Guess which character survives in the end. No one.
- "Charity begins at home"
Airdate: November 27, 2006
The Happy Tree Friends try to find a way out of Giggles' newly built house.
"Home is Where the Hurt is" provides examples of:
- 1-Dimensional Thinking: At Giggles’ house, the Mime entertains Lumpy by doing a "walking downstairs" gag, but he ends up falling into an open compartment on the floor, where he falls to his doom. And somehow, he didn’t see how short the staircase leading to the compartment was below him, or if he even saw the compartment at all.
- Bizarrchitecture / Eldritch Location: The titular house in this episode. The house is a massive maze full of death traps and gravity-changing rooms that lead to nowhere else but death.
- Blind Mistake: The Mole accidentally shoves Cuddles into a wood chipper.
- Brick Joke: While the show already loves using this trope, this episode has a lot of them.
- In the beginning, Giggles almost steps on a nail but stops right before she injures herself. Handy does the same near the end of the episode.
- During construction, Cuddles gets pushed into a wood chipper by accident, then near the end when Handy gets pierced by the wooden plank, one can see Cuddles' crushed body stuck to the plank.
- After Lumpy folds the house's blueprint into the shape of an origami crane, it's revealed in the end that the entire house was built into the shape of one.
- When Petunia was connecting some pipes, she gets a germ on herself and commands Lumpy to install a shower fixture. As Petunia runs off, Lumpy attaches an electrical pipe with one of the regular pipes. Later on, Petunia gets electrocuted to death by the same pipe attached to the bathtub.
- Mime's "walking downstairs" trick that he uses, in the beginning, kills him later on when he attempts to do the same thing inside the house, only to fall into a compartment in the floor, breaking his spine.
- Bookends: Both the beginning and the end of the episode feature a scene where a character almost steps on a sharp nail.
- Call-Back: Petunia's Neat Freak tendencies returns when she gets herself dirty with one of the pipes and freaks out.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Where to begin...?
- Giggles is slowly vertically cut in half when sliding down the staircase which has nails poking out of it.
- Lumpy is crushed by a bed and has his head cut into bloody cubes by the grate under him.
- Handy has a nail go through his eye and brain.
- Decoy Protagonist: Giggles is one of the starring characters, but dies relatively early on compared to most other episodes where the starring character dies at the end.
- Downer Ending: Almost nobody is able to escape the house. Despite Handy finally doing so, a faulty floorboard immediately kills him, rendering his efforts moot.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: Yet another episode where no one survives.
- Eye Scream: Handy steps on a loose floorboard with a nail in it, and it pierces him straight in his left eye, killing him.
- High-Voltage Death: Petunia suffers this fate when she tries to take a shower to wash off Lumpy's remains, due to the moose mixing the water pipes with electric ones. That being said, Petunia trusted the wrong person for the job with putting the pipes together after getting dirty, since Lumpy often borders on sheer stupidity.
- Hope Spot: The Mole finds the exit to the house halfway through the episode, but due to being blind, he doesn't notice this and closes the door.
- Off with His Head!: While Lumpy was searching for a way out of the house. He comes across a split door in a bedroom. Outside of the room, the Mole is walking around the halls, until Lumpy opens the top door, and unknowingly decapitates the Mole’s head, and crushes him behind it.
- Origami Gag: During construction, Lumpy was having fun playing with an origami bird, while making its wings flap. But he pulls the bird too hard and rips the tail. He then finds the blueprint the tree friends are using to build Giggles’ house, and uses it as material for his new paper bird. Later, when Handy comes out from the crazy house, he sees that they built the house into a giant origami bird, as it flaps its wings.
- Out of Focus: Both Giggles and Handy have a starring role in this episode, but don't have that much focus compared to some of the other characters (specifically Lumpy).
- Pun-Based Title: The title is a reference to the common phrase, "Home is where the heart is".
- Rake Take: Handy steps on a loose floorboard with a nail poking out, that hits him straight in the face and stabs his eye.
- The Reveal: The reason why the house ended up so bizarre is because during the beginning, Lumpy folded the house's blueprints into an origami crane.
- Shout-Out: The house itself is obviously a reference to the real-life Winchester Mystery House.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Cuddles, Mime, The Mole, Giggles, Lumpy, Petunia, and Handy all die in this episode.
- Upside-Down Blueprints: An odd variant, due to Lumpy messing up with the blueprints, the resulting house is designed like a folding origami bird, built with an amalgam of upside-down rooms, doors leading to nowhere, deadly pits and hazards, and twisted halls.
- Wood Chipper of Doom: While the Mole and Cuddles were making wood out from a wood chipper by cutting logs, the Mole blindly pushes Cuddles into the chipper with a log, shredding him to bits.