Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

Archives for July 2013

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Listy VonListerson: Updated

These posts came about when people asked how we organize all the stuff that we have on our to-do list and we explained that we basically have one long run-on document that we update as we go. Back in May when we first shared this list, we didn’t get to cross anything off. But now that it has been a few months, some requests for an updated version rolled in and I was all “No, please dont make me cross things off!” Just kidding. I was all “Lemme at it! Ohmanohman I love crossing things off!” Picture the dog’s reaction in those Beggin’ strips commercials. And guess how many lines I got to make?  43. Which

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House Crashing: A Cozy & Creative Townhouse

We know you guys love seeing a wide range of homes when it comes to House Crashing, so when Katrina invited us over to run around her townhouse and snap some photos to share with you guys, we jumped at the chance. She’s a super creative momma who lives right here in Richmond with a lot of awesome found/collected items mixed with things that she has DIYed herself. And here she is now, with her adorable son Luke and her husband Nate. When you enter the townhouse, there’s a gorgeous cozy wall color (Gauntlet Gray by Sherwin Williams) that envelops you, along with the rich wood floors that her hubby installed himself on all three

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How To Install A Nest Learning Thermostat

Everywhere we turn these days there are things that need updating. Some just for aesthetic reasons. Some for functional. Some for both. Enter our old timey, first floor thermostat in our office. We figured with our new furnace system it’d be a good time to update this to something more energy efficient. We made the swap to a programmable thermostat in our first house, so this time around the tech geek in me begged Sherry to let us take this upgrade a step further – especially since so many of you have commented about loving your Nest. To my surprise, she agreed. And that’s how I found myself holding one of these babies. But let

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Fab Freebie: Founding Father

My alma mater was founded by Thomas Jefferson who most notably was our 3rd President and wrote the Declaration of Independence. But he also authored a list of motivational maxims which Lauren Fritsch has turned into a chic, hand silkscreened poster. This week’s winner will get their choice of any of the five color combos (we especially love the metallic gold and black one) and… … the winner will also score $150 to Citizen Native – a pretty web-shop stocked with cool American-made items. In addition to breezy and fun home stuff (I’ve never wanted a goat pillow more in my life), they’ve got awesome wares for pets and kids, as well as for us

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Foyer Freshness: A Soft Neutral Paint Color

The deed is done. Behold, our freshly painted foyer: It feels about a foot taller and at least two feet wider than it did before. Ah, the power of paint. This shot’s probably the most accurate when it comes to color. It’s definitely one of those soft neutrals that shifts throughout the day, but I’d say it’s one part sand and one part greige. Not too cool and not too warm. And pretty darn beautiful with white trim. As for choosing the color, we mentioned a bunch of swatches we were loving in this post, and shared this little makeshift palette: Can you guess who ended up in the foyer? Good ol’ Edgecomb Gray. The

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How To Remove A Dated Vanity Backsplash

Happy Friday, y’all! We’re painting the foyer today (pics on Monday – woop woop!) but I realized that I forgot to share two bathroom related happenings. And one’s a giant oops moment, so this should be fun. First of all, it’s fitting that this thing is called a vanity because I did a little surgery and removed its love handle. It’s hard to see in some of the more recent photos of the bathroom, but this one shows it loud and proud: That slab of counter against the right wall just felt imbalanced to us, and it’s actually a pretty simple DIY project to remove it. So if you have a side-splash thing that you’re

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How To Run A New Cable Wire

One thing we were excited about doing differently in this house vs. the last one is having a TV in our master bedroom. And while we did briefly have a TV in our last master, we never hooked it up to a DVD player or bothered to get a second cable box. Heck, I’m not sure it even got plugged in. We’ve never been gung ho about having a bedroom TV (and we realize it can be a hot topic) but as two people who struggle to snap out of blog mode at night, we thought it would help fight the temptation to work on our laptops (which happens all the time downstairs on the

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Sharing Some Love & Some Art

This week would have been my Aunt Kay’s birthday so it was kind of hard for me since she passed away last year (she lived with me growing up and was sort of like my second mom). She was such a happy and colorful person, and she loved to paint and draw, in fact it was her minor in college. So I decided to do a little watercolor painting with Clara in her honor. I know every mother probably thinks this, but my kid is an artist. Somebody get this girl a beret. The watercolor set came from Target (it was a total impulse buy when I saw it on an end cap – I just

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Upcycling A Secondhand Bathroom Light

