Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for June 2013

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Fab Freebie: Fix It

Happy (ever so slightly belated) Father’s Day everyone! To honor all those guys (and gals) out there who have that intrinsic need to fix things, we’re giving away some tools this week. And they’re coming from some folks who know a thing or two about fixing stuff: eReplacementParts.com. They’re a great resources for the parts, materials, and even the how-to when it comes to repairing your tools. So this week’s winner will get their choice of two of these three DeWALT tools: a circular saw, a jigsaw or a hammer drill.  That’s over $300 worth of DIY bounty! And since last week’s debut of Rafflecopter was so well received (thanks guys! It saved us just

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How To Remove An Old Sliding Shower Door

Don’t eat while you read this. Seriously, don’t. This is the story of removing the sliding shower doors in our bathroom. It was one of those can’t-do-this-soon-enough tasks that was at the top of our list. Not only did they enclose the tub in a way that a soft white fabric curtain wouldn’t, they had seen better days. So there were lines of rust around them… … and pretty impressive amounts of caulk that seemed to be holding them together. Plus their height was oddly low, so John hit his head (not once but twice) while climbing in. Fool him once, shame on the shower doors – fool him twice, shame on John. Here’s a

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How To Add Some Office Organization

Our office looked like this when we first laid eyes on the house. Then it looked like this on moving day.  And here’s what it looks like about a week and a half into living here. On one hand, it doesn’t look THAT crazy. I mean there could be a llama standing in the middle of the rug eating popcorn. But on the other hand, this room has a LONG way to go before it’s functional for two working adults (yup, we currently only have one desk going on). And the whole all-furniture-against-the-wall-with-a-little-round-rug-in-the-middle thing is a little weird. As for what we’re envisioning down the line, we’d love to have some sort of double desk

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Twelve Steps For Installing Hardwood Floors

After excitedly declaring “the hardwood floors are done!” just in time to move in, we got a bunch of requests for a follow up post with details about the “tricky stuff” like how we handled transitions, cutting boards shorter, cutting them thinner, how we addressed the top of the stairs, and how long it all took. So let’s dive back into floor world for a second. The entire floor-laying process took us about 6 days from the placing of the first board to the nailing of the final strip of quarter round. Sherry was able to help me for some of those days, but other days were just me myself and I while Sherry was

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New Pad, Still Glad

Amidst all the moving madness, we’re still taking our once-a-month pause to show how grateful we are to the sponsors who help make all of our other posts possible. So feel free to check out some things that caught our eye this month, and peruse our usual round-up of discounts at the bottom of the post: Fun finds on discount site Fab.com, like this Bongo side table / basket storage. Royal Design Studio‘s new Khanjali Ikat stencil. You know we love a good ikat… Boutique decal collections at WallQuotes, like their selection of monograms. Shades of Light‘s summery striped rugs like this large scale aqua chevron. Lots of stuff in the Bright & Bold sale

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Our House Hunting Must-Have List

Since we shared our house wish list back in the fall of 2010, we wanted to document what was on the list now (I just found it scrunched up in a vase that was sitting on the bedroom floor, naturally). It’s actually the same list  – we just scribbled things out as they changed and added new things as time passed (even when we weren’t house hunting, if we thought of something for our “someday house” we jotted it down whenever we came across the list). Not surprisingly, many things were the same – although it does seem that after 7 years of home-ownership our nice-to-have list grew a lot (I guess since we keep

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Fourteen New Interior Door Knob Options

Right before we installed the hardwood floors upstairs, we mentioned how we sprayed all of the blue trim and doors upstairs here… … but they’re now naked when it comes to knobs. We’re no strangers to ORBing things like we did here, but a lot of the doors here were rusted and pitted and some were even jammed/didn’t turn/didn’t lock. So in this case, it really makes sense for us to replace them with something befitting of our freshly painted six panel doors. On one hand, it was a bummer to have to shell out loot for new knobs, but on the other hand the doors are in awesome shape and look like new with

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Fab Freebie: Office Space

UPDATE: We’ve selected a winner below (Congrats Bridget!) but we also wanted to share that Kacy has another prize for everyone – a $5 coupon code (5OFFYHL)to use towards a purchase of The Inspired Office Poster. Enjoy! Moving is just about the antithesis of feeling organized. Which is why we’ve lined up this giveaway from Kacy at The Inspired Office. She’s a professional organizer who specializes in turning your space into a functional, productive, and (dare we say it) pretty place as part of her virtual video consultation called The Blueprint. And speaking of pretty, she has taken nuggets of organizing wisdom from over 12 years of doing this and put them on a stylin’

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Furnishing Our Living Room With Our Ikea Sofa

So… the living room. First it looked like this: Then it looked like this: Then it looked like this: And now it looks like this: Although the salmon pink walls, orange-brown bricks, and all of that dark wood trim & paneling is a far cry from our vision for this room down the line (we keep changing our minds, but today we’re dreaming of something like this for the brick, coffered ceilings like this, and this for the paneling someday) it definitely feels a lot homier already. You know, with a couch to sit on instead of a pile of non-sit-on-able furniture. Oh and we shared this picture on Instagram/FB a few nights back, but

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Our Last Day In Our Second House

We love being able to look back at the empty photos of our first house, because while they’re definitely bittersweet, it’s so much fun to reminisce. They’re a great reminder that a house is only a house, and it’s the moments that you’ve shared with the people (and the chihuahuas) that you love that really make it a home. So we wasted no time snapping empty photos of our second house. And although I thought “without furniture all these rooms will pretty much look the same” the funny thing is that none of them do. So it’s nice to know that we left our mark on this sweet home of ours. Here’s the dining room/office

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Other Houses We Looked At Before Buying Our New One

Back when we were house hunting in 2010 we shared a series of posts that each profiled a different house that we looked at (you can see them here, here, here, here, and here). And even though our hunt is over this time around, we wanted to revisit 9 other houses that we casually toured (many of them just on Open House days) before we met The One. So we had fun driving around snapping pictures for you and reminiscing (“That was the one with the phone in the bathroom!” “That was the one with the family of deer in the backyard!”). The Lake House: The first house was very modest in size and located

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