Everyone deserves to have a beautiful yard display for the holidays.
Every yard decorating guide online has the same problem. It shows you a beautiful display in somebody else's yard, on somebody else's lot, and leaves you to work out whether any of it fits yours.
So I started measuring instead.
Yard Plotted is a set of to-scale plans sorted by the shape of lot you actually have. Ten shapes, from a city postage stamp to a long rural driveway, and each one drawn properly with its own setbacks, its own sight lines and its own problems. A corner lot is not a wide shallow lot with the plan rotated.
Every plan gives you a drawing measured in feet from the sidewalk, a shopping list with dimensions taken off the retailer's own listing rather than guessed, real prices with the date they were checked, and how many outlets the whole thing needs before you find out in the dark.
Four budgets for every plan, and none of them go over. A plan that goes over its budget is a wish list, so the ones here are checked against a hard ceiling and rebuilt if they break it.
Where something is genuinely better made than bought, the build plan is free and stays free. Cut layouts, a printable stencil with a real inch ruler on it, and a heads-up at every step where it usually goes sideways.
I check the prices, I check the measurements, and when a piece turns out to be a different thing than the listing implied, I change the plan rather than the description.