Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for June 2013

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HGTV’d

As some of you guys have already discovered, we had the great pleasure of having our house photographed for the latest issue of HGTV Magazine. Well, our last house (we’d probably bat someone away with a stick if they tried to snap pictures of our new place just yet). And since a bunch of you have been asking for the behind the scenes scoop, here it is. That day was such a blur that we weren’t even sure that we had any behind the scenes photos to share, but when we looked back in iPhoto, it turns out we remembered to snap a few photos. This is Clara the editor. She’s telling us what we

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Installing White Faux Wood Window Blinds

Our house gets really nice sunlight – especially upstairs and especially in the afternoon when the sun hits the front of the house directly. We love it for everything from hanging out to taking photos. And Burger, well, he loves it for just about anything: napping, grooming, sniffing things, more napping. But the beams of sunlight streaming in also highlighted a shortcoming of this house: no window blinds. I think we took it for granted that the bedrooms in our last house came with nice white faux wood blinds, so it was kind of a shock the first night when we realized we had nothing for privacy or to keep the light from creeping in

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A Shared Nursery With A Crib & A Bed

Cindy had fun making a room for her daughter Sarah, but then plans changed and she had to make a quick adjustment. We loved that she made a mood board to keep herself on track, and hunted things that she loved until she found some great deals. Here’s her letter: Hello John & Sherry! I want to share the latest update in our home. In the beginning of the year we decided to let our kids have their own room. Around March of last year this room became our little girl’s bedroom… A couple months after finishing this room we found out we were expecting #3 and since our home is a three bedroom home

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So, There’s A Big Tree That’s Way Too Close To The House

In the words of Cher… “If I could tuuuuuuuuurn back tiiiiiiiime. If I could fiiiiiiiiiind a waaaaaaaay. I’d plant this pretty oak tree not on top of the house.” No doubt it started out a lot smaller, but it grew, and with it grew the danger of it messing with our house. So when the home inspector crawled out from having assessed the roots and their proximity to the foundation, we were sad (but not surprised) to hear him say “this tree has got to go.” Even if we could somehow do a root-growth-suppression-rain-dance to get them to avoid the house’s foundation, we couldn’t deny that about 50% of the tree’s canopy was precariously suspended

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Digging Up And Moving A Japanese Maple

If you guys have read this old post, you already know half of this story. For the rest of you, here we go. Way back in 2007, right before we got married – and before we even started this blog – my parents gave us a tiny Japanese maple. It was a little 24″ offshoot that had started growing near the large maple in their backyard. We planted the tiny little thing in our backyard, said a few plant prayers for it, and it grew a smidge in the 3+ years it lived there… though we don’t really have any photographic evidence of it. Since it was meaningful to us – having some wedding significance

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Fab Freebie: Uncommon Areas

What fun is a house without a little weird in it? For those homes lacking some quirk, uniqueness, or “points of interest” then this week’s $250 gift card to UncommonGoods may do the trick. Their site is well stocked with home decor, servingware, organizing accessories and even kids stuff that has a hint of fun injected into it. Personalized family pillow? Check. Cardboard side table? Check. Terrarium-slash-table-lamp? Yeah buddy. Once again, we’re using Rafflecopter, so you should see a box load under this paragraph (might take a second) and that’s where you can leave your entry. This week the prize ships to the United States. a Rafflecopter giveaway  

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Using Hot Water To Strip Wallpaper

Send out the ravens! (yes, that’s a Game of Thrones reference). Wallpaper stripping has commenced. I was actually really excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal project, because I am a strange breed of human and that’s my idea of a good time. And since we have five rooms full of wallpaper (the foyer, the half bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, and our bathroom), I decided that I would try a different removal method for each one and report back with the pros/cons about each approach as I went, all in the hopes of sussing out which ones bite the big one and which ones seem to work the best. I’m telling you

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You Can’t Take It With You… Or Can You?

As exciting as it has been to move into this new house, it was certainly sad to say goodbye to our old house and leave behind all of the parts (and projects!) that we couldn’t take with us. The penny tile backsplash. The deck. The fireplace. Wait, scratch that last one. Let’s zoom in a bit closer on that little item sitting on the mantel. Well, what do we have here? That, my friends, is an amazing miniature replica of our fireplace. Miniature as in completely portable and yes-it-totally-came-with-us-to-the-new-house. It’s the creation of Lisa Harrold, a recent fine arts graduate in the UK who specializes in miniatures. She emailed us to say that as a

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Ripping Up A Rug & Removing The Rug Pad & Tack Strips

We named the rug in the sunroom Stinky. We were feeling literal, and it was damp in the corners from moisture seeping into the sunroom from bad seals in the old sliders and some wood rot. The previous owners knew there was a moisture issue (along with a serious smell issue) in there, which definitely came into play when they set the low-enough-to-be-in-our-range listing price, so although this rug sounds like a curse, we actually consider it to be a blessing (heck, if we can take care of something that might turn off other buyers and it helps us afford a house that we LOVE, we’re all about it). So here’s how we got that

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How To Paint Patterns Onto Rugs

They say inspiration can come from anywhere and Sheena’s story definitely had us smiling. Here’s her letter: Hey John and Sherry (and Clara and Burger too!) I just wanted to write to thank you for some unintended inspiration you gave me recently. After reading about Clara’s dollhouse, I fell in love with the pattern on the fabric-sample-turned-rug in the tiny room and I just had to replicate it. So I did – with a plain rug, some foam insulation, paint, and a sponge brush. Think “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” in reverse and decor style!  :) I used a 3/4 inch thick piece of insulation styrofoam to make a stamp and stamped the design over

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How To Install New Interior Doorknobs

Alternate post title: Come And Knob On Our Door. Don’t you love a good forced pun on a Wednesday morning? Ever since we shared a bunch of doorknob options last week (and ordered the ones we liked the most), we’ve been waiting for them to arrive so that our upstairs doors could finally have some closure. Literally, we couldn’t close any of the doors. So when the box landed on our porch, we got right on installing them. Like many DIY projects, adding the new knobs was a bit more complicated than we anticipated. The latch assembly was bigger than the existing holes in our doors, so I had to use a drill to carve them

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Replacing An Old Furnace & Getting A New Roof

When we bought our house, there were two big issues we knew that we needed to deal with right away: the ancient furnace for the first floor was so poorly maintained we weren’t sure it would run the 32 year old roof was at the end of it’s life and there was a hole in it (it was actively leaking into the attic every time it rained) Thankfully we knew about both of these issues when we bid on the house, and we were able to negotiate thousands of dollars back at closing to go towards those updates (since a new roof and a new furnace are hardly cheap fixes). Then it was just a

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