_Basement_ (deep and rather dark).--Kitchen, pantry, servants' hall at back (generally very dark), lavatory, coal and wine cellars; front area (dustbin stands here), backyard; steep and dark stairs to ground floor. _Ground Floor._--Dining-room, smoking-room, and third small dark room, lavatory, narrow hall, and steep stairs leading to small half-landing. _First Floor._--Double drawing-room. Above, seven bedrooms, one lavatory, and one bathroom. All coal for the house must be carried up one, two, or three, and possibly four, flights of steep stairs. There is a large kitchen range, with flues to clean twice a week, as in order to keep up the hot-water supply much coal is burned, and the flues become very dirty. The chimney must also be swept every two months. Other chimneys must be swept twice a year; if much used, three times a year. All food and table utensils must be carried up and downstairs three times a day, and when lunch and dinner are in progress a servant must run up and down with clean and dirty dishes, etc. Washstands are used in each bedroom, and hot water taken to these rooms three or four times a day. There is but one bathroom and upstairs lavatory; therefore there is a good deal of stair work when doing the rooms. If there is a nursery, the nursery meals have to be carried up and down. Each time the hall-door bell rings, a maid must run upstairs to answer it, and visitors and tea in the drawing-room necessitate more journeys up and down, and the carrying of a heavy tray. Now, with a house of this description there are certainly two ways of converting it into a labour-saving dwelling. A Labour-Making House Converted. If the basement is deep and incurably dark, by far the best plan is to dispense with it altogether so far as living-rooms are concerned, using it merely for cellars and box-room. "But," says the householder, "there will now be no back door. The tradesmen will all have to come to the front door." They will. But tradesmen call chiefly in the morning, and the few who come in the afternoon might be instructed to go to the area door, to which the dustman would also go, while the coals (if any are used) would be delivered through the pavement coal-shoot as before. Arranging thus, the house proper begins on the ground floor. The large front room is the dining-room as before, and the double doors between it and the erstwhile smoking-room should be plastered up on the smoking-room side, for under the new arrangement the smoking-room becomes the kitchen, and the small third room the pantry. The kitchen will not be large, but neither a gas nor an electric cooker takes up much space.