Simple Ideas for Better Homes, Gardens & Outdoor Spaces
Turn your backyard into a breathtaking extension of your home—a place to relax, entertain, and connect with nature. Welcome to our Landscaping & Outdoor Living category, your premier destination for design inspiration, durable hardscape materials, stylish furniture, and essential tools. Whether you are building a custom patio from scratch, upgrading your garden beds, or creating an inviting outdoor dining space, we have everything you need to design the outdoor oasis of your dreams.
The first cold snap hits and suddenly your patio turns into a wasteland. The cushions are still out there from July, getting crunchy with frost, and you’re stuck choosing between hibernating indoors for six months or figuring out how to actually use your backyard when it’s 50 degrees out. I get it. For years my … Read more
Nothing ruins a crisp October morning like stepping onto your garden path in your good boots and sinking into a puddle that’s somehow always exactly where your foot lands. Fall rain doesn’t mess around. It comes in sideways, it pools where you least expect it, and by November your once-charming stepping stone path is basically … Read more
Your yard turns gorgeous for about six weeks in fall, and then it gets dark at 5:30 p.m. and nobody sees it. That’s the problem I hear about more than almost anything else this time of year. Neighbors walk by in the daylight hours when you’re at work, and by the time you’re home to … Read more
My porch used to be a pumpkin graveyard by mid-November. Every year I’d buy the same orange gourds, watch them cave in on themselves after two frosty nights, and then scrape moldy squash guts off my steps with a putty knife. Not exactly the cozy autumn welcome I was going for. Then a neighbor gave … Read more
My water bill used to make me wince every single July. One summer it hit $180, and my lawn still had brown patches shaped like Ohio. That’s when I realized I was doing almost everything wrong. I was watering at the worst times, cutting my grass too short, and dumping water on soil that couldn’t … Read more
My neighbor asked me last July why her cottage garden looked like a crime scene while mine was still blooming through a stretch of 95-degree days with zero rain. The answer was simple: her garden was gorgeous on paper and completely wrong for the weather we actually get now. Cottage gardens have a reputation problem. … Read more
Nothing stings quite like walking outside in April, coffee in hand, hoping to see those first green shoots poking through the soil — and finding nothing but mud where your favorite plant used to be. If you garden in a cold climate, you already know this heartbreak. You plant something gorgeous in June, it puts … Read more
Standing water on your walkway after every rainstorm is more than annoying. It’s a sign your yard is fighting you, and every puddle is a little reminder that water has to go somewhere. If it’s not soaking into the ground, it’s pooling by your foundation, drowning your flower beds, or turning your favorite path into … Read more
Brown patches showing up in July. A neighbor’s lawn that looks like a golf course while yours looks like a hayfield. A bag of fertilizer burning stripes into your grass because you read the label wrong at 7am with no coffee in your system. I’ve been there for all of it. My lawn has survived … Read more
My neighbor Gary spent four summers fighting his front yard. Crabgrass in June, brown patches in August, a sprinkler bill that made his wife wince every July. Then one day he just… stopped. Ripped the whole thing out and threw down clover seed instead. Now he waters maybe twice a month and his lawn looks … Read more