Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for February 2012

| By | | 675 Comments

Guess Where We Are?!

Last Monday, a surprise snowstorm (in the middle of a super mild winter) made for this picture out of our living room widow:   And Clara went outside and had fun doing this:   Fast forward about a week, and our view looks more like this:   And Clara’s sporting a different kind of outfit:   Yup, true to our anniversary resolution, we snuck off to Maui, Hawaii to celebrate finishing our book, our impending five year anniversary (in July), turning 30 (I will in March and John already checked that box in November), and any other celebration-worthy excuse that we could think of (Clara’s first four syllable words: escalator, helicopter, and anemone!). It’s actually

[ Read More ]

| By | | 278 Comments

How To Organize Your Coupons

Psst- Today’s our leaving-Portland travel day (sad face) so we’ll probably be spotty and slow on comments/etc after 1pm EST. We’re sorry for the interruption, but so happy to have gotten the chance to explore Portland. We owe you guys a big post about all the stuff we did/bought/ate! We purchased some local art, crashed an amaaaaazing house, ate bacon on a donut, and John scored not one but two new t-shirts (neither of which are soda related, but both of which are food-related). Lately I’ve been asked a bunch of times about how I organize/store our non-food coupons (since the grocery store ones are just stuck into one of those clear envelopes and stashed

[ Read More ]

| By | | 91 Comments

A Dining Room With Board & Batten And Dark Blue Walls

The boldest color we’ve ever used on any wall is Martha Stewart’s Plumage (which we slathered all over our guest room walls). Long story short: we’ve loved it ever since. So when Jackie sent us her dining room makeover boasting lots of Plumage, of course we were all over it. Here’s her letter: “When we moved into this house, the dining room started with just a table and the bamboo armoire. We didn’t even have dining chairs. Over the last six months I prioritized finishing this room in time for the holidays. It is filled with DIY projects including art silhouettes, board and batten walls, mercury glass vases, jute wrapped monogram, and my favorite: the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 296 Comments

Petersiks In Portland

Wow, so yesterday was a fun little whirlwind. We spent pretty much the whole day romping around the Portland Home & Garden Show (minus a break to scarf down some much-recommended Voodoo Donuts – and yes we tried maple bacon – mmmm).  The Expo Center here is stuffed with gorgeous gardens, cool green living ideas, and tons of friendly Portlanders. Or Portlandians? Portlandites? Whatever they’re called, the people here are crazy nice. We’ll give you an actual Portland shopping/stuff we did/house-crashing trip roundup once it’s actually complete (today’s our Explore-The-City day) but for now we’d at least tell you about our time at the show yesterday. It kicked off early with some interviews with the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 275 Comments

How To Install A Dishwasher

As we mentioned on Monday, before we hopped on a plane yesterday, we tackled our bisque colored dishwasher. And let’s just say the stainless one is a crowd pleaser (we like it, but Clara loves it). We’ll get to that in a moment. We had been telling ourselves that it would be better to do this once the new floors went in (so we didn’t accidentally trap it behind the new cork boards or something). But then we realized that was a dumb excuse because we could just slide it on top of a few cork planks so it would be the same height as the rest of the floor once it goes in. Plus

[ Read More ]

| By | | 96 Comments

How To Make An Emergency Kit

After our disaster-filled week last August (we had an earthquake and a hurricane within a week of one another) we had several requests for a post about emergency preparedness. We hemmed and hawed because we’re no experts in that department, but then a couple of actual experts / regular YHL readers reached out to us with emails fulled of information. Phew! So without further ado (since it’s already taken me like 6 months to finally write this post), here are some of the recommendations and information they sent our way. First off, our experts are Amanda F, who has her Master’s degree in this field and worked as an emergency coordinator for a hospital in

[ Read More ]

| By | | 152 Comments

Hanging A Towel Hook In The Bathroom

goose! And horse. So apparently my little self-imposed Dude Get On That Already challenge is just a sick joke where the universe tells me: “hey crazy lady, stop hoarding animals in the playroom.” But at least I’m getting things off the floor in there and up on the walls of the rest of the house so they can actually be enjoyed (or that’s just the denial talking). So without further ado, two more thrift store finds from here and here. Yes, this week was a double whammy of getting on that, since no painting was required. And they’re both over a year overdue. Another big surprise. So it was time to get these guys up

[ Read More ]

| By | | 6,823 Comments

Fab Freebie: Made In Portland

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** As our time in Portland comes to an end, we’re excited to share that the random winner of this very Oregonian prize is… Joyce (who would go all the way back to the late 1700s to check out the Constitutional Convention). Congrats Joyce! Since we’re headed to Oregon this week, we thought we’d send a little bit of Oregon your way in return. So how does $500 in product from Portland-based Rejuvenation sound? They started off as an architectural salvage shop, but now they serve up authentic lighting, hardware, and other home staples from a whole slew of time periods and styles. We’re

[ Read More ]

| By | | 343 Comments

How To Spray Paint A Pendant Light’s Cord & Canopy

A while back we bought this light for $29 at the Pottery Barn outlet. We originally planned to hang it over our sink “someday when we redid the kitchen” but then we got our oil-rubbed bronze pendant lights for over the peninsula, and although we love mixed metals, we just thought this silver + mercury glass light didn’t jive with them. So we started thinking about hanging it in a bathroom or something.   Then I asked tall John to hold it up as if it was hanging over the sink and surprisingly the shape was perfect. But the silver neck, black string, and silver ceiling cap were all wrong. But the glittering mercury glass

[ Read More ]

| By | | 374 Comments

Ram Down!

Remember our dear sweet never-hurt-a-fly Ramsey who watched over us in a not-creepy-at-all way when we slept? He was a beloved member of our household and even inspired Burger to do yoga. Well, Ramsey will be missed. And yes, it totally felt like this tragedy of yore all over again. Except John didn’t draw a depiction of the event… … because it actually wasn’t John’s fault. But yes, yesterday we bid a fond farewell to our TJ Maxx find when he somehow popped off the wall in the kitchen where he was temporarily hanging for a book vignette above the fireplace. No one was even in the room to attempt to catch him on the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 90 Comments

A Diamond Stenciled Tan & White Wall Treament

We don’t have stairs in our house. Which we love. But sometimes it’s a bummer when we see people do fun things with them like Roeshel recently did. And the most impressive part is that she did it without buying anything. You go, girl! Wait, forget I said that… just read her email: I’m sure you guys get a ton of submissions for consideration but I recently gave our stairway a little pizzazz using leftover paint and things we already had on hand. It turned out fun! So I’ve included before and after pictures in the event that you like my crazy little makeover. Before was boring. I cut out a diamond shaped stencil from

[ Read More ]

| By | | 671 Comments

Our First Big Art Purchase

That’s what Clara said when she woke up and saw our freshly hung real art in the kitchen. It was cute. And we laughed. And then she squealed “She’s swimming! Look, fishies!” which are most definitely not in there, but the girl has quite an imagination. So hooray for imaginary fishies. I described this gal as “real art” because it’s actually our first big art purchase ever. It’s a large print of an original oil painting by an amazing Etsy artist that we just couldn’t get out of our mind. And at $195 it was definitely a splurge for folks like us who usually frame free art that we make ourselves or hunt thrift stores

[ Read More ]