Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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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page and paint color/source page last week, we realized that the photos for a couple of rooms were already looking out of date.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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How Our Fireplace Makeover Plan Got Squashed (And How We Pivoted)

If you’ve followed along for a while you’ve seen our bedroom fireplace get a few updates over on Instagram Stories, but today we’re telling the whole sordid tale of how our update ideas recently veered off-course (and how we ended up at Plan B when Plan A went bust). Last time you saw it on the blog, it looked a little something like this: But we should rewind for a second. It was pretty bleak looking when we first started Operation Revive The Fireplace. There was a bunch of dried glue and gunk leftover from some tiles that had once covered the surround (not to mention a rusty screen and general grime). But Sherry had

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How We Store Everything In Our Much Smaller Kitchen

Last week we shared how we painted our cabinets, and today we’re taking you through the whole shebang of how they’re organized. This kitchen has around one 25% of the cabinetry/storage of our last one – and even we were a little nervous about how we’d adapt to significantly less countertop & cabinetry – but the spoiler alert is that it has been great! We can store everything we need and use – and things are pretty easy to grab (no digging behind a bunch of items to find something). So if you’ve been curious about this particular aspect of downsizing – or just like peeking inside other people’s cabinets – this post is for

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Our Freshly Painted Mauve Kitchen Cabinets (And A Trick For Using Hidden Hinges)

I never thought I would use the word “mauve” and “fresh” in the same sentence, but here we are. As you saw in our last kitchen post, we decided to embrace the existing counters and go for a tone-on-tone look for Phase One – just because why the heck not?! When else do you get mauve counters to work with? Note: you can read more on why we prefer to make smaller updates & live with the kitchen we have for a nice long time (versus gutting it right away) here. After doing five quick & easy updates to our kitchen that made a pretty big difference a few weeks back, we knew that painting

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A Before & After Look At Our (Only!) Bathroom

By now we’ve shown you every room in our new house, with the exception of this one: our bathroom! And as you’ve probably heard us say, it’s our home’s only bathroom (which has really not been a big deal so far at all – for which we’re extremely grateful). The funny thing is that although there’s only one, it wasn’t even functional when we bought the house. The sink vanity had been torn off the wall, the water was shut off to the entire house due to various leaks, and there was not a functioning sewer or septic system attached to the house at all. As in, even if the toilet flushed, it wouldn’t have

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#181: How The Other House We Considered Came Back Around

There were two houses in our neighborhood that we seriously considered, and today we’re sharing a truly random occurrence that involves the house we didn’t buy. We’re also sharing what we learned from our astrocartography readings. What did the stars say about our move to Florida? Were our readings dead-on or completely off? And what random sentence about a certain mammal made Sherry extremely excited? Plus the tale of a simple outdoor project that took months longer than it should have and the purchase that made us change our tune about outdoor furniture. Also, Sherry did something embarrassing again. What’s New Here’s a look at our new fence that we had installed between us and the

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Five Quick & Easy Updates To Our Kitchen

Quick note: if you missed the update to last week’s post that went up a few days after it was originally published, you can catch up on that here. When we moved in one of the subcontractors said they’d been wondering why we didn’t tear out the old cabinets and mismatched appliances and pink laminate counters and redo the kitchen before we moved in. But if you’ve followed us for a while, you know the answer. We like to live with a kitchen for a nice long time before changing the layout or doing any major upgrades like replacing the cabinets or counters (in our last house we waited three years for our big renovation).

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How We Painted A Colorful Abstract Wall Mural (UPDATED!)

Last week we showed you how most of our daughter’s room has come together so far, and today we’ve got all the details about one wall that you didn’t see – along with an update to this post as it originally appeared because there was a second phase of the mural inspired by our ten-year-old just a few days after publishing this! So we took some updated pictures & added the details below for you. It was one of the most fun and impactful painting projects we’ve done in a while. And it was extremely budget-friendly too. As you saw in last week’s post, we were able to vault the ceilings in this room (this

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How To Make A DIY Channel Tufted Headboard (& How Our Daughter’s Room Is Coming Along)

After using our favorite method to make a simple headboard for our son’s room last week, we actually had enough leftover materials to try out a new trick in our daughter’s room – which yielded a completely free headboard for her. Three cheers for $0 projects, right? Especially since she helped us settle on the design and make it, so it’s not only cozy to lean back on (you know that function is my love language), but she’s also super into the finished result because she had a hand in it. Literally. Before we dive into that how-to, we realized you haven’t seen how her room has shaped up since we moved in. In case

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DIY Headboard + Custom Bookshelf = Cozy Built-in Kids Bed

Now that we’ve checked off the basic needs in each of our bedrooms (you know like beds, window coverings, clothing storage, etc), we’ve shifted our focus towards… adding even more function (hello, I’m John “Practical” Petersik). Last week we shared the current state of our bedroom and today we have a few projects that we did to make our son’s room work a lot harder for him. We still have some plans to bring in more color, pattern, and fun – but things have definitely gotten a lot comfier & more convenient in here in the past few weeks. For reference, this is what his room looked like when we first laid eyes on the

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