Hi, I’m Sarah —
I measure twice and write once.

My Story

I’ve bought the wrong size more times than I’d like to admit.

My name is Sarah Howe, and that sentence is basically the founding principle of Ivy Rose Decor. Over the years I’ve ordered a privacy fence quote that didn’t account for my sloped backyard, bought a patio umbrella that left half my dining table baking in the sun, and installed flower pots with zero drainage because nobody told me that mattered until my succulents started rotting from the inside out. Every mistake cost me money, time, or a dead plant. Eventually I started writing the corrections down — not as a warning to myself, but because I figured other people were about to make the exact same call I did.

I started in 2019 after my husband and I bought our first house — a fixer-upper outside Augusta with good bones and a backyard that needed everything. No fence, no patio, a shed full of someone else’s junk, and a yard that turned to mud every time it rained. I had no contractor connections and a tight budget, which meant most of what got built, got built because I figured out how to do it myself, or because I called five different installers and compared their quotes line by line until the numbers actually made sense.

That habit — measuring everything, comparing every quote, writing down what went wrong — became the whole approach behind this site. When I researched privacy fence costs, I didn’t stop at one quote. I called installers in three different price brackets, asked what was actually included, and found out labor alone swings by 20 percentage points depending on terrain. When I sized my first patio umbrella, I learned the hard way that “looks about right” is not a sizing method — my table’s corners sat in full sun for two summers before I did the math properly. I write about these things with exact numbers because vague advice is exactly what got me into trouble in the first place.

What I’ve noticed, after a few years of doing this, is that most people aren’t short on inspiration. Pinterest and Instagram hand you plenty of that. What’s actually hard to find is the boring, specific, slightly embarrassing detail — how much labor really costs per hour, what base weight keeps your umbrella from becoming a projectile, whether your pots need that hole or not. I try to be the site that answers the question you’re actually asking, with the number attached, instead of a paragraph about “creating your dream outdoor oasis” that tells you nothing useful.

I also believe in showing my math. If I tell you a fence costs $25 to $60 per linear foot, I’ll tell you why the range is that wide, and what pushes you to one end or the other. If I tell you to add four feet to your umbrella size, I’ll explain the coverage logic behind that number instead of asking you to take my word for it. I’d rather you understand the reasoning well enough to adjust it for your own situation than just copy a number that might not actually fit your patio.

I still live in that same fixer-upper, which now has the fence, the patio, the properly-drained pots, and an umbrella that actually covers the whole table. My husband still handles anything involving a chainsaw; I handle the budgeting, the research, and apparently an unreasonable number of opinions about base weight. Outside of the blog, I’m a fairly average gardener with strong opinions about drainage, a person who has called more fence companies than I’m proud to admit, and someone who will absolutely measure your patio for you if you ask nicely.