Young House Love

Home Decorating, DIY Tutorials, & Shenanigans

Posts By John Petersik

John Petersik is one half of the duo behind the award-winning home improvement and do-it-yourself design blog, Young House Love. Together, he and his wife Sherry have renovated seven homes, published two New York Times Bestselling books, and designed products sold in Target and Home Depot. They are currently enjoying their downsized home on Florida's Gulf Coast with their two kids and their dog, Penny.

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4 People + 1 Bathroom: How & Why It Works For Us

Any time we mention having only one bathroom it spawns a flurry of interest in our Instagram DMs about how we manage that with our four-person family. Although we’re definitely not intrepid for having this setup in any way (so many families in the US & abroad live a wonderful life in a smaller home with one bathroom), and we also have an outdoor shower that we can use almost year-round (which definitely takes the pressure off of our single indoor bathroom), there’s a surprising amount of curiosity around the topic. So we’re here to break down why it has worked so well for our family and what we’ve done to make it extra efficient

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How To Make An Ikea Pax Wardrobe Look Built-In (Plus A Bedroom Closet Update!)

Raise your hand if you remember how much closet space our bedroom had when we moved in. The answer is zero. We used dressers for a while (and borrowed the tiny closet in our son’s room for our hanging stuff) and eventually added some floor-to-ceiling Ikea Pax wardrobes to our bedroom after about 10 months, which felt like we had arrived. A bedroom closet is so nice to have. And – big news! – as of writing this post, we’ve added another Ikea wardrobe to that wall… which means we have just as much storage in our current bedroom as we had in our last house’s FANCY WALK-IN CLOSET! I know. It’s downright mind-blowing. For

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How (And Why!) We Fit A King-Size Bed Into Our Smaller Bedroom

This is a meandering journey of a post, so make yourself comfortable. We mentioned in this side table post that we traded our queen-size bed for a bigger king-size one. The reason might seem obvious – because it’s bigger, duh! But we happily sailed through over 17 years together without ever wanting one. So why the sudden about-face last fall? Well, it essentially boiled down to: “the things we do for our dog” (more on that in a second). We also had to carefully plan how we’d squeeze the biggest bed we’ve ever owned into our smaller bedroom. And we had a big realization about larger furniture in a smaller house in the process (it’s

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How We Protected Our Plants From Freezing Temperatures

Last month’s arctic blast brought surprisingly frigid temperatures to Florida. We had three consecutive nights with temperatures in the low 20s – and an ultimate low of around 18 degrees! A lot of our outdoor plants aren’t built for that kind of freezing weather (in the 3 winters we’ve spent here we can remember one other low of about 32-degrees, but things went right back up to our more normal lows of around 45 degrees within a few hours). They’re calling our recent deep freeze a “once-in-a-century event” here in Florida. In other words: the ultimate test. So here are the steps we took to protect our plants, including a few things that worked better

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5 Ways We Prevented Frozen Pipes in Florida

We thought frozen pipes were a worry we’d left behind by moving to Florida, but last month’s arctic blast sent our temperatures plummeting into the low 20s for three nights in a row (with an all-time low of 18 degrees, which they’re calling a once-in-a-century event here in Northwest, FL). This was especially concerning because Florida homes in our area aren’t always constructed with this weather in mind. Frozen pipes are bad news because water expands when it freezes, potentially causing pipes to burst or crack, leading to leaking or flooding. Luckily, with a few easy prevention steps we successfully kept our pipes from freezing! Which, sadly, isn’t something a lot of our neighbors can

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The Rooms We Don’t Miss After Downsizing (And The Ones We Do)

Sherry’s post a few months ago about what furniture & decor we still own after downsizing was the first time I’d looked back at photos of our previous house in a while. It was a fun walk down memory lane (how has it been 2.5 years since we moved?!). It also jogged my memory about how much “extra house” we used to have. As in, full rooms that were so under-utilized that I’d almost forgotten about them! Don’t get me wrong: we loved that house. But, as you know, it was a much bigger house than we realized we needed (spending an entire summer in our smaller pink beach house really clarified that for us

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Creating Custom Storage With Ikea Bestas

Want to turn simple store-bought cabinets into custom built-ins? “Hacking” something that’s already made is so much easier than building something from scratch, and it can look really custom in the end. Built-in storage is universally helpful (especially in a smaller home – but really, anywhere), and things like the floor-to-ceiling closets in our bedroom, the desk & bookcase we added to our son’s room, and the wall-to-wall media cabinet in our family room have made such a difference. But one built-in that we’ve barely mentioned since we added and upgraded them are the Ikea Bestas flanking our fireplace: The good news is that it took just a few fairly easy steps to make them

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Are Robot Vacuums Worth It? Why We Changed Our Mind.

We owned a Roomba robot vacuum almost a decade ago because it sounded so good in theory. Something that does the vacuuming for you while you sit on the couch? Sign me up. But in reality, we had SO MANY ISSUES with it. It was extremely loud, frequently got stuck, and didn’t cover many areas before the battery died. Did I mention it always got stuck? It felt like babysitting someone who was poorly vacuuming to the point that our time was better spent actually doing the vacuuming. We finally ended up selling it on Craigslist. So imagine our surprise to now be declaring that we actually LOVE having a robot vacuum and the technology

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Adding Outdoor Storage To Our Kitchen Porch

I’ll start this post with a confession: I resented our kitchen porch when we finished it last fall. Resent is a strong and, admittedly, strange word to use for a porch. But I’ll explain it later on in this post. The good news is that I no longer harbor any ill will toward it. In fact, it has become one of the spaces I’m most grateful to have in our smaller home. Especially after some functional additions that we’ve made to it over the last year since you saw it. I love this space so much, that I’m actually writing this post from it right now. Call it Method Blogging. I’m fully immersed in my

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How We Built Modern Wood Nightstands From Butcher Block

For the first time in our lives, after four decades of living on this planet, we’ve upgraded to a king sized bed! We’ll get more into whys and hows in an upcoming post (it’s both bigger and significantly lower) and we see the obvious irony of owning a bigger bed in our smaller house – but let’s just summarize it as: “the things we do for our dog.” You’ve also probably heard this before, but sometimes the way to feel like you’re living large in a smaller space is with fewer larger furniture pieces (as opposed to a bunch of small dollhouse-scaled furnishings). There’s such a luxury to having a nice long 90″ sofa upstairs,

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Our Favorite Toilet (Yes, We Have A Favorite)

You know you’ve left your mark on the world when people quote you in the pages of Time magazine or you get interviewed by Oprah. But what does it mean if one of your top google results is “young house love toilet” (true story)? And up until now, searching that term on our blog didn’t really lead you anywhere helpful (Sherry talks a lot about our favorite toilet mostly on IG Stories). So if that’s the rabbit hole that led you to our blog and you typed in those infamous words, this post will now have you and all of your toilet-related queries covered. Our favorite toilet is the Kohler Memoirs Elongated Toilet (sometimes also

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How We Upgraded A Utility Closet By Adding Tons Of Functional Storage

Today we’re talking about the stock market! Just kidding. Exactly as the title suggests, we’re going to show you how we earned some really useful extra storage in our new kitchen by upgrading a formerly VERY PACKED utility closet. It used to basically just have a water heater and an HVAC system in it without much room for anything else, and now there’s, say it with me… so much room for activities. Ok, not for like cartwheels, but significantly more room to store stuff than before. Like maybe 500% more. Really. If you watched our drawer-by-drawer kitchen organization video, you already got a peek at what we have going on in there, but today we’re

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