Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for December 2010

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Twenty Eleven Resolutions

Every year we publicly proclaim a few of our resolutions in the hope that it’ll light a fire under our arse (arses?) and help us “get there.” So without further ado (except for this gratuitous Clara picture) here they are… Resolution #1. To be more bold with our decorating & renovating choices. We want to embrace color and contrast and just have fun without worrying that we’ll mess up. Mistakes are always when we learn the most about a project or our style, so we’re going to welcome them with open arms. And we hope to do our best to resist always going with the “safest” decisions in favor of taking a few chances and

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We Ordered A West Elm Duvet…

When we saw the amazing after Christmas sales at West Elm we had to spring for a new king sized duvet buddy for Ed the bed (get acquainted with Ed here and here). Even though Ed’s a queen sized bed, we wanted a king duvet cover because we thought it would drape a bit more over the sides (our old full/queen sized duvet cover was looking a little tight). Plus it’ll hopefully result in fewer sleep fights about who has more of the covers. So here’s what we got: We love that it’s bright, bold, geometric, and full of energy. It just looks nice to wake up to. Plus it has a lot of the

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How To Frost A Glass Door And Avoid Bubbles

It’s no secret that the real improvement we need to make to our new laundry area is in the upgrading to energy efficient appliances arena along with adding some nice built-in storage to maximize that tiny room. But as we save up and plan for those upgrades, we took a few hours after Clara’s bedtime a few days ago to tackle some smaller items on our laundry list. Pun intended. First we went to work on the glass side door. You know, the one that gave everyone a straight shot from our carport, through the laundry area and into our kitchen (here I am being creepy and demonstrating the problem, which you can read more

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Listy McListerson

Wahoooooooo! A list post! I loooooooooove lists! Oh haaaaaappy day. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, this post will continue without the excessive exclamation points & extraneous vowels. Lots of people have been asking what we’ll tackle next, what order we’ll be doing things in, etc. And our answer is usually: it’ll honestly just depend on our mood and what supplies we have on hand. When it comes to big projects we like to save our pennies and plan things to death, but for small things (which we always recommend doing first so you can live with the house for a while before making any dramatic changes that you might regret) we

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Day Fifteen

Yesterday marked two weeks of being in our new house, so we thought it warranted an updated glimpse into each room’s progress… or lack thereof. On one hand we feel very accomplished for having already tackled things like painting Clara’s room, buying and assembling a new bed, removing a bunch of bi-fold doors, raising our shower curtain, and unpacking everything – especially considering we were tied up with family stuff for a few days over Christmas. On the other hand, we’re still feeling pretty unsettled. Most of the important stuff has found a place in our new abode (not that it will necessarily stay there for the long haul), but the house is still riddled

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So Many Moving Boxes

We’ve dealt with box-y rooms, but this takes that term to a whole new level: What you’re looking at is what we lovingly called our “Box Graveyard,” aka the guest bedroom filled to the brim with all of our now-empty moving boxes and packing supplies. As disastrous as it looks, we have to admit that after trying to be so orderly about packing, it was somewhat cathartic to just toss the empty boxes into one big über-disorderly pile. Call it tapping into our wild side if you will. But of course we can only pretend to enjoy a mess for so long. So almost as soon as the last box was tossed there, I found

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Why You Should Always Test For Radon When Buying A House!

Thank goodness we learned something from buying our first house and decided to pay a few hundred dollars for radon testing this time around. As part of our new home’s inspection, we paid a local radon company to conduct a multi-day test to ensure that dangerous levels of radon aren’t present (for any locals who are wondering who we used, we went with Radon Ease, because they don’t remediate, they only test- so there’s nothing in it for them to find radon). Sure enough the readings came back above a 4… which means there were dangerous levels of radon present in the home – enough to call for professional remediation as the solution. But instead

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Assembling Our Edland Bed From Ikea

Last you saw our new bed Ed – aka, the Edland four-poster bed from Ikea – he looked like this (read more about how we chose him here). He has since been assembled – and even slept on for one night. And thanks to the Skorva steel support beam (also from Ikea, which is mentioned as a must-have along with the bed in the “good to know” section) Ed can, in fact, hold the weight of 30 dead people (aka: our incredibly heavy mattress) plus the weight of two DIY enthusiasts, their beefy chihuahua named Hamburger, and their baby girl (when she’s in there for a morning snack). Constructing the bed was a remarkably easy

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Fab Freebie: A Simplified New Year

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down for special discount and to see who won!*** If the words “simplify,” “organize,” “declutter” or “make more time for [blank]” will be showing up on your resolution list this year, boy do we have the giveaway for you. Simplify 101 provides all sorts of fun interactive tips and online workshops to help you achieve those goals, and this week a trio of you will win TWO free workshops. Our three winners can choose from any of the following workshops being held early next year: “Quick + Simple Clutter Control,” “How To Achieve Your Goals And Create A Life You Love,” “Organizing 101” and “It’s About

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Buying A Bed Frame From Ikea

After over two weeks of doing it, sleeping on the floor is officially getting old. So we bought a bed frame. Oh happy day! We had big plans for possibly building one (using one of Ana White’s amazing tutorials). And we debated just getting a cheapo-metal frame and laying slats of wood across it so we could rest our mattress on that (so we could DIY another upholstered headboard down the road). But in the end the four poster bed that caught our eye back when we whipped up this future bedroom mood board won out (click here for more mood board details). One of the issues is that our organic mattress (which you can

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Using A Silver Sharpie To Decorate Mugs

This is a weird DIY thing I tossed together three Monday nights ago in front of the TV in our old house. The first reason I’m calling it weird is because we no longer live there, so it’s funny that this post somehow got buried and now it’s getting published with our old walls and shelves in the background. And it’s pretty darn close to Christmas, but I figured it might be a fun little last minute gift idea for someone. Better late than never, right? Hence the idea of hitting publish on it (as opposed to delete). The second reason I’m calling it weird is that I totally didn’t use the right materials to

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