Il bagno
Time to name what is actually in the Italian bathroom. You wash your hair with lo shampoo and your teeth with lo spazzolino — a diminutive of spazzola (brush), built just like the diminutives you met earlier. Both take lo, the article for s + consonant words.
| I brush my teeth with the toothbrush. | Mi lavo i denti con lo spazzolino. |
You wash your face in il lavandino — the sink, in the bathroom or in the kitchen. A long soak happens in la vasca, the bathtub (in full la vasca da bagno); the quick alternative is la doccia, which you already know.
Gli elettrodomestici
Household machines are gli elettrodomestici — literally the electric domestics. The hardest-working one is la lavatrice, the washing machine: it deals with il bucato so you don't have to. Not a machine but just as essential for living: la lampada, the lamp.
Due stanze in più
Two more parts of the home. il soggiorno is the living room — the same room as il salotto, but soggiorno is the neutral, floor-plan word you see in housing ads, while salotto has a cosier, sitting-room flavor. And the car sleeps in il garage — borrowed from French and, like most foreign borrowings, unchanged in the plural.
| The car is in the garage. | La macchina è nel garage. |
