Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for July 2012

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What We Registered For When We Got Married

Q: Hey guys!! I find that I often look to you all on things DIY related, but more often than not, on things life related. I would love to hear items in or around your house that you are so glad you own because it helps with the day to day. I really enjoyed reading about how you saved money with Clara (what items you skipped out on or decided to go back and buy) and how you saved money with your wedding. I am getting married next June and it would be super helpful to hear what things my fiance and I should register for (and what we shouldn’t). You guys are my favorite!

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How To Build The Base Of A Deck

“Can’t we just lay some decking already?!” That quote’s an homage to this kitchen post from last December about all of the little annoying prep steps we had to squeeze in before we could get down to painting cabinets – and I feel like we just hit the same stage in the deck project. Which means we’re making progress, but we’re impatient little DIYers. After getting all of the joists set in place we were soooo excited to finally lay down the decking… until I realized I had a bunch of nitty gritty details to take care of first. Womp womp. But not to worry, you’ll actually see decking going down at the end of

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Fab Freebie: All That’s Fit To Print

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** And our random winner is… Robyn R (who’s in luck because her fantasy printer prints photos – which she says would save her so much money). Looks like your dream is about to come true, Robyn. Congrats! Having a wireless printer is one of our favorite tricks to keeping our office looking put together (well, if you ignore the messy stacks of paper on our desk). So we jumped at Epson’s offer to give away one of their most versatile new models – the $499 Epson Stylus Photo R2000. It’s built for creative types, not just because its 8-ink process shoots out glossy archival prints

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How To Paint An Old Egg Chair

I have officially hatched my evil egg chair plan (mwah-hah-hah). Sorry, couldn’t resist an ovum-related pun. Anyway the $30 thrift store can’t-believe-it’s-mine egg chair that I mentioned late last week got cleaned up, first with a nice liquid deglosser wipe down, and then with some spray primer + spray paint. About ten minutes after I snapped this grody before photo with the old cushion on it in our sunroom… … I had him out in the yard ready for a little somethin-somethin. Although the orangey-wood tone above doesn’t actually look bad in the picture, in person he just looked dated and a bit dilapidated (thanks to the caning that was missing on both sides of

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A Green & Gray Living Room

It all started when I was going back through old posts looking for a link to something when I came across this old forgot-about-it mood board of yore. It was made about a month before we moved into our second house (back in 2010) and featured this board with the words “we have no idea what our future living room will actually look like, but today this is what I’m loving.” I thought it was pretty funny that 20 months later, after completely forgetting about making it, we have lots of gray and green going on, and even specifically have a big gray sectional, a green rug, and the exact same zebra pillows (scored about

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Updating A Bathroom With Marble Tile & Beadboard

When we opened this reader email, our first thought was that someone had stolen photos of our guest bathroom and just adjusted the color to turn our yellow tiles green. Seriously, how similar are they (our yellow guest bathroom is here on our house tour page)? But it turns out Susanne was just lucky enough to have a real-life green-tiled bathroom of her very own. Here’s her letter. Hi John & Sherry! We just completed a total DIY renovation of our 1956 en-suite bath. Prior to the renovation, the bathroom looked a lot like your yellow bathroom…. lovely green tile up to your eyeballs (well, your eyeballs when you’re 5’2″). Three different patterns of green

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Buying A Thrift Store Egg Chair

I have been obsessed with egg chairs for at least a decade since seeing this hanging one in Domino magazine back in college and this guy from Marie Claire Maison (their French house-related magazine) who has also been in my desktop inspiration folder for at least five years. So as you can imagine, every time I’m in a thrift store I’m on the eternal egg chair hunt. I dream of hanging one in our sunroom next to the daybed for Clara (or me) to swing around in without killing ourselves. Not sure if we can handle it, but the universe has taken some safety measures and insured that every time I look I have no

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Window Shopping: Beachy Shops & Thrift Stores

Last week I promised a post about all the window shopping slash actual shopping that we did during our week at the beach with the fam. And that includes the two items we actually purchased: the whale sign for Clara’s room (made from wood, a five year anniversary material)… … and the thrift store basket that I’d love to turn into a hanging pendant somewhere in our house (more on those items here). But I owe you guys the rest of the eye candy that we perused, so here we go. As we mentioned, we stopped at the Ole Sale Barn in Maryland where we found the L-turned-7 in our office last Labor Day. And that’s

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Painting The Bedroom Rockport Gray

The deed is done! Rockport Gray is all up in this hizzy. We love how much more things like the extra thick crown molding and the trim around the doors and windows pops now that the color is deeper and more… sleepy? Can you describe a bedroom color that way? In love. It’s such a mutating color. Sometimes it looks lighter and grayer. And sometimes it looks moodier and more mocha. We think it looks especially good with our cheap-o Ikea curtains (Vivan panels for $9 a pop) and other crisp white things, like this old side table from our first house’s den and the white lamp shade on our floor lamp. So yeah, we

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Fab Freebie: A Splash Of Color

*** This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** After quite a color-filled few days here on YHL, random.org has selected our winner as… Daffodil (whose kitchen gets almost zero natural light, so she painted it a cheerful bright yellow). Congrats! And I think we have an idea of what color sink you might be choosing… Jonathan Adler has been a big inspiration to us lately, especially as we learn to embrace more color in this house than our first one. And as excited as we were by his new color-filled collaboration with Kohler, we were even MORE excited when Kohler agreed to give one of you a new kitchen sink and faucet

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Finding The Perfect Medium Gray Wall Color

Yup, we went for it. We slapped up two paint colors that we love (and already had on hand) in our bedroom to see if darker walls (which is something John that has been campaigning for over the last few months) is the way to go. Remember when we poorly photoshopped it a while back? Except picture it more brown-gray, like a putty color (instead of blue-gray), since there are plenty of colors in the rug and the bedding already. We tried one of our favorite smoky gray colors (Gray Horse by Benjamin Moore) which is under the chair rail in the office and also tried the darker and moodier color that’s more of a

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A Dreamy White & Gray Bathroom With Box Molding

Okay, so maybe the red bathroom Melissa and Ian inherited with their house isn’t bad enough to deserve a nod to The Shining, but it was pretty killer on the eyes. Fortunately they remedied things with an awesome redo that they sent our way. Here’s their letter: Hi John and Sherry! We bought our second home up north in good ‘ole Canada in April of 2011 and started our DIY magic – or whatever you wanna call it ;) So far we’ve done 2 bathrooms, an office, a guest room, and our bedroom and I still feel like we have tons to do (I’m sure you know the feeling). However, we’re really happy with how

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