cut & paste pix

Hi,
first of all you may find out if you have the correct permissions in your home directory within Nautilus:
http://library.gnome.org/users/user-guide/stable/nautilus-presentation.html.en

If permissions are correct, in Nautilus you may right click on the home directory -> properties -> permissions.
Access can be changed for owner, group and others.

Ubuntu works with restricted permissions for security reasons, there is no root account per default and not recommended.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FilePermissions

You may open a terminal ##commands in there are case sensitive
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GnomeTerminal

and find out permissions for /home/user_name
##lets say the username is Tom you'd type:
ls -l /home/Tom

If Tom is in the admin group he can be root and using the 'sudo' command with the password same as used for login.

In case to give an owner lost permissions back to /home/user directory the command in Terminal would be e.g.:
sudo chown Tom:Tom -R /home/Tom
Password for Tom: ##you'll type blind
##hit enter after each command

To make sure having correct permissions to access files in the home directory:
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /home
Password for Tom:

For a deeper understanding of Ubuntu these docs are recommended
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/