Decorating Your House for Halloween Is Now Just as Popular as Wearing a Costume Here’s a number that stopped us mid-scroll: according to the National Retail Federation’s most recent annual Halloween Consumer Survey, conducted with Prosper Insights & Analytics, 51% of Americans planned to decorate their home or yard for Halloween, and 51% planned to … Read more
Where Downsizing Actually Makes Financial Sense Right Now, by the Numbers In Memphis, baby boomers whose kids have moved out own 31.2% of the metro’s three-bedroom-plus homes, the highest concentration in any major U.S. market. Cleveland comes in right behind at 30.9%, with Pittsburgh close after at 30.6%. Nationally, that same group, empty nesters, holds … Read more
For most of the last decade, the safest bet in flooring was also the plainest one: wide, pale boards running the same direction through every room in the house. That era is loosening its grip. Walk into a newly renovated kitchen or entryway this year and you’re increasingly likely to find the wood laid on … Read more
Something quietly remarkable happens in backyards across the country every winter: more than a million people, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s own tally, pause what they’re doing to count the birds outside their window. In the most recent Great Backyard Bird Count, participants logged 8,257 species and filed 467,696 checklists from 216 countries and … Read more
The Furniture Industry Is Racing Toward $1.33 Trillion — Here’s What’s Driving It The global furniture market sat at roughly $786 billion in 2025, and industry analysts expect it to climb to about $1.33 trillion by 2033, a steady 7% growth rate year over year, according to Grand View Research. A second research firm tells … Read more
Kitchens Still Eat Up More of the Renovation Budget Than Any Other Room Every year, American homeowners pour roughly $405 billion into improving their houses, and if you had to guess where the single biggest slice of that money lands room by room, the smart bet is the kitchen. According to the Harvard Joint Center … Read more
Ask ten homeowners when to stop mowing for the season, or how much of the grass blade is actually safe to cut, and you will likely get ten different answers, most of them wrong. That is not an insult; it is what a recent survey of 1,034 U.S. homeowners conducted by LawnStarter actually found when … Read more
American families are on track to spend a record $43.3 billion on K-12 back-to-school shopping this year, with the average household laying out $863.86 per student on everything from backpacks to laptops, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey. That number is climbing even as budgets tighten: Deloitte’s 2026 Back-to-School Survey found that 57% … Read more
For the better part of a decade, the recipe for a “good” kitchen renovation was almost formulaic: white or pale gray cabinets, a cool-veined quartz countertop, and a subway tile backsplash that matched nothing so much as it politely disappeared. That formula is losing its grip. In Houzz’s 2026 Kitchen Trends Study, wood cabinetry pulled … Read more
You already know the toilet needs bleach every week, maybe rubber gloves, maybe its own dedicated scrub brush kept far away from anything that touches food. The kitchen sink, meanwhile, gets a quick rinse and whatever soap happens to run off the dinner plates. That instinct feels backward the moment you look at the actual … Read more