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We have three kids — ten, eight, and five — and one 11-by-12-foot bedroom that has to hold all of them. For a year the arrangement was two kids sharing a hand-me-down full-size bed and the five-year-o…

My garage didn’t have a tool shortage. It had a tool location problem. Three socket sets, two drills, a graveyard of hex keys — all of it living in milk crates and the original cardboard boxes, which …

My dad is 68, and his left knee announces rain two days early. It is an old basketball injury, the kind he used to laugh about and now plans his afternoons around. The couch in his living room sits lo…

Early July, my old coffee table gave up. It was a $60 flat-pack I had owned for three years, and the middle had developed a sag you could see from the hallway. Mugs slid toward the center like they we…

My living room has a cold spot. Not a drafty-window cold spot — a dead patch by the arm of my sofa where the baseboard heater never quite reaches, and where my old media cabinet sat like a monument to…

Why I stopped buying dining chairs in sets of four Three years ago I furnished a 10-by-12-foot dining corner in my apartment and did what the furniture catalogs told me to do: I bought four dining cha…

I Bought a $299.99 Rocking Chair With Footrest for My Nursery. Nine Months Later, the Honest Verdict. My daughter came home on a Thursday in February, and by the following Thursday my lower back had f…

Here is a confession: I own a tape measure, and I have used it on dining tables in three different apartments. When FLNORW MALL added a $598 counter height dining table set with built-in storage shelv…

I did not set out to buy commercial kitchen equipment. I set out to stop spending my Sundays slicing forty pounds of deli meat on a plastic folding table. I run a small weekend meal-prep operation out…

Farmhouse Ceiling Fan: My $299 72-Inch Verdict, One Year Later Our dining room is 18 by 22 feet, which works out to just under 400 square feet of air that needs moving every summer. The builder-grade …

I Installed a $468 Shower Door. Here Is the Buying Guide I Wish I Had First. My hall bathroom has a standard 60-inch tub alcove, and last spring the shower curtain finally beat me. It clung every morn…

My two-car garage hit 98 degrees last July, and my old 20-inch box fan was doing nothing about it. It rattled, it hummed, and every afternoon it walked another few inches across the concrete on its ow…

Travel Umbrella Review: My $37 18-Month Test A travel umbrella is the kind of thing you buy in a panic, usually while standing in a downpour staring at a drugstore rack. That is exactly how I ended up…

Last January, on a 14-degree morning in Columbus, I found frost on the inside of my front door latch — a little white beard of ice crystals on the metal, right where my hand goes every morning. My bui…

I bought my first sideboard because I loved how it looked in the photo. I sold it eight months later because it never fit the wall, never fit the room, and never fit the life I was actually living. Th…

Before I bought a real bedroom dresser, my clothes lived in a $45 fabric-cube organizer that leaned like a tired boxer. It sagged in the middle, the drawers were fabric socks pretending to be furnitur…

I bought a hand truck the week my back filed a formal complaint. Two trips up the driveway with a 50-pound bag of water-softener salt, and I was standing in the garage doing that slow straighten-up ro…

Last spring my plumber dragged our old two-piece toilet out to the driveway, and lying on its side the thing looked bigger than the crate our new dishwasher came in. The tank was a separate 30-pound s…

Basketball Hoop: My $288 Driveway Test Verdict My son turned twelve in March, and last fall’s trampoline review taught me something I didn’t expect: the basketball hoop bolted onto that 14-footer got …

My sister visits twice a year, and every visit restarts the same argument in my head: air mattress or real bed? For three years I went with the air mattress. It hissed, it sagged by 3 a.m., and one me…