For as long as most of us have gardened, one assumption sat quietly underneath every seed catalog and how-to column: a real vegetable garden needs a yard. Ground to till. A fence line for the tomato cages. Somewhere permanent enough to say, this bed is mine, and I’ll build the soil up year after year. … Read more
Scroll through any home and garden feed lately and you’d think half the country has a tidy little countertop crock feeding a lush backyard pile, turning banana peels into black gold every few weeks. Composting has become something of a lifestyle signal, the kind of quietly virtuous habit that shows up alongside sourdough starters and … Read more
Americans are about to spend $13.1 billion on Halloween this year, a jump from $11.6 billion last year and the highest total the National Retail Federation has ever recorded. That works out to an average of $114.45 per person, also a record, according to NRF’s annual Halloween Consumer Survey conducted with Prosper Insights & Analytics. … Read more
Fifty-three percent of American homeowners now write a check to a homeowners association, which works out to roughly 40 million households paying HOA dues on top of everything else housing already costs them, according to research compiled by iPropertyManagement’s national HOA statistics report. And the total flowing into association budgets nationwide isn’t holding steady. It … Read more
Here’s a number worth sitting with: 1 in every 60 insured homes in the U.S. files a water damage claim every single year, according to HouseCashin’s 2026 water damage statistics report. That’s 1.6% of all insured households, and when it happens, the average payout runs $13,954. Zoom out even further and the picture gets more … Read more
Here’s a number that stopped me in my tracks: if you water an average-sized lawn for just 20 minutes a day, every day, for a week, you’ve used roughly as much water as running your shower nonstop for four straight days, or taking more than 800 showers, according to the EPA’s WaterSense program. That’s not … Read more
Out of 290,599 hospital discharges tied to home improvement projects in a single year, 117,026 were finger injuries, which works out to roughly four in ten trips to the ER, according to Clearsurance’s analysis of national emergency-room data. That single number beat every other body part and every other injury category the analysis tracked, which … Read more
Only 41.1% of mortgaged homes in the United States are now considered “equity-rich,” meaning the owner has at least 50% equity built up against the home’s value. A year ago that number was 47.4%. That’s a 6.3 percentage point drop in a single year, and it puts the national equity-rich share at its lowest point … Read more
Somewhere in the United States right now, termites are working their way through the framing of a house whose owner has no idea anything is wrong. That’s not a dramatic guess. It’s the ongoing reality behind Orkin’s termite statistics, which put the number of U.S. homes damaged by termites each year at roughly 600,000, with … Read more
More than 200 people in the United States die every year from carbon monoxide produced by ordinary household products, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s own Carbon Monoxide Fact Sheet. Not from house fires. Not from a car left running in a closed garage. Just from the appliances so many of us keep … Read more