But before we get to that: an armadillo in the bathroom. Let’s talk about it. Everyone needs one, right? I mean, we can argue that a lot of decorating “rules” are personal preference and yada yada, but seriously, can we all agree that a bathroom is not complete without a golden armadillo? That’s a print we bought from this craft fair from an awesome local artist named Rachel that I finally got around to framing and hanging up. I especially love it in the burlap-y/grasscloth-ish frame (an old Pottery Barn Outlet find) hanging above the framed instagram photo of Clara holding a naked doll (felt kinda bathroom-esque). The linen-like fabric behind the instagram photo looks

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Our Other New House

Yup, Sherry and I have started work on another new house. But before you gasp – we’re not moving into this one… and it isn’t technically ours. Heck, it’s not even built yet. In fact, the lot currently looks like this: Some of you may remember this Mega House Crashing that we did last year where we toured 8 custom show homes – each constructed by a different builder and decorated by a different interior designer – as part of an event called Richmond Homearama. Well, their 2014 event is now in the works and they’ve asked us to design one of the homes! Cue the girlish shrieking (not from me, I promise my shrieking is

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Fab Freebie: I Sense A Refresh

As we mentioned on Friday, we have an almost unbelievably shallow kitchen sink. So when Kohler offered us a new sink and faucet, it pained us a little to say no… but you know we love to pay things forward to you guys! Which is why we’re thrilled to announce that someone’s about to win any KOHLER sink of their choosing (yes, any!) AND a new KOHLER Sensate Touchless faucet (so you’ll be able to turn your water on and off by just passing your hand – or bowl or spatula – under the faucet’s sensor). They’re even offering a free consultation with a KOHLER interior design to help you pick the perfect sink &

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Painting Our Bathroom Vanity (Twice To Get It Right)

Let’s talk about vanity, shall we? Specifically the sink vanity that we last left off as primed in this post. This is one of those real-life stories where we painstakingly stared at about fifty swatches before carefully choosing a pretty kelly green tone that we thought would be awesome. A fun pop of color in a white room (sort of like this). So off to the store we went and grabbed a quart of Baby Fern by Benjamin Moore in their semi-gloss Natura paint. And after one coat – even though we gave it two in the hope that the second one would work a miracle – we knew… Baaaaaaad call. Seriously, at one point Clara

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Breaking Down The New Pad

It’s Friday! Let’s get mathy up in here. By now you know I’m a card carrying facts & figures nerd (here’s Exhibit A and Exhibit B) so when Sherry and I started to notice some unique stats about our new house my throat basically erupted with “LEMMEDOSOMEINFOGRAPHICSPLEEEEEASE.” Whether she actually was keen on the idea or was just worried that disagreeing would turn me into some beastly werewolf-statistician, this post was born. We always end up loving random time capsule posts like this the most in hindsight (it’s fun to look back at things we probably would have forgotten otherwise, like this, this, this, this, and this). So in the name of some headed-into-the-weekend fun

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Pondering Layout Changes & Paint Color Possibilities

Since a bunch of you guys have requested more details on what layout changes we’re pondering and what paint colors we’re currently leaning towards, we thought we’d share a giant brain dump about what’s flying around in our heads at the moments (which will change as we go I’m sure!). Y’all ready for this? Lots o’ words. Lots o’ diagrams. Lots o’ links. Please fasten your blog-reading seatbelts and be sure that your desk chair is in its upright and locked position. This is what the first floor looked like when we bought our house (we’ve since removed the three sets of the double doors off of the kitchen).  But here’s what we’re thinking we’d

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How To Program Your Garage Doors (& Their Dip Switch)

We have two garage doors. I know, I know – cool story, bro. But I promise this gets better. Well, it does if you’re a tech nerd or just enjoy life’s little conveniences. Sherry’s eyes glaze over when I try to tell her this stuff, so I’m talking to the remote-control-loving convenience enthusiasts out there. Anyone? Each door came with its own remote, which we inherited from the previous owners. This guy barely worked at first, but with a quick battery replacement it works almost too well – occasionally opening or closing the door when the remote shifts in my cup holder. Did I mention it didn’t come with a visor clip? Yeah, that’s why

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Painting The Back Of Your Front Door A Bold Color

Alternate post title: Paint Me Like One Of Your French Girls. Yes, much like Rose once begged Jack, the dusty blue back of our front door was just begging to be painted (ok, so Rose said “draw me like one of your French girls” but it’s close enough). The new paint color of choice? The same happy teal tone that’s on the front of it. There’s no hard and fast rule about carrying the color that’s on the front of the door back around to the inside of it (in our last two houses we chose bright colors on the front and plain old white for the back) – but for the first time ever

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House Crashing: Calming & Clever

