"Our house floor" or "our house's floor"? [duplicate]

Question

What's the correct form? Example:

Our house floor was sparkling clean.

Our house's floor was sparkling clean.

I always get confused about this. And when I search on Google I always get the two versions.

Answer 1

In this case, "house's floor" is usually used, but "house floor" could be used in other sentences like

I like house floors better than hotel floors.

(Not that anyone would say something like that). In that case, it would sound better because you wouldn't have the extra 's's.

It also seems to work if you say something like "a house floor." But then again, you don't say "a house roof" you would just say "a roof" or "a house's roof", if you need to specify. Although, "house roof" could work if you say "A house roof beats no roof."

Extra Notes: "House floor" on its own refers to the U.S. House of Representatives floor. But that usually won't make things confusing.

You could also use "house" the verb. As in

That building houses the first computer ever made.

or possibly:

I house floors.

Answer 2

1. Our house floor was sparkling clean.

2. Our house's floor was sparkling clean.

3. The floor of our house was sparkling clean.

The three examples above are all grammatical. However, they are not all as natural as each other. The first is the least natural. Sentence (2) is more likely, but still not very natural. The third would be the most likely sentence. The reason is that when the "owner" of the thing is not animate, we tend to prefer to use "the X of Y". If it's animate, we tend to prefer "Y's X":

• The colour of the bottle (the bottle isn't animate)
• Bob's leg (Bob is animate)

This is not a grammar rule, but it is what native speakers tend to do. So if we want a natural sounding sentence, it is safest to go with option (3) here.

Whether or not to use a compound noun is a bit more difficult to predict. I don't know of any good guide to how acceptable a compound will be in any given instance. It's probably best to see if you can find other examples before you put a compound like that into any essay, for example. The "X of Y" construction will nearly always produce acceptable results when "Y" is not animate. So it doesn't really matter if you use this when there is a well-established compound also available:

• The door of the car ...
• The car door ...

Both of the options above are perfectly natural.

Answer 3

Our house's floor

is what I tend to hear most of the time, meaning:

the floor of our house

However, the phrase "the house floor was clean", would be considered correct as well, but I would say that using "the house's floor" is what most speakers would say.