If you want light on your patio table and you’re tired of string lights or your phone flashlight, outdoor table lamps are an easy fix. They’re small lamps made to sit outside on a patio table, a balcony, or a covered porch, and they can handle wet air and wind in a way your living […]

My first Decor Steals mirror purchase was a $ 34 gold sunburst, which looked fantastic for about six weeks before the edges began peeling gold flakes onto the wall behind it. I still own the thing, now repainted. This is the other shoe in the decor-steals mirror deals: the fine print no one reads before […]

You’ve got a thousand-piece jigsaw half finished on the coffee table and nowhere left to put a cup of tea. A puzzle coffee table sorts that out: the puzzle sits in a shallow well a couple of centimeters below the top, and a sheet of glass, a lid, or a sliding board goes over it […]

Is the Decor Steals box worth $124.99, or are you just paying for a big surprise? The box is called the Steal It Box, and you buy it one time. It’s not a subscription box, so nobody charges your card every month. Most past seasonal boxes included seven full-size decor pieces, and everyone who bought […]

Most home decor ideas for living room lists open with a shopping basket. Do these seven jobs first and the basket gets a lot smaller. The seven jobs, in order: 1. Clear every surface Shelves, mantelpiece, coffee table, windowsill. Put everything in one box by the door, not the loft, because about half is coming […]

The fastest DIY door makeover ideas are painting in a real color, gluing on thin trim to create fake Shaker panels, adding a plank or herringbone overlay, and installing new hardware. Most of these cost under $50 a door and fit in a weekend. Plank overlays cost more and mean moving the door stop, so […]

My last apartment had a “no nails, no exceptions” clause buried on page four of the lease, and I found that out the hard way when my landlord pointed at a single pinhole above my desk during move-out and knocked forty dollars off my deposit. Forty dollars for a hole smaller than a pencil tip. […]

Three items. Evenly spaced. Same height. One per shelf. That’s what almost everybody does, and it’s why the shelf disappears into the wall instead of doing anything. Floating shelves styling ideas that actually hold up start from the opposite place. Odd counts, not even ones. Different heights, not matched ones. Some space you… leave, even […]

By the second week of October, my dining table stops being a dining table. There’s a hot glue gun on it, usually still plugged in because I keep meaning to unplug it and then don’t, and a paper plate with dried paint on it that I should have thrown out days ago, and somewhere under […]

A twenty-dollar nightstand from Goodwill with a tired orange finish and one knob hanging loose is my favorite kind of project, and a painted nightstand makeover on a piece like that fits into a weekend as long as the first day goes to prep. Peeling edges, drawers that grab, rings on the top. Nearly all […]