About The Home Picks

Last updated 13 August 2026

The Home Picks is a small independent review site about household gear — the cleaning tools, storage, kitchen equipment and travel bits that make a house run. We started it because product research online had become almost useless: page after page of specification lists written by people who had clearly never opened the box.

So we do the boring version instead. We buy a product at the normal retail price, use it in an actual home for a few weeks, and write down what happened. Sometimes the answer is that it's excellent. More often the answer is that it's fine, with two caveats worth knowing before you spend the money.

Who writes this

The site is edited by Dana Whitfield, who has spent most of the last decade writing about home products and consumer goods. Testing is done across a handful of households in the United States — different floor types, different climates, and at least one enthusiastic shedding cat — because a product that works in a tidy studio apartment often falls apart in a family home.

What we don't do

• We don't accept free review units or loaner products from brands.
• We don't let a company read a review before it publishes, or change one after.
• We don't publish sponsored posts or paid placements dressed up as reviews.
• We don't rank products by commission rate. Several things we recommend earn us nothing at all.

How we pay for it

Through affiliate commissions. If you buy something after clicking a link here, the retailer may pay us a small percentage, and you pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway. That's the entire business model, and we'd rather explain it plainly than bury it.

We explain the arrangement in more detail on our affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or missing an important caveat, tell us and we'll fix it. Corrections get made on the page itself with the update date changed, not quietly deleted. Write to hello@thehomepicks.com.