With so many home warranty companies available that claim to offer the most comprehensive coverage, it may be challenging to find the best option for your situation. If you’re asking yourself, “what does a home warranty cover,” the This Old House Reviews team will educate you on what you should expect when purchasing a service contract, including coverage, pricing, and limitations. What Is a Home Warranty? A home warranty is an annual service contract that covers repairs and replacements on major home systems and appliances, like air conditioning or a refrigerator, that have failed due to normal wear and tear.…

Good news: Here are housewares that do plenty of good for the world. We’ve been following Goodee for the better part of a year, from the time Fan heard a talk by the founders—Canadian twin brothers Byron and Dexter Peart (formerly of WANT Les Essentiels)—to when Julie met up with the duo for a peek into their pop-up at the Whitney Museum in New York earlier this winter. The online marketplace offers a curated collection of home goods and stories from around the globe, and we love the bright, well-made, good-looking wares, made by artisans and creators all over the…

Ian Hague needed a place to chill out. When he acquired 75 untouched acres in New York’s Hudson Valley, the NYC fund manager (whose business focuses on Eastern Europe and Russia) envisioned a “hermitage in the forest” tailor-made to his interests: reading, building balsa wood model airplanes, driving a Tesla, and decompressing amid the treetops. He also wanted to create a state-of-the-art, low-impact retreat and enlisted sustainability specialists BarlisWedlick Architects of NYC and Hudson, New York, for the job. After encountering a fox on the property during his first visit, Hague dubbed his Columbia County spread Fox Hall, and during the many months of…

According to the Alliance for Water Efficiency, showers are the third largest water use after toilets and washing machines. Replacing an old shower head, particularly if made prior to 1980, head with a new model that uses less than 2.5 gallons per minute (an ultra-low flow shower head, for example, uses 1.5 gallons per minute) can help save water. Many modern American shower heads are already low flow but to be sure, a shower head that uses 2.5 gallons of water per minute constitutes low flow; the lower gallons per minute (GPM), the better. Here are our 10 favorites. N.B.…