Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for September 2011

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Small And Simple Bedroom Updates

We’d like to present our bedroom with the award for Most Often Tweaked. It just seems like time goes by and a few things get added to the mix and it inspires us to remove the top bed rails, hang a ram above the bed, ditch the duvet, or move out some horse art. But we’re all about trial and error and learning as we go (who gets it all right on the first try? And if you do, please share your secrets!). It’s definitely one of our more out there rooms (read: not everyone’s cup of tea), but we like that since it’s our own private bedroom and not a common space where we

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How To Make Faux Needlepoint Art

Last week my brother and his wife Ali came to visit us (well, mainly Clara, haha). They live up in NYC where John & I met and fell in love, so it’s always a treat to have them in our neck of the woods and it was actually their first time seeing our new house. Since it was almost exactly their one year wedding anniversary I thought I should DIY something sweet, and since I was an accidental kleptomaniac at their wedding (where John’s long arm snapped the pic below), I knew at least one material that I’d be using: a pilfered napkin. Wait, let me explain. I had a three month old daughter who

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Fab Freebie: Lowe-ded With Ideas

***This giveaway is no longer expecting entries – see who won below!*** Random.org once again spun its wonderful wheel of randomness and selected our two winners as… Amy @ Larryspearslive.com and Amanda Deerr. Congrats ladies! Raise your hand if you want a $50 Lowe’s gift card. Or better yet, give me a “hootie hoo.” And if the thought of being one of two lucky winners doesn’t instantly get your brain spinning with all of the potential projects that you could tackle, Lowe’s Creative Ideas will happily fill your head with… wait for it… creative ideas. You may already know of the free Lowe’s Creative Ideas magazines (if not, you can subscribe to ’em here), but

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Painting Our Office Moonshine by Benjamin Moore

We did it. Completely out of order. Yup, we finally decided what color to paint the office and went for it. Which would have been a lot easier if we had pinned down our color pick before we built our wall-to-wall two person desk. Oh well, such is DIY life. We didn’t want to rush into choosing a wall color and then hate it after we built the desk (which would have meant having to repaint everything again after the desk was built anyway). So we waited. And waited. And discussed. And rediscussed. And waffled. And it’s a good thing that we actually did wait. Because before the desk was completed we were considering some

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Framing A Custom House Portrait

How do you like that sensationalized title? Haha. It’s like Star Magazine up in this joint. This is basically a post idea that John and I came up with when we realized that there were a surprising amount of nooks and crannies in the house that we’ve never shared. And some things that are a lot bigger than a nook or a cranny. Which is weird for two over-sharers like us. So consider that remedied now that we’re over-spilling the beans in true Petersik fashion. Without further ado, here’s the first we-can’t-believe-we-haven’t-shared-it-yet thing. Our pantry: We’ve mentioned that we have a pantry-ish cabinet next to the wall oven in our kitchen… … but realized that

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Thrift Shopping In Delaware

Just as we did over Memorial Day, we used the long Labor Day weekend to squeeze in a few days at my parents’ beach house near Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was another trip full of family, food, and fun-slash-weird finds. And you know we love a good vacation/what-we-saw/what-we-bought post. And we actually bought two pretty big items that we’ve been trying to find for a while. Our weekend adventure actually began in Maryland. Specifically, here: It’s the Ole Sale Barn in Denton, MD. We’ve passed it countless times on our treks to the beach and have always been fascinated by it. The stars finally aligned on this trip (i.e. weather, holiday schedules, baby nap schedule)

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How To Make A Planked Wood Desk

So our built-in wall-to-wall desk already made some good progress this week with the painting and making-taller of our cabinets. But something was missing. Yes, remember the view from before? Yes, we were devoid a counter (aka, the desk top). John and I were actually quite indecisive about what to do when it came to that part. And whatever we did, we needed about thirteen feet of it (a length that we learned most kitchen counter suppliers wouldn’t even deliver since 12 feet was usually the max before you ended up with a seam). At first we considered ordering a legit kitchen counter top (maybe butcher block, maybe silestone, maybe this from Ikea – although

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Framing Out A Mirror That’s Mounted On A Door

Let’s talk about a mini makeover that involved a whole lot of hiccups. It was alllllll the way back in January that we decided that this mirror on our master bathroom door could stay (unlike the one on our guest bathroom door, which got the heave-ho since the person on the toilet could see THEIR ENTIRE BODY in it). But we figured the bedroom mirror could stay (since it doesn’t force you to stare at your reflection while on the porcelain throne) on the condition that we’d create a thicker frame around it to give it more presence so it looked less like one of those big flimsy $5 mirrors that you bring to college.

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Removing Weeds From Our Paver Driveway

Perhaps this screenshot of our old header will give you a hint as to what we tackled in this outdoor update (which is most likely number 7 of 582, since we like to tackle outdoor stuff in bite-sized stages so we don’t get too sore/overwhelmed or blow the budget)… Yup, that’s the Camellia tree that we first mentioned back in March (you guys actually helped us identify it). It’s a beautiful tree, but we’ve always bemoaned the fact that it was growing just inches (maybe even just one inch?) from our foundation… which made us tres nervous about permanent damage if we allowed it to stay. After showing it to a few plant expert friends

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Making A Big Double Desk With Secondhand Cabinets

The transformation of $6 hotel nightstands into a built-in-wall-to-wall-desk-for-two continues. If you recall, we last removed the hardware, sanded, and primed them all in preparation for painting them white. But before painting, we had to do a bit of construction (we needed to attach them in pairs and built them up about four inches so they’d be desk-height). And before doing any construction we decided we ought to look at them in the space first… … which is clearly something that we should’ve done sooner (but they’re darn heavy, so moving them back-and-forth isn’t fun – which is why we plopped them down in the sunroom and moved on to sanding and priming). Oh well,

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August Superlatives

It’s that time again! When we take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff, just because we’re over-sharers. This month felt especially busy for us, with everything from painting, organizing, building, rearranging, crafting, art-making, upholstering, light-fixture-ing, coding, ORBing (yes, it’s a category of its own), and breaking stuff. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives, because we’re strange birds. Most Illuminating: Clipping 320 clothespins in place to create our laundry room’s clothespin chandelier for our first ever Pinterest Challenge. Oh and

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Whew. Comment Explosion.

Who knew a half-baked banquette idea could bring on the chatter like that? Over 800 comments within a few hours time? Insanity. We’re loving all of the ideas and suggestions that you guys are throwing into the pot and promise to keep you posted every step of the way! There are definitely a lot more things to consider and nothing’s set in stone, so I think we’ll probably change our plan by the minute. But you know we’ll gab incessantly about it to anyone who’s willing to listen as we go. In the meantime, since I should be painting office cabinets (but haven’t had a second to tear myself away from the blog), I thought

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