This story category covers home decor, home maintenance, garden design and garden maintenance.

Beautiful Ming Vase

Ming Got A Ding? Where To Get It Fixed

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Antique china is irreplaceable—but if it {or any glass or pottery item} breaks, here’s where to fix it locally.

Beautiful Ming VaseDARE TO REPAIR | My grandmother passed on to me not only a love of beautiful things but some of the beautiful things she loved—like a set of delicate Czech glass goblets. I carefully packed them in a box and brought them home on the plane from Winnipeg as carry-on. At least that was the plan. As I watched the box go through the airport security x-ray, I realized to my horror that I’d carried on the wrong box and the goblets were taking their chances as regular luggage. Read more

HomeSense Lampshades - Casey Phaisalakani

Where To Find Well Made Lampshades

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Where does a shopper have to go to find a decent lampshade in this town? Felicity Stone has the answer.

HomeSense Lampshades - Casey PhaisalakaniSHOPPING AROUND | Lamp shades are not something I shop for often, but when I do, I find myself frustrated by the poor selection and quality out there. My particular peeve is shades with plastic backing, which not only becomes brittle and cracks over time but also looks so, well, plastic. Read more

Garden Hose

Never Buy A Cheap Garden Hose—Ever!

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In which our writer experiences the horror and torment of buying an inferior product.

Garden HoseBUYER BEWARE | Sometimes a bargain is a terrible deal. Case in point: the 100-foot hose I bought on sale at Canadian Tire for $29. The Yardworks hose was advertised as “anti-kink” and “heavy-duty” and since it was only 29 bucks, I figured I had myself a winner. That is until I tried to use it. Read more

3 Top Trends In Gardening Right Now

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People are talking about perennial vegetables, backyard fowl and compost as rich as a Middle East despot.

GROW YOUR OWN | Though it may feel a bit premature given the weather recently, March is when all good backyard farmers gear up for the growing season, deciding what they’ll sow, starting seeds and enriching the soil for the nourishing work they’re going to need it to do.

Producing at least some of your own food is the fashionable thing to do right now, though the gardeners we know who toil in earnest care more about the environment, the provenance of their food and the fresh taste of fruits and vegetables than they do about being trendy. Still, it’s nice to know that of all the gardening stories we featured on Frugalbits this past year, the three highlighted below are trending topics when the subject of urban farming rolls around.

3 Gardening Trends That Sizzle Read more

Make Magic: Put String Lights In The Garden

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Inexpensive string lights in the garden make it feel magical, inviting and fun.

Cheap + Beautiful | Many of the clients in my residential landscape design practice can afford whatever kind of outdoor lighting they want, so it surprised— and delighted— me a few years ago when one of them suggested we find places to put white string lights in her large and rambling garden. “I love the way they look and the kind of feeling they bring to a garden,” she told me, rattling off a list of “happy, fun” string light sightings that included weddings outside, hill towns in Europe, those blocked-off laneways with shops and bistros in San Francisco.

My client may have been a romantic, but she was definitely on to something. Of all the ways to light a garden—up-lighting, down-lighting, moonlighting, etc.—few methods can match humble, cheap low-voltage white string lights for creating a genuine feeling of enchantment. Read more

A No-Fail Way To Get Kids To Turn Off Lights

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There is a NO-FAIL way to get your kids (or anyone else in your house) to douse the lights when they leave a room.

 

WASTE NOT Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the times were desperate around my house. After what seemed like eons of continual nagging by me and my husband, our children, lovely individuals all, continued to leave the lights on when they exited their rooms, or any of the other spaces in our home they frequented with regularity.

“Turn off the light when you leave a room” is one of our basic house rules, along with “Do not take hour-long showers” and “Avoid drinks in disposable containers” if at all possible. But where wasting water and steering clear of junk plastic seemed to click with my tribe, remembering to douse the lights remained an issue. Read more

Paint & Install This Glass Guard Yourself

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Annoyed by the high cost of back-painting and installing the glass behind her gas range, this adventurous renovator took on the task herself.

 

DIY | When Terri Brandmueller renovated her Vancouver kitchen awhile ago, she thought a lot about how the surface materials and finishes would look when viewed together. She had dark wood and white laminate cabinets; butcher-block countertops and a solid beech island; and stainless steel appliances—everything set against a backdrop of white beadboard wallpaper. What was missing, she figured, was a serious splash of colour, and the surface behind the range seemed like the perfect place to put it. This is how she hit upon the idea of installing the light-reflecting sheet of glass pictured here, back-painted ocean blue. Read more

Top Up Your Old Silver Service For Less

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Where to find the missing pieces for your grandmother’s old silver service for less.

SPENDING SMART | Early last April when we were busy launching Frugalbits, I was also busy buying sterling silver flatware. The only other time I’d purchased sterling silver was the last time the U.S. and Canadian dollar were at par. Whenever the dollar is near par, I think about buying things south of the border that I’d otherwise consider an indulgence; much as I love it, sterling silver flatware falls into this category. Read more

Coco Rocha & James Conran

Decorating Secret Of The Stars: Multiply

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What do supermodel Coco Rocha, superstar writer/artist Douglas Coupland and super designer/TV personality Kelly Deck have in common besides B.C. roots? They know how to multiply.

Coco Rocha & James ConranMORE IS BETTER | Repetition, as designer Kelly Deck pointed out to me recently, is central to good interior design. “If we’re designing the interior architecture of the home, we often determine well in advance what repeating architectural elements we’ll use throughout the design. Perhaps the millwork and doorways will all have chunky wood wraps, or the hardware throughout will be square, polished and jewel-like. These are subtle uses of repetition, but they’re fundamental in creating an interior that feels quiet and unified.”

More literally, repetition is very effective in decorating, particularly when you’re trying to stretch a budget—or make a high-impact artistic statement. Here are the ways the model, the writer and the designer have multiplied to great effect. Read more

Areaware Candlesticks

Useful + Fun Gifts For Design Aficionados

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3 inexpensive, purposeful home products from Areaware for picky design loving types.

Areaware CandlesticksCHEAP + CHIC | Sometimes subversive, typically surprising and always fun, the useful and poetic products by Areaware trigger an emotional response. This trend-setting New York-based company’s mandate is to “create thoughtful products that encourage a dialogue between people and their everyday surroundings,” and the first time I flipped through their online catalogue and discovered the marble and resin Distortion candlesticks shown here, designed by Paul Loebach, I wanted to give them as Christmas gifts to all my designer friends. I worried that something this original and arty might be too expensive, but discovered the opposite is true: these traditional-with-a-twist 10-inch-tall candlesticks are a steal at $24 each. Read more