Jon Gorey

Don't skip them.

Prioritize place over property.

Or a trust fund.

It's a big question, but the answer will surprise you.

You'd never guess their original purpose.

Can you properly define your floors and ceilings?

Next stop: Exeter, N.H.

Now I know about the importance of flat driveways and old windows.

Care for an interest-free loan?

When counties or towns don’t have enough poll workers, they’re forced to shut down polling locations — making it harder for people to cast their ballot on election day.

Saving for any one of those goals is daunting enough, much less some combination of the three. So where do you even begin?

And what's so bad about "Not In My Backyard?"

Did zoning and permitting ever cross your mind?

This racist housing pattern isn't a thing of the past.

Diverse housing options = diverse residents.

Oh, Canada.

Put the baking sheet down.

Grow with FLO (Frederick Law Olmsted).

According to real estate experts.

On living in homes with a medley of maladies.

Paint, paint, paint.

Plus, a few striking similarities.

You thought doing your taxes was a nightmare? Wait until you apply for a mortgage.

Shopping for a home means weighing wants and needs, and making careful compromises to squeeze as many of those must-haves and wish-list items into your budget as possible. But many buyers focus on typical home features while overlooking one potentially important detail. Nine out of 10 home buyers would like a laundry room, for example, while 82 percent want hardwood floors. Most buyers are looking for a three-bedroom house with two bathrooms, a new kitchen, and an open floor plan.

We introduced our daughter to Home Alone this month, one of my all-time favorite Christmas movies. (Now we watch it almost every day, because that’s how things go with a five-year-old.

Like it or not, house flipping is back: Americans flipped more than 200,000 homes in 2017, the most since 2006. But while there’s an understandable appeal to buying a freshly renovated, move-in ready home, there are some things to think about before you buy a flipped house. House flippers do it to make money—enough to make it worth the considerable risk, effort, and upfront investment. The average profit on a flipped house was $66,448 in the third quarter of 2017.

There’s something to be said for appreciating the home you have. In a way, I feel lucky to have lived in so many bad apartments in my 20s. It made all the fixer-uppers we looked at while house hunting—the only homes remotely near our price range—a little less off-putting. Is it structurally safe, with a working stove? Wow! There aren’t any rats or strange midwinter mosquito infestations? Super!

Who among us hasn’t entertained visions of buying a distressed house, fixing it up, and selling it for a handsome profit? HGTV shows make it look downright easy—and fun, too. But even veterans of these shows and big-pocketed pros sometimes struggle to make money flipping houses—or, at least, enough to make it worth the stress and hassle. Not convinced?

Should you buy an existing home, or a brand new one? Depending on where you’re looking or what your budget is, you may not have much choice in the matter, as we’ll see below. But what are the pros and cons of each? New homes accounted for just 10% of home sales in 2017, but the majority of home buyers say they would prefer a new construction house to an existing one if given the choice, according to a survey by the (admittedly partial) National Association of Home Builders.

When my wife and I were looking to get pre-approved for a mortgage, we started at the most obvious spot: Bank of America, the longtime home of our checking and savings accounts. Turns out, that may not have been a smart idea. For starters, we were surprised to discover that their rates and terms were pretty unattractive, especially for first-time buyers like us. We were already scrounging for cash, and the bank was pretty inflexible about the down payment amount.

More than half (57%) of new homeowners believe they could remodel an entire room without any help from a professional. Millennials are even more confident in their DIY abilities, with 64% ready to tackle a remodeling project on their own. That’s according to a Home Depot survey of 1,000 new homeowners, age 25 and up, who had purchased a home in the past year.

Blame it on HGTV or Pinterest, but millennials seem to think they’re pretty handy — even when they’re not. Nearly seven in 10 millennials (69%) consider themselves handy around the house, according to a new survey by Porch — including 79% of millennial men. By comparison, only 61% of baby boomers and 62% of Gen Xers said the same. And to some extent, millennials are walking the walk: Home Depot said that DIY-minded young homeowners are helping to boost sales.

More than a third of American households are renting their homes — thought not all of them want to be.

It’s a big, exciting step in a relationship, but moving in with a partner can also be a minefield of new complications. Just ask Meredith Goldstein, the Boston Globe’s Love Letters columnist who’s been answering readers’ relationship questions with a familiar warmth and comedic candor since 2009.

Real estate website Zillow announced on Thursday plans to expand its Instant Offers service — which currently allows investors to bid on homes sight unseen in Las Vegas and Orlando, Fla. — into Phoenix. But the bigger revelation was that Zillow itself will be one of the investors buying homes in two test markets, Phoenix and Las Vegas, with plans to make necessary repairs and flip the homes as quickly as possible.

Whether you’re remodeling your kitchen or just replacing a worn-out range, the next time you go stove shopping, you’ll probably notice there are a lot more convection ovens on the market—and not just in the Wolf and Viking price range. “It’s almost assumed you’re going to get convection in a higher-end appliance,” says Steve Sheinkopf, CEO of Yale Appliance and Lighting in Boston.