Have you made the leap to a smart Wi-Fi thermostat yet? Once you experience the bliss of a pre-warmed house before you get out of bed in the morning, you can never go back. But did you know there is SO much more to the gadgets like Nest, EcoBee, and the rest? I was maybe too early of an adopter, and bought a pretty standard issue Honeywell Wi-Fi thermostat with no bells or whistles. Hey, at the time, just changing the temperature from my phone was amazing enough.

Save yourself some time and money with this one tip.

What is it about under-sink areas that make them so likely to turn into a black hole? Is it because they’re sort of low to the ground and tucked away that we have a tendency to just crack the door, shove stuff in, and slam the door? As a result, sink cabinets turn into these dank, dark, places where all the stuff you don’t want sitting on your countertop just accumulates.

Bathroom vanities can take a serious chunk out of a renovation budget. Given that a mid-range bath remodel can run upwards of $19,000, according to Remodeling’s 2018 Cost vs. Value report, the prices shouldn’t come as a surprise, but they often do. I was determined to not drop a small fortune during my recent bathroom remodel, but at first that seemed like an impossible task.

It’s funny how most of us know we can’t be our own physician or attorney after watching a few YouTube videos, but ask us if we can run our own renovation and an awful lot of us think we can handle it just fine. Who needs a contractor when you can find your own sub-contractors online and order all your own materials? Why pay them a percentage of the cost (ranging from 10 to 50 percent) on top of your already over-budget budget when you can just DIY? Well, I’ve done it. Twice.

Yes, they are so luxurious, but there's a catch.

I used to be one of those people that always preferred being cold to being hot. “You can always put on more clothes,” I’d insist, “but there’s only so much you can take off.” Then a few things happened, one of which was that I developed an auto-immune condition called Raynaud’s. As many as one in 10 people have this issue, which causes fingers and toes to overreact to cold, losing blood and turning white-blue. (Yes, it’s as painful as it sounds.

How I got what I wanted, for a whole lot less.

It’s hard to imagine how we did things before Amazon, which brings us anything we need in a very short timeframe. But there’s more to the site than super speedy delivery. For several years now, I’ve been indulging in my champagne taste on a beer budget, thanks to Amazon Warehouse and third-party sellers. See that price right next to the item you must have? That doesn’t have to be the price you pay.

When you’re redoing a kitchen, flooring has a huge impact on the way the room looks. The orangey faux terra cotta we inherited in our Victorian kitchen drove me nuts and I couldn’t wait to replace it. New floors aren’t cheap though. If you’re considering an overhaul of your kitchen up to and including the floor, it’s easy to drop way more than you intend to. The good news is you don’t have to.

Kitchen renovations are basically one long series of compromises. Stumble upon a Ferrari red Bertazzoni range at half price? Obviously you have to slash the budget elsewhere (many elsewheres) to make that the star of the new kitchen. More often than not, these compromises are focused on the savings and not the splurging. Those splurges are oh-so-tempting, though, and wait for you around every corner—and on every Pinterest or Instagram refresh.

Have you ever met anyone who finished a renovation with zero regrets? If so I’d love to know their secret. It’s a daunting task to take a room, especially a high-stakes one like a main bathroom, and totally redo it. Somehow I thought I could easily manage our recent bath renovation (down to the floor joists and wood lathe) without a contractor—while simultaneously doing a full kitchen reno—but I was wrong on a couple of things.

Read up before you install one of these.

Anyone who’s ever done a renovation on a budget knows that you have to find places to cut costs. Everything can’t be a splurge, after all. When my husband and I redid our home’s third floor to make it a full-time Airbnb, we were starting from scratch, so expensive things like HVAC systems ripped huge chunks out of our budget. I knew we had to restore the gorgeous original wood floors, and that meant another big expense.

Here's what you didn't know.

If you’ve ever looked into tile prices, you probably know that materials can destroy your renovation budget in no time. My jaw hit the floor when I saw the prices on some of the beautiful tiles popping up in Pinterest. Honestly, who is out there paying 50, 75, or 100 bucks and up, per square foot? (And when the manufacturer website doesn’t even tell you the price, you know the old saying is true—if you have to ask, well, you can’t afford it.

See a bathroom pedestal sink and you can’t help but think things like sleek, streamlined, graceful. And they are undeniably handy in tight quarters when there’s no room for a full-fledged vanity, and they do tend to be much less expensive than a sink and vanity. Also? There’s just something romantic about them.

When do you know when a trend is over? For me it’s when there’s a knockoff of the real deal at a big box store. Sadly it wasn’t long after I had a kitchen island built of reclaimed wood (Kentucky barnwood, and it wasn’t cheap, you guys) that I saw a faux reclaimed version at Lowe’s and sighed. As much as we all like to be on-trend, at the same time, who wants to be just like everybody else?

