Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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How To Use A Pressure Washer: A Beginner’s Guide

You may think pressure washers are complicated, expensive, or hard to control. But good news – they’re not! Pressure washing is an easy, affordable, and TOTALLY AWESOME way to keep your outdoor spaces looking clean and fresh. This is a comprehensive start-to-finish guide for anyone ready to get their pressure washing feet wet (maybe even literally). We’ll cover set-up, spraying tips, surfaces it works on, and more. Trust us, even we were intimidated the first time we tried pressure washing over 10 years ago. The cumbersome gas-powered machine we rented for a day was so big it didn’t even fit in our car! So I TOTALLY understand anyone with PWH (pressure washing hesitation). Our Favorite

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A Weekend In Serenbe, Georgia

Serenbe is a small “New Urban” community about 45 minutes south of Atlanta in a rural town called Chattahoochee Hills. It’s sort of a mix of an upscale-feeling suburban development and an eco-conscious resort in the countryside. We recently took a 3-night trip with our kids and had a great time exploring, eating, and spending time in nature!

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How To Make An Ikea Pax Wardrobe Look Built-In

Since our bedroom used to be a living space, it came with absolutely zero closet space. This was obviously a big downgrade from the fancy walk-in closet in our last house. BUT ALAS! Watch how we built in some floor-to-ceiling Ikea Pax wardrobes to create just as much storage as our last closet AND make them look like they’ve been there all along… For comparison, our last home’s walk-in closet was an 8′ x 6′ room. Each side had one 29″ wardrobe in the middle flanked by two 19″ wardrobes on each side. That’s 67″ of linear closet space along each wall, for a total of 134 inches. In this home, we used the exact

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How To Get Rid Of Fruit Flies – Using Stuff You Already Own!

Got little bugs buzzing around your kitchen? Congratulations, you may have fruit flies! Don’t fret. These annoying pests are pretty common but luckily, it doesn’t take a lot of money, supplies, or effort to get rid of them. In fact, you can probably find everything you need in your cabinets! We recently had a fruit fly problem in our home (the first time in over four years here – we have no idea what brought them in). So I seized the opportunity to test 7 different methods of eliminating them. Yes, there were copious notes taken and even a spreadsheet. So today I’m sharing the best fruit fly traps and how to make them.

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How To Build Easy DIY Garage Shelving

When we needed some heavy-duty garage shelving for our new shed, we turned to this shelf tutorial from our friend Ana White. Shelves like these stand up to the weight of heavier items like power tools & paint cans and, most importantly, are also SUPER straightforward to build – even for beginngers! We ended up loving this technique so much, we’ve since repeated in the shed at our beach house (seen below) and the small shed at our current hosue. They’re such an easy DIY project and I find them FAR superior to most store-bought garage shelving units. Making these long shelves with generous spacing between them to creates flexible storage with easy access to

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A Weekend Getaway To Ocean Springs

Never heard of Ocean Springs, Mississippi? Neither had we! But it caught our eye on round-ups like Southern Living’s 15 Most Adorable Small Towns and USA Today’s 10 Best Coastal Small Towns where it ranked #1. So a few months ago our family decided to check it out for ourselves. It did NOT disappoint! We actually considered detouring through Ocean Springs on our weekend trip to New Orleans two years ago. But now we’re glad we didn’t shortchange it with a quick pitstop and gave it a full trip of its own.

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2024 Holiday Gift Guides

Just like we did for our 2023 Gift Guides and our 2022 Gift Guides, we’ve got all three of our gift lists in one singular post right here. So let’s dive right into the 3 categories that we cover each year: Every year that we make these, we love including actual things that we own and enjoy, as well as things that we’re buying for others (like our own kids, each other, and relatives/friends). Also feels like a good moment to mention that nothing was sponsored/gifted to get into this guide. If something is on these lists, we just genuinely love it and think it would make a good gift (and in some cases, we already

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Downsizing Update: Almost 5 Years Later

In November of 2020, we published a post called “What’s It Like To Downsize” after living in our smaller home for 6 months. We covered a range of experiences – like the good things about moving to a smaller home (owning less stuff! saving money!) and some of its challenges, especially in the initial stages of downsizing (paring down! figuring out storage!). We still agree with everything in that post, but it had only been six months… and since it has now been over 4.5 years (!!!), we feel like we have a few more to add about the long-haul downsizing experience. Let’s get into it. I won’t recap our entire decision to downsize (you

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A Girls Weekend In Sedona, Arizona

My best friend and I live in different parts of the country (we’ve been best friends for 24 years, and have only spent about 1/3 of them in the same city), so we love taking trips together. Let me tell you, the joy of packing light (only for yourself! not the whole fam!) and having a few nights of sleepovers in a fun new place and exploring so freely (just us eating dessert for breakfast if we want to!)… it’s euphoric. And our latest trip that we enjoyed was a completely new spot for me! She grew up going to Sedona with her family, but I had never been! She didn’t have to work hard

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How To Dye Clothes

Dyeing your clothes can sound difficult, messy, and downright scary. But guess what? It’s none of those things! After all, I’m the girl who dyed her wedding dress so I could wear it again. Trust me, anyone can dye clothes at home because it’s easy, straightforward, and crazy affordable.

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How We Manage Renovation Stress: 5 Tips

Big renovations are exciting and fun, but it’s no secret that they can also be really stressful – especially when it’s one of those expensive, weeks-long, life-interrupting renovations like a kitchen or bathroom. Things go wrong, budgets get broken, timelines go haywire, and somehow there’s always dust everywhere. EVERYWHERE. So since we’ve renovated 7 houses over the past 17 years, we thought it might be helpful to share our best tips for preparing for & minimizing renovation stress.

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The Easiest Homemade Window Cleaner

We started using a homemade window cleaner last year and immediately regretted not switching sooner. Not only is it cheaper than storebought stuff like Windex, it also cleans better and without streaks! Plus, it only takes 2 ingredients (although more can be added). So grab an empty spray bottle and come see the light with us! That’s supposed to be a clean window pun, btw…

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