Football Season Is Just Around The Corner! Get Inspired Backyard Tailgating Ideas This #SummerWithSears

Need Some Backyard Tailgating Ideas?

I know I’ve mentioned a few times that we are big football fans around here; when you live in Kentucky, it’s almost a requirement.  We love it in all it’s forms: from high school, to college, to the pros.  Bubbles even attended her first game before she was born!

Great space for Bubbles to, well, chase some bubbles! But needs a little work before it’s a Backyard Dream Tailgating spot!

Along with football, though, comes another fun activity that we enjoy – and that’s tailgating!  And just because you can’t actually get to every game it doesn’t mean you have to miss out on tailgating; you just home-gate, instead.  We have a good blank canvas (as you can see above) for backyard tailgating at our new place, but it needs a few things to jazz it up a bit first.

I was browsing our local Sears ad online the other day and I decided to click around to see if they had any end-of-summer sales.  They actually have three nice ones:

• 30% off all Patio Furniture and Decor
• Save $500 on Ty Pennington Style Halston 4-piece seating
• ALL grills on Sale

The sales prompted me to start looking around the Sears site a bit more to see if I could find items to purchase for tailgating season.  The more I looked, the more I found that I like, and eventually I realized I had quite a wish list going.  I might not be able to afford it all right now, but a girl can dream, right?  At least when we’re ready to purchase, I’ll have an idea of what we need and want.

It’s hard not to dream when the Sears Outdoor Catalog displays the patio sets, grills, and more in such an inspiring way!  It also has a lot of useful information, like the Grill Quick Reference Guide above.  Compare cooking area, BTUs, number of burners and more, all in one place.  I’m definitely printing that out for when we’re ready to get our grill.

I also stumbled across the Sears Style Hub – and ended up losing about an hour to their design simulator.  Seriously – it’s awesome.  You can choose different “floor” textures like backyard, patio, and deck.  Then you can choose from a limited amount of actual Sears merchandise and practice your layout.  It really gave me a feel for what we could fit back there and how it would all look together.  In addition to the design program,  you can take a quiz to find your outdoor style which will help guide you to selecting pieces to purchase.

For tailgating a grill is pretty much a requirement, so that’s where I started looking first.  While looking for the grill I found a cool branding tool for your meat that says UK on it (for the University of Kentucky – go Cats!) which would be a neat little extra.  I also found a very cool lighted grill gazebo.  It’s a little pricey (at least you’d earn a ton – 9000! – of Shop Your Way Rewards points) but really very practical, especially for Kentucky.  It has been known to be both 20 and 100 degrees on the same day here, so having a covered area for those pop-up storms would be nice.  And lights so you can see to grill late into the game would be awesome!

I found so many other things that I would love to have in my dream backyard tailgating spot that I decided to put together a Polyvore board to show them all off.  Polyvore is an easy way to collect all your favorite elements in one spot so that you can then share them.  You can see everything on my Polyvore board, plus other items I liked but didn’t quite make the cutoff, here in my Google+ Album.

Here’s the full list of all the items that made it onto my dream board.  You can click the thumb’s up to show me which of my backyard dream pieces you like, too!  I’d also love to hear what else you’d include for tailgating this #SummerWithSears; I can always use the extra inspiration.

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Keep in touch with Sears on Twitter and Facebook for sale updates, style suggestions and more.  If you love to grill, you’ll want to check out the Grilling Is Happiness website (they’re on Twitter, too!).

I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community. This content has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and Sears. #CBias #SocialFabric  All opinions, as always, are 100% that of myself and my family.