If you’re looking for a relatively painless, low-cost way to update your kitchen, and have ever been on the internet, you know that painting your cabinets is the way to go. Honestly, I can’t think of better dollar-to-dramatic improvement ratio on any other project. And the news gets better: It’s way easier now than it was the olden days, before the miracle of chalk paint.

Spring might get all the attention when it comes to cleaning, but it’s pumpkin spice latte season, and you know what that means—winter is coming. Fall is the time for hoodies and boots, but also the time to tend to some of those yearly chores. So get busy! It’s easy to forget about smoke detectors. They’re those things we sort of take for granted most of the time, but they save lives.

Painting the bathroom is just like painting any other room, right? Not so much, it turns out. I’ve painted my share over the years and never treated them any differently than any other room, but I’ve been doing it wrong. When it comes to bathrooms, there are a few things that make painting a little trickier than the rest of the house. Sam Ross of Nailed It Contracting was nice enough to pepper him with painting questions when he painted my bathroom recently.

I learned this one the hard way.

I used to live dangerously, buying paint willy nilly without ever trying it out on the walls first. Who needs samples anyway? Be bold, be daring, and trust your instinct, right?! Once, I even made a choice just by looking online and letting the painter pick it up at the store. Surprise! I made some regrettable choices. In fact, it’s kind of amazing how many times I was happy with my decision without trying out paint first. But how many ways did I find paint disappointment?

Does anyone else have a love/hate relationship with HGTV? Ever since I got hooked on Christopher Lowell’s show ages ago and took his advice to hang a sheet on my bedroom wall as decor (don’t ask, I have no idea) I’ve dipped in and out of home and design shows. After swearing off the genre for months I’ll find myself watching again. Weeks will go by in a blur of binges, usually around the time we’re planning a big change to our own home situation.

We recently wrote about things at home you don’t need to worry about. But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. For every ahh, it’s not actually that big of a deal item on the list, there’s—sorry—something waiting to take its place. And it’s not always the stuff you might think about. So, just in case you need something to keep you up at night, here are five things that you should be worried about.

So it’s time to stop telling yourself you’re okay with your old countertops, that they’re fiiiiiine, there’s nothing wrong with them, really. Because, truth be told, you just can’t stand to look at them one more minute. Maybe you tried an interim measure, a quick budget fix, but that reached its expiration point. The time has come and you couldn’t be more excited. But, before you get too giddy, there’s some bad news.

Your poor bathroom vanity. It has to hide all the things we don’t want on display, which is no easy task. Consider that we’re talking about a box that also has to hide a nest of plumbing pipes: No wonder it easily devolves into a jumbled mess and then a black hole into which toiletries disappear. Soon you end up with duplicates of mouthwash and deodorant—which only makes things worse—because you can’t find anything under there.

Here's what you need to know, before you start building.

Sometimes there’s just nothing better than a simple change of color. And, when it comes to giving furniture and decor a brand new lease on life, for the least money and effort, the hands-down winner is spray paint. I’ve tried a lotta lotta spray paint, and recently found my new favorite. It’s easier to think of things I haven’t spray painted—my dogs, maybe—than all the things I have.

This might give you pause.

In the midst of a kitchen and bath renovation in our 1890 home, I find myself uttering those four expensive words: while we’re at it. Most recently it was, “while we’re at it, why don’t we paint our dining room?” So I asked our drywall/paint contractor to add that onto his estimate for work in two other rooms. The total for the 225-ish square foot room? $1,890. (Turns out, we won’t be painting the dining room while we’re at it.

I can get behind a design trend just as fast as the next person. Exposed brick? Sliding barn doors? Reclaimed wood? Check, check, and check! I dream of a farmhouse sink and a subway tile backsplash and am about to do the all-open-shelving thing in our kitchen. But there’s one seemingly mandatory design decision that I have zero interest in making: adopting the open kitchen. In our 1890 home, the kitchen is at the back of the house in a textbook-style late-Victorian floor plan.

Full disclosure: I’m the last person to give advice about not worrying. I was up half the night last night thinking about everything currently going wrong with my home renovation. Trust me, if it wasn’t that it would be something else. But look, there’s plenty of actual Bad Stuff happening out in the world—none of us need to add to that worry load. So take a look at a few things around the house that I believe we can just strike off the list.

Nothing screams ‘Sad Kitchen’ like shoddy old countertops. Okay, a bad floor or rickety old cabinets are probably right up there, but a decades-old, grungy, cracked, and damaged counter can turn an otherwise perfectly decent kitchen into something to cringe over. When my husband and I prepared to put our previous home on the market, our realtor encouraged us to replace the dated laminate counter.

With so many things that really ought to be done by a professional when it comes to home improvement, the temptation—the need if you don’t have deep pockets—to DIY the simple stuff is totally understandable. And first on that list has got to be painting. All you do is grab a brush and go to work, NBD. Right? Well, it’s true that most anyone can do it. Doing it well, on the other hand? Maybe not so much.