Psst- Sorry about yesterday’s truncated post, Reader users. There was some bad code in a video we embedded (we like to feed full posts, so if you ever see a shortened one, something wonky’s going on). We’re painting something again today! Who’s surprised? Anybody? Nobody? We’ll be back with the goods tomorrow, but in the meantime we thought this house tour was so charming and creative that we had to share it. It’s a great example of a someone buying a house and just going for it, without being even a little afraid to make it theirs. And if there’s one thing that we’ve learned in this whole home-making journey of ours, it’s that the

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Fab Freebie: Comfort, Clara-Style

One of our favorite things in Clara’s room is her cozy ikat throw. That or her monogrammed “C” pillow. So if the maker of said throw and pillow emails you to do a giveaway, you say “YES!” And that’s how someone’s going to end up scoring both a throw and pillow cover of their choice from Happy Habitat by Karrie Kaneda this week (a $200+ value). Another cool thing about Karrie’s throws and pillows is that they’re eco-friendly. They use recycled cotton, which basically means scrap pieces and threads are getting a second life. A life with you, perhaps? Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but

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Priming And Painting Trim With A Paint Sprayer And By Hand

“I’m Blue Da Ba Dee Dabba Da-eeeeee” (anyone remember that song?). Picture us maniacally singing it while priming and painting trim for hours days. We’re slowly losing our minds, but we’re having fun doing it. Please feel free to click over and jam out so we feel less alone (and slightly less certifiable). Ok, so when we last left our hero, er, our foyer, he was sporting some snazzy blue trim. We had stripped down all the wallpaper, and had also removed two closet doors and the bathroom door so we could take them out to the garage and use our paint sprayer to apply a coat of primer and two coats of white semi

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Celebrating Our 6th Wedding Anniversary

Last weekend marked our sixth wedding anniversary. As you’ve come to know from us, we like to celebrate with some family time, a good meal, and a few pictures to remember it all by. Actually, one of our few goals for commemorating each year is to get a family portrait (which we hung as a collection in our last house). It started off very casually on our little point and shoot. Then it started involving tripods and camera remotes (you can thank Clara for that). But this year we went super simple and just broke out the iPhone on a family walk. I snapped this guy with my own hand. We also tried to get

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Email Answer: I Bought A Fixer-Upper, Where Do I Begin?

Q: My husband Tim and I just bought our first fixer upper two weeks ago in Fort Worth, Texas. It is our second home and we hope to make it our last. Falling in love with our home was the easy part, but the thing is we just don’t know where to start. Should I mention that we have a 19 month old little ball of energy “helping” us? I know you don’t know what our house looks like nor do you know what our plans are for it. I won’t bore you with the details, I just want to know if you have a post about getting started; about how to go about making

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Using A Steamer To Remove Wallpaper

Things are getting steamy in the foyer! As a refresher, we have five rooms full of wallpaper and we’re attempting to take five different removal methods for a spin, just to see what ends up working (and what bites the big one). For our first time at the wallpaper removing rodeo we used hot water and a spray bottle, which actually worked out pretty well. And in this week’s hard-hitting Wallpaper Exposé we’ll be tackling the foyer with this guy. His name? Steamer. His game? Steaming clothes. He’s actually John’s sister’s, but it was free to borrow and we thought we’d see how it worked out for wallpaper too. But first, a moment of silence

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Stars, Stripes, and Some Thanks

It’s time for our once-a-month pause to show how grateful we are to the sponsors who help make all of our other posts possible. So feel free to check out some patriotic things that caught our eye this month, and peruse our usual round-up of discounts at the bottom of the post. Summer-tastic, vacation-envy-inducing art canvasses on sale at Joss & Main. A knitted pendant light spotted on Fab.com, among other cool & quirky items. The Tile Shop‘s inspiration page, which showcases lots of unexpected tile combos. Patriotic WallQuotes for Americans (and Canadians!) like this one. Shades of Light‘s vintage sign-y letter lights, available in an alphabet of options. Small scale stencils from Royal Design

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Our Fun & Filled Fourth

Our Fourth of July weekend was pretty jam-packed and we were grateful to be able to carve out some time to enjoy the holiday. The fun kicked off Thursday (July 4th) afternoon with a family walk around a new park we’d never been to. It was hot, but too beautiful not to be outside. Actually, one of our favorite parts (partly because it was completely shaded) was a tunnel that went under the road. Clara could’ve spent all day in there. It’s where we got this cool shot we posted on Instagram that day. Oh, but did we mention it was hot? After we got home, cooled down, and napped (well, Clara napped) we walked

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