this column every week when I target a word, focus on it and attack it: next week I'll be homing in on the insanely versatile verb "get".
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