Well, nothing says summertime like *** family gathering in the backyard. That's why our friends at Veranda Magazine have *** few tips for putting together your perfect patio. Joining me now is Stee Marco, uh, editor in chief of Veranda. Steele, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. We appreciate you. Uh, there are *** few common mistakes that people make when it comes to designing the outdoor space. So what is one thing that we should include in our patio plans still? You know, almost all of the designers that I interviewed, um, about how to design the ideal backyard patio mentioned that people often forget to plan for shade. And in fact this is *** consideration that comes up kind of too late in the game and really needs to be something that you think about really kind of early on in your planning, especially for us uh here in the South who are uh we're so lucky to have so many months of sunshine. Um, that this is really kind of an essential thing to think about early. And when you're thinking about shade, you'll want to think about whether or not, um, you wanna have *** covered area and sort of where you might want that to be, but you'll also want to think about, uh, trees, planting trees either surrounding your patio or in pots kind of at the corners and edges of your patio. That's *** really good point. My husband hates sitting directly in the sun. Uh, let's talk about decorating. It is key, uh, but such *** small space could get crowded pretty quickly. Yeah, that's right. um, several designers that I interviewed for this story, um, talked about how, you know, it's not only essential to make sure that your patio is large enough to accommodate your furniture, but that you also need to think through how you're gonna move through the space and kind of the circulation around your furniture. So I think here the critical, the critical piece of this is to think about how you really want. Use your patio for example, is this gonna be *** place where you wanna have meals with friends and family in the evenings or is this *** place where you might just want to sit outside and do some reading? Those are really gonna, um, those kind of decisions are really gonna influence what kind of space you need outside and just in general, can you just talk about the importance of just investing in your space? Yeah, you know, this is, this is critical, as we all know, making decisions for our home can be expensive and can have long lasting um impacts on how we live at home. So you know, *** couple of the designers that I interviewed talked about how one big mistake they'll see people make is to put all this money into landscaping and then, you know, not have any budget left over for furniture and so then they're not able to um go outside and kind of use their beautiful outdoor space. So what they recommend is not buying cheap outdoor. Furniture which will of course you know rot over time, not stand up to the elements and that sort of thing they say that really well made good furniture is can be quite expensive so if that's not in your budget, then *** great idea is to shop for vintage um or antique uh for outdoor furniture and these are things you can pick up at local shops or even online auctions and that sort of. These are great tips. Steel. Thank you so much for joining us. You've been extremely helpful. We appreciate you. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, and you can find even more ways to improve your patio on veranda.com. You can also scan the QR code at the bottom of your screen in order to subscribe to the magazine. Veranda is owned by Hearst, which is the parent company of us here at WVTM 13.