Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

Archives for September 2009

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Reader Redesign: The Forest Through The Trees

When Yansy sent us her amazing forest-inspired bedroom makeover we couldn’t wait to share the play by play. Here’s her letter: I wanted to share with you my finished master bedroom since you were the inspiration behind the Forest Wall. I would love to know what you both think of it. Of course I borrowed the idea from your old dining room chalk project. But instead of doing chalk and sealer I just used white chalk to trace the pattern on the wall and painted over it instead. I didn’t copy the pattern from anywhere (it’s something I came up with and that’s probably why it took me 5 hrs from start to finish). I would

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Carrie’s Design Dilemma

Carrie’s ready to give her bedroom a chic and modern new look. Here’s her letter: I am SO EXCITED that my boyfriend Brian got me a custom mood board from YHL for my 25th birthday! We live in Richmond as well and I LOVE your site, your style, your advice, and pretty much everything you write about! Can you tell I’m excited? Our bedroom needs your help. I think our style is pretty modern (think IKEA, CB2, ZGallerie, Jonathan Adler and Target of course) with a hint of beachy/casual. I love pops of color and fun patterns. The bed and dresser must stay. The shades should also stay – I love them, but I think

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Richmond Represent.

For anyone who’s wondering what it’s like to live here in Richmond, here’s a heelarious video all about our beloved River City. Granted, it may be one big inside joke. But if nothing else, hopefully you’ll get a kick out of watching a couple of guys rap – plus there’s totally some sweet auto-tune action at the end. It’s probably heavily inspired by the DC area’s Arlington Rap, but we love this one more because it’s about our hometown (and they mention three of our favorite restaurants). Plus it’s definitely already stuck in my head… “statues, statues, statues comin’ atchu”…

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A Modern $358 Nursery Makeover For A Lucky Little Boy

You guys have patiently waited for the big nursery reveal while we’ve spent weeks tackling everything from paint, mirrors, and art to lighting, storage, and a custom crib skirt. Now we’re back to share the whole room all put together (and not a moment too soon since John’s sister Emily’s son is due in two weeks!). But first let’s look back on the blank slate of a before that we started with: We hardly even remember that bare and boring guest room. Here’s the clean-lined yet oh so cheerful nursery we whipped up for Emily’s wee one on the way: The playful and modern vertical stripes in yellow, caramel, white and slate blue really added

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Goal Tending: Year Three

For our first blogiversary we announced a few of our goals going into year two and we’re back to see how we did and set some new ones as we move towards year three. Check out my calves. Anyway, last year we decided to publicly declare our goals because while writing them down in a notepad could work, we figured publishing them for all to see would really light a fire under our rumps (what can we say, we work best under pressure). Miraculously, we did pretty well…. Last Year’s Goal: Get Your Read – We wanna write more fun and interactive posts like this (which resulted in this). How We Did: Not bad. We

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Growing Our Blog: How Did We Get Here?

John and I often ask ourselves this question. How did we go from blogging-about-our-impending-kitchen-remodel-to-our-friends-and-family-as-a-hobby to writing-to-thousands-of-people-about-interior-design-and-home-improvement-every-day-as-a-bona-fide-job? And since this same question seems to be popping up in our inbox more and more lately (and even in Tuesday’s reader survey) we wanted to take a stab at answering it. So for all of you aspiring professional bloggers or curious readers out there, here goes nothin’… In a nutshell: we attribute our blog’s growth to a combination of lots of good old fashioned hard work and a series of lucky breaks (of which we’re eternally grateful). We didn’t start the blog with hopes of creating a business, we just wanted to share our kitchen renovation with our

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Take A Number

With our two year blogiversary in full swing, we thought it would be fun to look back at some of the stats that make us smile, blush or just plain blow our minds. Here’s how it all breaks down… 1006- Our number of published posts to date (crazy considering we only had 380 on our first blogiversary) 68,025- The number of comments we’ve amassed from you, our lovely readers 19,206- The number of spam comments that our stupendous spam filter has intercepted (no we don’t want to see naked Lady GaGa pictures thankyouverymuch) 3,507- The number of comment questions that we’ve answered  to date (we do our best to answer every single one) 78- Average

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