FAQs
You asked, we answered. Without further ado, the scoop on all things Young House Love:
How did you find your home? Here’s the whirlwind that we called house hunting. And here’s a post full of house-hunting tips for first time buyers.
What paint color is in your kitchen/bedroom/den etc? Click here for a fun little room by room breakdown.
Where did you get your sofa/brown and white guest bedroom quilt/yellow rug? Click here for a complete room by room source list for every item in our house.
What are your favorite places to shop for rugs/pillows/lamps/sofas/dining tables, etc? Here’s a very thorough post with all of our favorite shopping sources listed by category.
Do you have a floor plan of your house anywhere? I’d love to see the layout. Here’s a handy little floor plan for you. You can also watch our video house tour by the Nest or this old homemade house tour to get a better idea of the layout. And when it comes to our property, here’s the exterior breakdown.
How did you create the wall of curtained built-ins in the bedroom? We used two inexpensive doorless wardrobes from Ikea on either side of the bed for tons of added storage space and added drapery panels to hide all the clothes and shoes. To finish things off, we hung a wooden header to make the wardrobes look even more built-in. Click here for more details.
Where did you get the green headboard in the guest bedroom? Did you make it? Yup, in about ten minutes with a $12 staple gun. Check out our simple and speedy headboard tutorial.
What are you favorite cleaning products/appliances/magazine subscriptions/decor books/shows/cookware/make-up/eco-bags, etc? Check out our Amazon shop for all of our favorite things (and a slew of furnishings that we have in our very own house, so you can get the look quick).
Do you still sell that monogram art in your shop? Everything in our shop is limited edition so while we don’t offer Magazine Monograms anymore, here’s a tutorial for making your own.
What kind of camera do you guys use to shoot your images? We use a Canon PowerShot SD1100-IS Digital Elph. It’s a small 8 megapixel camera that has great little features like a macro setting, an image stabilizer, and a manual setting (which we use 100% of the time so we can turn the flash off- pictures look so much better without it!).
Why did you guys start this blog? It was actually John’s idea to start a little blog to track the progress of our kitchen remodel. We quickly realized that we enjoyed sharing all of our adventures- and misadventures- in home improvement and so a hobby (and eventually a bona fide profession) was born.
How did your blog grow from a hobby to a full time job? In a nutshell we’d say that it was a combination of hard work and a series of lucky breaks. Here’s the whole story.
Where did you guys meet? We met in New York City when we both worked at the same advertising agency on Johnson & Johnson baby products and ob tampons. What can we say, babies and feminine hygiene brought us together. We secretly dated for almost a year and kept things under wraps until we moved to Virginia and got engaged. To this day our old coworkers still talk about how we “blew their minds” by revealing our relationship, and we laugh about all the times we almost got busted strolling through Central Park hand-in-hand.
Don’t you guys also write for a national magazine now? It’s true! We’re lucky enough to have been recruited to write a regular column in Better Homes & Garden’s Do It Yourself Magazine. We’re beyond honored and actually have to pinch ourselves whenever we see our words in print. We were also featured on the cover of The Nest magazine’s spring issue- here’s that story (more details here).
And weren’t you guys on HGTV’s Rate My Space? Ah yes, that’s also true. We made a fleeting appearance as one of the “inspiration rooms” that designer Angelo Surmelis used to makeover a master bedroom. You can check out a clip of the show here and read more about our behind the scenes experience here.
Didn’t I see you guys in a house tour video on thenest.com? Guilty as charged. You can watch the entire tour here (we personally think that Burger stole the show).
Wait, were you guys on CNN? Yup. That was quite the surprise! Here’s the story and the clip.
How do you make those mood boards for your design dilemmas? We make ours in Adobe Photoshop, so after we bring a bunch of our favorite items into Photoshop, we size ‘em, cut them out, and add some numbers to create a handy dandy guide that correlates to our explanations. If you don’t have access to Photoshop, we’ve heard great things about Polyvore and MyDeco so you might want to check those out. Happy mood board making!
What goes into the process of creating a custom mood board? Do you start with a specific item (like the biggest or most expensive)? We usually start with the requested decorating style along with specific furniture requests. For example if someone requests a “sleek and modern dining room” we might start with the table (a fab glass one from CB2?). Or we could start with a light fixture (a modern pendant from West Elm?) or even with the curtains or the rug (which might inspire our color scheme). In a nut shell: there’s no method to our madness and a lot of what we choose at the start of a project gets bumped by something better that we find later (curtains that looked great with the table can get swapped for new ones that look great with the table AND the new rug). It’s an unpredictable process, but it’s always super fun.
Do you guys really crash weddings? You want the real scoop, huh? Some of the weddings we “crash” are actually friends or family, so we don’t randomly hop on a plane to Hawaii. After we shared some details about our own backyard wedding people started requesting ideas for fall weddings, destination ones, thrify ones, etc. So we started sharing all the weddings that we attend for inspiration. And while we’re usually invited to ‘em, we do occasionally find ourselves in the right place at the right time to do some bona fide crashing.
