Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for January 2011

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Painting The Wood Trim In Our Living Room

Glad that’s out of the way. Painting the trim was as long and tedious of a process as we expected. Maybe more-so actually, but it’s done! Wahoooo! And it feels pretty darn good. Seriously, there was more than one happy dance (one on Friday night when we finished, and another one in the morning when we saw the room in the light). What is it about certain annoying home improvement jobs that make you want to ugly-cry while doing them but happy-cry when you’re done? Talk about roller-coaster emotions. In the end, we never regret them, and we’re happy we got ‘er done. We’re just not ready to “do them all over again” the next

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We Found A Note Hidden In Our House!

You know how we hid a secret note in our first house to hopefully be discovered in a few decades? Well, we found one in our new house! It doesn’t appear to be very old, so we’re guessing it’s from the previous owners (who lived here for 22 years, so it’s still pretty amazing). Where was it? Tucked behind the large wall mirror in the hall bathroom. See that tiny nub sticking out under that wonky orange arrow? While John was giving Clara her bath I was hanging out with them slash standing-around-staring-at-things-I-can’t-wait-to-update when I looked up and saw it peeking out of the top of the mirror. So I tugged on the corner, revealing

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A Modern House Tour

Woot, it’s Friday! And we’re hard at work painting the trim in the living room at this. very. moment. So it seems like as good a time as any to go house crashing. We thought we’d share pics of this amazingly inspiring NYC pad that we virtually house crashed while we’re off getting our paint on. One thing’s for sure – Herman and Eduardo (the proud owners) definitely have made every last inch count. Speaking of size, their pad is just 500 square feet and it consists of a modestly sized kitchen, dining area, living area, bedroom, and bathroom. But it feels luxe and lovely, like it’s all anyone would ever need. It’s such a

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A Soft Gray Color For The Living Room: Moonshine by Benjamin Moore

Feel free to sing the title to the tune of the famous Dolly Parton song. Or our new favorite version by SNL. Anyway, painting our living room yesterday sure was quite the task of endurance, especially given various breaks for Clara-tending and blog-tending. In fact, it took us exactly 12 hours, from 9am to 9pm to fully complete the project. Good news – the living room is officially Moonshine’d. Better news – so is the hallway (what can we say, we were on a roll). But the day got off to a slow start. Between Sherry squatting the first blog post of the day to answer a bunch of questions, Clara needing some breakfast, and

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How To Choose The Right Gray Paint Color…

We usually feel pretty confident in our ability to pick a paint color. But something about choosing the perfect gray color for two major living areas in our house made me extra nervous (we’re going to use the same color in the future dining room, main hallway, and living room for some nice continuity). Sherry had a field day ribbing me about my paint paralysis. I was literally second-guessing every swatch we looked at. “Sure, I like it… no I don’t, I hate it.” Yeah, that was me. I blame my neurosis on having selected a hideous gray tone to paint my middle school bedroom (I picked it because I liked the name – Cannonball

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The Best DIY Tools

We’re psyched to be a part of Mrs. Limestone‘s “Junk Drawer Overhaul” series, where a few bloggers will be sharing how they’re kicking off the new year right by re-organizing their messy kitchen junk drawers. We bent the rules a little bit and shared how we organized our tool drawers (which are also located in our kitchen). But it wasn’t really a drawer re-organization since our tools had just been piled in the corner of our office after we moved. Nice, right? You can read more about how our screwdrivers and hammers went from “yikes” to “that works” over on A Brooklyn Limestone In Progress. And an interesting thing happened while organizing our tools. In

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An Epic Shower Curtain Fail

Well, it’s not really epic. More like Not So Bad Fail. Or No Biggie Fail. But we like to share our trials along with our triumphs, so here ya go. We were in HomeGoods scouting night tables, rugs, pillows and whatever else wanted to come home with us when we spotted this baby for a mere 12 beans. It’s a shower curtain. Fun modern pattern? Check. In line with the gray & yellow color scheme for our guest bathroom? Check. On sale? Checkity-check-check. So we brought it home (our only purchase of the day, actually, but that’s another story) and threw it right into place. At first it felt like the perfect step it waking

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Wall Art For The Nursery

We finally hung stuff on the wall in the beanette’s room. Earth shattering right? Except it’s actually somewhat of a big deal considering we haven’t hung a single thing in the entire house except for a wreath on the back of the fireplace in the living room for Christmas. That’s right, for the last month we were card carrying picture hanging virgins in the new house. But now that we made about 34 holes (yes, I counted) in the walls of Clara’s room, our v-card is long gone. So we snapped some pics of the nursery now that it has a little more flava. The only real change from Clara’s room in our last house

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Fab Freebie: Designer Labels

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** Since January is often the season of organizing, the folks at DYMO thought they’d help a couple of you amp up your process with a brandspankingnew label maker. But the LabelManager260P isn’t your mom’s label machine. This puppy lets you design labels with a full keyboard, special characters, 3 label sizes, 3 fonts, 6 text styles, and even 8 underlining and framing techniques. So get ready to pimp your “bills” folder or those “recipe” files. Here are all the entering deets: PRIZE: The DYMO LabelManager260P TO ENTER: Comment on this post with the words “LABEL ME!” and… BONUS QUESTION: … spill

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Using A Cloth Napkin For Color Scheme Inspiration

Please tell me you sung that title to the tune of the Brady Bunch? If not I’ll give you a minute to get to it. Now that we have that out of the way, I thought I’d share our inspiration command center when it comes to the new house. It’s this napkin that we scored on clearance from Crate & Barrel (which you might recognize from this post of yore). I kid you not. That napkin is like the Sue Sylvester of Casa Petersik when it comes to picking colors and pinning down that ever elusive whole-house-color-scheme. She’s loud. She’s totally in charge. And she’s fun to watch. Thankfully no bullhorn though. That wouldn’t go

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How To Paint A Mirror

The deed is done. Everyone on Team Paint The Mirror White (not to be confused with Team Edward, which I’m totally a member of) can rejoice. Our mirror above the sink went from this: To this: And I guess we should show how it originally looked when we moved in for the full before: But back to the white paint choice. After much thought (and a decent amount of flip-flopping) we decided to go with our first instinct and paint the mirror white to match the trim. It definitely looks integrated and a bit less heavy, so the nook is now a little less look-at-me-right-now distinct (which is a good thing since we’re trying to

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The Washer & Dryer We Picked: Stackable Whirlpool Duets

Our new washer and dryer are here! Which of course means that our old ones are not. Fortunately our plan to craigslist them worked out swimmingly (thanks for buying ’em Leslie Ann!) even if it did leave us appliance-less for a few days (as you saw in the video house tour). By selling them for $250 thanks to good old craig and his list, we in effect brought our already-super-discounted total down from $638 to $388. Although after the wall plug, the stack kit, and taxes it was closer to $460 spent. Either way, we’re still feeling crazy good about the deal – and we’re glad that so many of you were able to take

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