Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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A Simple DIY Outdoor Plant Shelf To Disguise Ugly Utility Boxes

When we shared pictures of our front porch last fall, we said that our decorating strategy out here was basically “plants and more plants.” It helps visually connect the porch to all of the greenery surrounding our house and – as we’ll show you today – it’s also helping us hide some less-than-pretty parts of this outdoor area. Let’s call them wall warts. Three large rectangular wall warts. But more on that in a second. First let’s travel back in time to what this all looked like last February when we put an offer in on this house (that’s our realtor in the photo below) As you can see, we’ve already come quite a long

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How To Hang An Outdoor Daybed (On Video!)

Last week we shared how we built the DIY outdoor hanging daybed that we installed on our front porch. And as promised, I’m back to share how we hung it since, if you’re like me, hanging things that are meant to support the full weight of a human body (or two!) can make you a little nervous. It was actually extremely easy to do. So easy that we did it more than once (ha!) so that it resulted in the smoothest and most non-tipsy sway possible (our first hanging attempt made it tip forward and backwards a bit, which wasn’t ideal). Thankfully the second attempt worked like a charm. Plus it meant we could document

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How To Build An Outdoor Hanging Daybed

Back in October we mentioned our plans to add a hanging daybed to the covered portion of our front porch and our entire family couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally done. Hanging daybeds like this are super popular in our area, and we’ve always had a soft spot for them. Is there anything better than reading/napping outside on a lazy Saturday afternoon? One of the Airbnbs that we stayed at in Costa Rica last January had one that pretty much cemented our feeling that they’re just about the perfect outdoor lounge spot. Sherry and our daughter spent hours there, each leaning up against a side arm with their legs extended towards each other, reading

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How We Built An Easy Modern Fireplace Mantel… Just In Time For Stockings!

We mentioned in this year’s holiday decorating post that we wanted to get some sort of fireplace mantel built this month and, well, Santa delivered! ::pats self on back:: Yes, setting a goal to have a place for hanging our kids’ stockings is a little random, but we were happy to have the motivation to check this project off our list sooner rather than later. If you recall, our fireplace looked like this when we moved in: Here’s a wider shot of that area right after we got here, just for kicks. Ah, those packing blankets as curtains are #MEMORIES. So yeah… it feels good to be here: Sherry did some work to freshen it

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Has Downsizing Been What We Expected?

Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way. This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you

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How We Added Some Much-Needed Storage To Our Smaller Home

Downsizing from 3200 square feet to 1400 means storage is a big deal to us these days, and a couple of weeks ago we got two major upgrades in that department. We still have some “hacking” to do to the simple Ikea cabinets that we bought, but we’re stupidly giddy over just having them assembled and installed. They basically add up to 8 more large cabinets worth of storage – and our kitchen only has 7 cabinets, so the excitement was palpable when those flat-packed boxes arrived (they had about a 4 week wait time, but otherwise delivery was smooth and uneventful for those wondering how the ordering experience was during this time period). They

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Our Front Porch: Big Plans & Even Bigger Plants

It has been about five months since we first introduced you to the outside of our house. That was our very first week of living here, and our outdoor spaces have been getting a lot of use ever since. You’ve already seen how our second-story deck has come together, so today we wanted to update you on our front porch as well as the covered area that we call the side porch and some new landscaping that we’ve added too. We’ve made some functional and organizational improvements, some strictly aesthetic enhancements, and have some other upgrades that are still in the works. So won’t you join us on the front porch? Here’s how it’s looking

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How We Installed A Stair Runner

Sherry recently hinted on Instagram Stories that we were up to our old staple-coloring antics. And by that I mean we were installing another stair runner (admittedly one of the less popular definitions of “antics”). But after installing one in our old house 7 years ago it has become one of our favorite projects – just because we truly believe anyone can do it, and whatever runner you choose can give you a totally different look (and a nice grip underfoot, but more on that functional upgrade in a minute). Why We Wanted A Stair Runner Before we get into the “how” of adding this runner, let’s talk about the “why.” We’re not people who

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A Colorful Planked Wall Treatment For Our Son’s Room

Hoo boy, today’s post has all the good stuff: murder, mystery, INTRIGUE! Just kidding it actually has none of that. But it does have a riveting step-by-step tutorial that involves ten test pots of paint and a whole lot of lattice. So let’s get right into how we created this colorful wood wall treatment in our son’s room. Last time you saw this room in July, we had installed this easy upholstered headboard and built-in bookshelf. It made his room so much more functional (and extra cozy), but we mentioned that we were all looking forward to adding some more color & personality in there for him over time – especially on that wall at

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Our Low-Maintenance, Multi-Function Deck Space

In addition to our 1400 square feet of indoor space, we’re lucky that our house also has some pretty great outdoor spaces – including a large second-story deck off of our family room. Having all of this bonus living space up in the trees has quickly become one of the “rooms” we’re most thankful for, and you’ll see why in this post. It was raining when we bought the house back in February so we didn’t spend much time out here, but you may remember this before photo that we shared along with all of the exterior before & afters back in May. You know, before we painted the house and replaced all of the

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We’re Finally Taking Advantage Of Our Tall Ceilings!

While putting together our house’s before & after page and paint color/source page last week, we realized that the photos for a couple of rooms were already looking out of date. One notable example was our upstairs family room, which has gotten a few important additions since we first shared it back in July. Can you spot them? Probably the most prominent update is the addition of this oversized capiz globe light that has literally been in Sherry’s mood boards and Pinterest pages for years. It’s probably one of Serena & Lily’s most well-known designs, but we’ve never had a spot where it made sense (or could fit!). That is until we found ourselves owning

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Befores, Afters, and Sources For Our Current House… So Far, At Least

We had other plans for this week’s post, but then Hurricane Sally made her way ever-so-slowly through the gulf and gave us a few solid days of rain, rain, and more rain. Thankfully it was nothing more than that (no power lost, and no flooding for us), which has us feeling incredibly grateful – and we hope everyone who was more directly affected is safe and their homes are ok. Since we couldn’t take the outdoor photos we had planned for an exterior update this week, we realized we should build two blog pages that had been sorely missing for the last, oh, four months. So to everyone who has been asking for those, we

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