🤯🪑Your IKEA furniture is quaking

It’s Thursday, Boston.

☘️ If you’re looking for a way to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day … we have a little code for you. You can get $5 off your ticket to Harpoon’s St. Patrick’s Day Festival this weekend — which has music, drinks, and for some reason, pro wrestling — with code BSIDE5. 

🇺🇸 And, BTW: President Joe Biden’s third State of the Union Address is at 9 p.m. tonight. You can watch it live here. Stay politically informed, stay hot <3. 

👀 What’s on tap today:

• Flood watch: Activated

• The Seaport is vrooming

• Mass.’ “Love is Blind” connection

Up first…

LIFESTYLE

Get into the spring cleaning spirit

The housing market may be ugly, but that doesn’t mean your apartment needs to be. With spring cleaning season around the corner, we talked to local organizers, decorators, and DIY-ers to bring you their best tips for giving your (rental) space a refresh on the cheap.

Here’s what they said:

📦 Step one: Declutter, declutter, declutter. Consider this permission to Marie Kondo your life. “It’s the elbow grease that can help you get to the next level without spending a lot of money,” said Megan McGovern, owner of SORT, a professional organizing business. “Think about how you as an individual are using your own space,” McGovern said, and sort your items in a way that’s personal. 

🤔 Where do I start? In any given category of stuff, take out all of your items, determine which ones you use regularly, and “declutter the ones that you're not using and then putting it back in a way that makes sense to you,” she said. In other words, keep things you use within reach and store away what you don’t. Think: If you want to clean out your spice cabinet, keep only the spices you use everyday within reach.

🙋 Step two: Remember, your space should reflect YOU. “I believe that a space has the ability to … truly change the way that you live,” said interior designer slash New England Tiktok sensation Emily Shaw, who is currently gutting and remodeling an entire house. If you’re struggling to reimagine your space, it could be your mindset that needs a renovation: “It belongs to you at the end of the day,” Shaw said, “approach it from a place of passion.”

🤔 Where do I start? “Look for budget friendly creators who are giving you tips and tricks to get you started and think of project ideas,” she said. And try not to fall into the aesthetic traps of IG and TikTok without considering your own needs. “It just has to be something that feels good personally … the internet is so full of options these days that the possibilities are endless,” she said. Here are three (1, 2, 3) tutorials of hers to get you in the DIY mood.

🖼️ Step three: Details make all the difference. Small changes like art, plants, lighting, pillows, and hardware can make a space feel more in line with an individual style without breaking the bank, according to Molly McAndrews, a design-focused content creator.

🤔 Where do I start? McAndrews suggests making a good old-fashioned vision board of spaces you like, and then “try to figure out which items specifically draw you in” and why. Once you have a sense of what you like, consistency is the key. For more unique and high quality finds at a lower price, she's team thrift store and flea market all day.

QUICK QUESTION

👷 What’s the most ambitious DIY home project you’ve tried?

CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

☔ Prepare for a sloppy commute. While the downpours were at their worst overnight, meteorologists say you should still plan for a wet morning commute with slow travel (somehow, we all forget how to drive in the rain). The soil is also v saturated at the moment, which means it can’t hold onto much more moisture, creating the possibility of flooding. We’ll have a quick break from the rain Friday before it comes back with a vengeance Saturday night. Keep up with the latest here, and stay dry!

🏠 Boston’s housing market has a racial gap. According to data from Zillow, Black and Latino-owned homes in Boston are worth significantly less than those with white owners. This info isn’t exactly new news — the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team reported similar findings earlier this year — but it does highlight how decades of segregation and structural racism have led to disparities not only in homes’ worth across racial lines, but the likelihood of home ownership, and in income by neighborhood. 

🏎️ Things are vrooming in the Seaport. The perfect place for Massholes to blow off their road rage doesn’t exi— F1 Arcade, the country’s first dedicated Formula One racing arcade, announced it’ll be opening its doors in the Seaport on April 22. The arcade will be two floors, with 69 full-motion racing simulators, a giant bar with an extensive cocktail list and raw bar, and it'll transform from a family friendly venue to 21+ at 7 p.m. each night. Daniel Ricciardo not included, unfortunately. 

🎤 Boston’s small music venues came to play this spring. If you’re looking for a fun night of music but aren’t willing to shell out that Eras Tour ticket money, smaller concerts can scratch that itch. Boston.com rounded up 14 must-see concerts at smaller music venues (think: BabyTron, Maddie Zahm, Real Estate) across the city this spring, from punk to Americana to pop. You’d spend that $20 ticket on an Uber to some Fenway bar anyway, so what do you have to lose? Check out the list here.

SPOILER ALERT: “LOVE IS BLIND” SEASON FINALE SPOILERS ARE BELOW. KEEP READING AT YOUR OWN RISK.

ONE LAST THING

A local “Love is Blind” connection

Did you know a contestant on this season of “Love is Blind” has some serious Mass. ties? 

It’s true, although she’s since moved to North Carolina, Amber Desiree “AD” Smith is a Dorchester native and a former Pats cheerleader — just about as Boston as you can get. The Globe interviewed Smith about her time on the show, and she dishes (as much as she’s contractually allowed to) about why she agreed to go on the show, her somewhat controversial relationship with commitment-phobe Clay Gravesande, and the female friendships she’s kept since filming.

While AD and Clay didn’t say “I do” at the altar during the season finale (well technically, AD did), we’re anxiously awaiting next week’s reunion to know if their romance fizzled for good. 

You can read the whole Globe interview here.

— Written by Gia Orsino and Emily Schario

💍 Thanks for reading! A blind man could’ve seen Clay’s response from 10 miles away.

🍝 The results are in: It looks like it’s BE Pasta Bar’s turn for the B-Side certified treatment. 37% of readers voted for our two cents on it, and we can’t say we’re not stoked for pasta in a cup.

💃 Keep up with us @BostonBSide on IG, TikTok, and Twitter. Send comments and suggestions to [email protected] or [email protected].