House Coloring Pages

Ask a child to draw a house and you get a square, a triangle and a chimney. These free printable house coloring pages are the argument against that: a great many different ways of living, drawn carefully enough that the differences show. A yurt with a painted band around its wall and a metal flue through the roof. A stilt house over calm water with a ladder down to a jetty. An adobe house with ladders leaning against a flat roof and painted clay pots by the door. A narrowboat with flower pots on its roof, tied up along a towpath.

It makes a better topic on homes than almost anything else in the catalogue, because none of the pages carry a word of text and the comparisons are all visual: roof shapes, materials, how you get in, where the smoke goes.

These are detailed sheets

Worth saying before you print for a four-year-old: this is one of the denser collections on the site. Walls have bricks, roofs have tiles, and the village scenes have dozens of windows. The doll house and the cut-away house are the ones with the largest, clearest shapes, and they are where to start with a younger child.

Lots of detail above the grid gathers the crowded sheets and leads with the densest of all.

• A roof half laid with tiles
• A tiny house on a trailer
• A timber-framed house with leaded windows

The hillside village and the stepped street are the ones to keep for an evening: whitewashed houses climbing above a cobbled lane, a flight of stone steps, washing strung between the walls.

Brick, tile, thatch and stone

The materials are the whole pleasure of this set, and each one has a shortcut:

• Brick: fill the wall in one light tone, then pick out every fifth or sixth brick a shade darker. Never color them all. It takes ten times as long and looks worse.
• Roof tiles: the same trick, in rows. One darker tile here and there, and the eye does the rest.
• Thatch: long strokes all running the same way, down the slope, in two browns. Leave the ridge lighter.
• Stone: outline a few stones in a darker pencil and leave the rest as the base tone. Drystone walls want more contrast than a house wall.
• Windows: pale blue-gray with one white diagonal stripe left blank. Do it on every window in a village and the whole page looks glazed.
• Whitewash stays bare paper. Color the shadows under the eaves and between the houses instead.

Inside, and the sheets children pick first

A couple of pages open the house up. The doll house stands open on three floors, a bedroom, a kitchen and a sitting room, each one furnished. The cut-away goes further: a house sliced through to show an attic full of boxes, a bedroom, a kitchen and the staircase joining them.

Those two get chosen before anything else at a table, and they are also the ones that hold a child longest, because every room is a small separate scene.

Building one, and living in it

Some sheets follow a house being made rather than finished: scaffolding and ladders around a half-built brick house with a cement mixer beside it, a roof half laid with tiles stacked in bundles across bare battens with a cat sitting by the chimney, and a removal van with its ramp down and an armchair waiting at the bottom.

And a few are about the edges of a house rather than the house: a front door with a lion knocker and boots on the step, a gate in a clipped hedge with a mailbox on a post, a garage with a workbench under a board of hanging tools, a conservatory full of pots, a cat on a windowsill of herbs framed by a climbing rose.

For interiors rather than exteriors, the cozy coloring pages carry on where this collection stops at the door.

Building the street

Houses are the one subject in this catalogue that children want to stand up rather than pin up.

Color a house, glue it to card, cut round the roofline and fold a tab at the bottom. It stands. Do it with six or seven and they become a street along a windowsill, and because these are houses from different countries the street ends up looking like nowhere in particular, which is usually the point of the lesson.

The cut-away sheet is better used flat. Give a child the colored version and ask them to draw the people into each room, or to label what happens where. It turns a coloring page into the floor plan of a house they are inventing, and it is the sheet teachers come back for.

Two more that work at home. A colored front door, trimmed and taped to a bedroom door at child height, becomes their own front door, complete with a number they choose. And the beach hut sheet, cut into individual huts and glued along a strip of card, makes a bookmark that sticks out of the top of the page.

If the comparison between the houses is what interests you, print the yurt, the stilt house, the adobe house and the narrowboat on one pack and pin them in a row: four answers to the same question, with no text on any of them to give the answer away.

The nature drawer holds the landscapes these sit in, the christmas coloring pages have the snowy versions, and the gingerbread coloring pages build the edible ones.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is cut off, and turn draft mode off: there is a lot of fine line in these drawings and toner saving thins it to gray. The printing guide covers paper weights. Press Add to pack under each sheet you want and print them as one PDF.