I don’t think you choose to have a restaurant wedding as much as a restaurant wedding chooses you. You have to be a laid-back couple who are after a relaxed affair. The type of wedding planners where “great food” is the most important item on the list of what you want for your big day, and second is “not really having to decorate.” If that sounds like you, there are some big pros to hosting your wedding reception at one of your city’s finest eateries.

There’s no match for the ingenuity of a creative bride with a tiny budget. That’s when you get brilliant solutions, like the ten included in this post that use common IKEA marketplace finds to create beautiful DIY wedding details. These tiny plastic frames are a bargain and can be used all over the wedding to share messages (like in the shot at top from IKEA via My Little Secrets, or above without a paper insert in a wedding from Ruffled) or, you know, photos.

If the stress of wedding planning is enough to make your head explode, you and your beloved might just be the ideal candidates for a short, sweet and itty-bitty city hall wedding. There’s a long list of “pros”: Courthouse weddings are affordable, they come together quickly, and they can still be just as drop dead gorgeous as the bigger bashes. They’re more personal, too.

The bedroom is a sacred space for a relationship, but it’s about more than just a good mattress, tranquil wall color and comfortable sheets. You need also to keep consistent bedtime habits with your partner–the kind that almost dare you not to go to bed in total bliss. Here are four bedtime rules & rituals that happy couples swear by: Going to bed together is a sacred time, and a great opportunity for couples to connect and download their days.

When some bride out there in the wedding world puts together a small army of crazy talented vendors to create a picnic wedding or a BBQ wedding, there are bound to be some stellar ideas that come out of it. And you can absolutely steal–er, borrow–some of those ideas to really impress at your next get-together. Above from photographer Michaela Rae: What’s cooler than a cooler for serving drinks? A DIY beer bar made from wood and painted cinderblocks.

Let’s face it–some weddings can be, well, boring (especially if you’re not the dancing type). You’re probably happy to be there, just to support the couple as they commit their lives to each other forever. But sometime between the rubbery chicken dinner and the encore performance of the Cha Cha Slide, you’re bound to be sitting there thinking to yourself, “This wedding would be so much better if there was a bounce house.” And you know what?

Bride & Groom: Ashley & Ca’Ron Wedding Date: June 12, 2014 Venue: Maison La Vigne Bed & Breakfast in Hapeville, Georgia Number of guests: 6 “Don’t be afraid to go small.” That’s bride Ashley’s best piece of advice for future couples looking to tie the knot with a sweet and simple ceremony.

If you think getting eight hours is going to solve all your sleep problems, I have some bad news for you. Getting enough sleep is one half of the battle. The other half is getting good sleep. It’s time to refresh your bedtime and wake-up routine and banish these bad bed habits for good. I’ve had tremendous success controlling my sleep with this tidbit: A person’s sleep cycle is, on average, 90 minutes.

It’s never been easier to connect with people than it is right now. Social networks reach across the globe in seconds, and there’s a video phone in every person’s pocket, as if we’re all living in an episode of Star Trek. But for all the things that modern technology has done to make it easier to make and stay friends, there are just as many pitfalls to friendship in the digital era. How many friends do you have? A few hundred? A few thousand?

Nobody wants to show up empty handed when they’re invited to celebrate a birthday, but if you don’t know the person all too well, buying a gift can be sort of a minefield. What not to give: Tired gifts like decorative soap, picture frames or candles. Instead, put one of these five presents on your list. Each one is common enough to be a crowd-pleaser, but can be easily dressed up with a pretty or personal touch.

If the calendar had subtitles, January’s would be “The month of reinvention.” New Year’s Resolutions are top of mind for everyone, and the ripples are showing everywhere—from our Facebook feeds to the newly crowded gyms. The new year promises a chance to start fresh with whatever you’ve been struggling with. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? We all have areas where we’d like to improve.

The end of the first two weeks of the new year is a tipping point for resolutions: By now, either you’ve already quit on your goals, or you’re solidly living them. I’m happy to say that our Real-Life Resolutions writers—each one taking on a four-week challenge in the name of wellness—are all holding steady.

Navigating the world of registry etiquette is tough work. To put together The Registry Rule Book, we asked some industry experts to weigh in and answer some of the hardest questions engaged couples might have. The reason wedding registries can be such tricky territory is that the whole process is a delicate dance.

Try not to think about it too hard, but you’re currently flying through the universe at a million miles an hour. Your balance—a skill finely tuned since you were a toddler—is keeping you upright, allowing you to maintain control when everything around you is moving faster than you could imagine. Balance is no less important outside of the body.

Bride & Groom: Margarita Passione + Byron Zinonos Wedding Date: September 3, 2016 Venue: Greenpoint Loft in Brooklyn, NY Number of guests: 120 This couple of high school friends turned into lovebirds some (ten-ish) years later—safe to say they knew each other pretty well by the time they decided to get married in Brooklyn last year.

Hoarding is more like a spectrum than a binary classification, and most of us fall somewhere between KonMari and get this person a TLC special. In fact, collecting needless things is such a common human experience that the Japanese have developed a very specific word for my particular favorite flavor: hoarding books. Yep, it’s true: The Japanese word “tsundoku” originated as a slang term to define the habit of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them.

There's a way to turn a vice into a virtue—just listen to these brilliant tips by self-admittedly awful emailers.

99 Percent Invisible is not a new podcast, and The SoHo Effect is not even a new episode. But on a recent re-listen during a long car trip, I realized that there’s a whole lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of Apartment Therapy readers and people who would probably find this story fascinating. So here we are. I’m writing, and you’re reading, a very forthright recommendation: Go listen to this 19 minute, 38 second podcast.