Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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Refinishing Your Hardwood Floors: What To Expect

The new floors in our kitchen are easy to forget amidst all of the other big changes (a completely new layout! a wide doorway to the living room! new cabinets! new counters!). But every now and then we’re reminded that the floors are a HUGE reason that space – and heck, the entire first floor – feels so fresh, updated, and open. So we thought it might be helpful to recap the entire process, including time & cost, for anyone else who’s debating a similar upgrade. This before picture does a good job of demonstrating just how much of a difference the new floors have made. Yes, the photo below was taken from the same exact spot as the after shot

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Why We Returned Our Mail-Order Foam Mattress

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the last couple of years, you’re probably well aware of a new generation of mail-order mattresses: Casper. Leesa. Tuft & Needle (just to name a few). They’re these affordable foam mattresses that ship straight to your door, magically unfurl on your bed, and promise an improved night’s sleep or your money back. Having been bombarded with that message for months (years?) we decided to jump on the bandwagon… but quickly second-guessed our decision. And so the “Is this The One?” mattress spiral was born. Let me preface this by saying that I’ve been hesitant to write this post. We generally don’t like to spotlight products that don’t

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How To Make Long Reclaimed Wood Shelves

Long ago we promised more details about how we made the reclaimed wood shelves that we hung as part of our big kitchen remodel, so we’re finally back with every last measurement, stain method, and hanging tip. We hadn’t originally planned to put shelves there, but after our initial idea to display a large piece of art fell flat (literally – it felt like that wall needed more dimension) we turned our attention to shelves. Besides adding some storage for things in heavy rotation like drinking glasses (if you cycle through things fast enough they don’t have time to get dusty), Sherry has never met a shelf didn’t have fun accessorizing. Also, plants. Gotta love plants. These shiny

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How We Picked Our Beach House Color

Picking paint isn’t always easy, and boy did we have a hard time deciding on a beach house color. If you follow us on Instagram or Facebook, you probably saw us share a bunch of photoshopped options a few weeks ago that flashed by, slideshow-style, like this: And if you listen to our podcast, you’ve heard all about the house colors next door and the other factors that need to be taken into account (like not wanting to paint our original wood door, for example). All of that’s in Episode #28, which you can play below to get all caught up. Note: If you’re reading in a feed reader, you might have to click through to the post to

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2016 Rewind: Our Favorite Makeovers & Projects Of The Year

2016 was an interesting year, to say the least. Between starting a podcast, buying a beach house, creating a coloring book, and taking on various projects around here and beyond, well, there were lots of firsts. So we thought we’d end 2016 with a quick recap of the year’s highlights. Topping the list as our most memorable room makeover was this speedy space-themed bedroom update that we did for a local family whose young son Mason passed away suddenly (the bedroom that he shared with his older brother Hudson needed a refresh so that Hudson could work towards sleeping in there again). We’ve stayed connected to the family via Facebook, so they’ve been on our minds frequently throughout the year, and

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Behind The Scenes: Making A Coloring Book

Our coloring book has been out a couple of months now, and I realized we haven’t really talked about how it got made. I can’t say we ever really thought about how a coloring book is made, so finding ourselves in the middle of doing one was quite the surprise. In case you missed our previous mentions, Color at Home is an 80-page coloring book for adults, filled with everything from full room drawings, decorated vignettes, design mood boards, frameable art prints, and collections of things like pillows, chairs, and lighting. It’s $12.99, but places like Amazon have it for under $10 now (stocking stuffer alert!). We’ve got some peeks at it throughout this post, but you can

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Beach House Video Tour & Floor Planning

Thanks so much for all the sweet and excited comments over on IG & FB about our needs-lots-of-love beach house project (for anyone who’s like whaaaa??, here’s that post to get you up to speed). As promised, we’re back with the rundown on the floor plan, and what we’re currently thinking we’re going to do with it. Warning: we’ve been known to change our minds – so this is just the plan thus far. This house is like a giant iceberg that floated into our lives, and we are just at the tippy top of the thing, waddling around like excited penguins. But before we throw a bunch of floor plans your way, how about we

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We Bought A House!

But don’t worry – we’re not moving into this one. As we shared on this week’s podcast, we recently purchased a beach house (!!!). But it’s not the fancy, high roller version that the term “beach house” tends to evoke. Nope, this one’s nearly 100 years old and can best be described as the roughest, most in-need-of-help house that we’ve ever purchased, and it’s already proving to be one of our most challenging projects. (If you’d rather hear us gush about it informally, you can just press play below – and you can click here to learn how to subscribe for free.)  We’re in love with the potential and charm of this old home and its awesome

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Five Kitchen Remodel Mistakes That We Made (So You Don’t Have To!)

There are tons of decisions, measurements, plans (and change of plans!) that go into a kitchen remodel. So it’s usually unrealistic to assume that you’ll be able to navigate the entire thing without hitting a few speed bumps or having to course correct along the way (ten points for two driving related metaphors in one sentence!). And our journey was no exception – perhaps you already heard about our GIANT tile miscalculation on our podcast – so today we’re recapping five other mistakes that we made, noticed, and then fixed (some riiiight in the nick of time). You know, before they ate away at us for years on end as we stood in there giving them the stink eye. So if you’re

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Adding Built-In Bookshelves Around Our Living Room Doorway

It’s no secret by now that we love our new kitchen (you can see the full reveal here, and what’s inside our cabinets here). Buuuuuut there’s a feature just beyond the kitchen that competes pretty hard for our affection: the new built-in bookshelves around the doorway to our living room. They’re sort of an “homage” to the original built-in bookshelf that existed when we bought the house, just amped up and more balanced to fit our new open layout. And speaking of homages, you may have noticed that they’re not terribly far off from the original built-in bookshelves that came with our second house, which wrapped around the cased opening that separated our dining room and our office. And

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How We Organized Our Kitchen Cabinets & Drawers: A Video Tour

The kitchen post train is pulling into the station once again, this time with a look behind the scenes doors & drawers to show you what we put where. Where’s the trash? Where are the knives? What about that blender for my morning smoothies? Where’s all the dang food?  Well, all is about to be revealed. We even recorded a quick video tour since we loved this kitchen organization tour that Chris & Julia shared last year. But first, if you haven’t read the full kitchen reveal post from last week, I’d recommend hopping over there first. As happy as we are to have a better looking kitchen, a better functioning kitchen is really where its at. So even after deciding on a totally

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Kitchen Remodel Chapter #2: Gutting & Rebuilding

Hopefully, by now you heard that we redid our kitchen. We shared how we landed on a completely new layout last week. But moving things around on paper is one thing, so today we’re taking you through how things happened in real life – including how a certain wall came down to get that open view into our living room. This kitchen was our biggest renovation project to date, and it fell somewhere in the middle of the DIY spectrum. It wasn’t entirely hired out (like our first kitchen mostly was) and it wasn’t completely DIYed (like our second kitchen mostly was). For some tasks, we decided that minimizing time was more important, so hiring professionals was the best choice.

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