Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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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How To Paint Your Garage Door & Utility Box

Do you guys ever get those irrational worries about how your house looks right before hosting a party? Leading up to Clara’s birthday on Saturday I was thinking random stuff like “I really should touch up some of the caulk in the sunroom before everyone comes over” like anyone would notice. And Sherry said “the patio table could use a fresh coat of paint” was running through her head when we were using a tablecloth anyway. But one thing that never crossed our minds was: “The back door is in pretty rough shape. Maybe we should do something about it before IT BECOMES THE PLACE WHERE KIDS PLAY WITH BUBBLES FOR HOURS.” Oh well. The

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Playing (Show)House

Before the Homearama show concluded this weekend, we slipped through on Friday with Teddy strapped into our baby carrier (Clara was with the grandparents) so we could check out the homes with visitors in them. It was fun to chat with show-goers, see our pantry getting filled up with food donations, and we even spotted a note someone left us on a notepad in the girl’s room of our house. But perhaps the most exciting thing we got to see in person was the People’s Choice Award that our house won! The votes were very close, and all of the other homes were so well done. It’s hard to put into words how much we’ve

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Beautiful Outdoor Spaces At The Showhouse

There are a few outdoor showhouse spaces that we haven’t shown at all in this entire yearlong process. Each of the seven showhouses were encouraged to include some fun outdoor spaces as well as indoor ones, so aside from the stuff you can see from the curb, there’s also a back porch and a back patio complete with a stone fireplace. The cool thing about these outdoor spaces is that they’re the places that we got to put our heads together with the builder and the architect the most – and they ended up being some of our favorites. The craziest thing is that our house won 1st place (i.e. the “Gold Award”) for both

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How To Make Planting Beds With Mulch

Let’s talk about planning planting beds, digging them out to crisp up the edges, spreading a truckload of mulch, and other fun curb appeal delights. Yes, with Clara’s birthday party coming up this weekend (more on that another day) we’ve been trying to give our landscaping a little attention. Mother Nature has done her job by cranking the greenery to eleven, so we’ve done some work to further improve the view from our front porch. And from this post title, you can probably guess what I’m talking about. Let’s hot tub time machine our way back to last summer (after all, there is no classier way to time travel) when most of our plant beds

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House Crashing: The Whole Show

For the last few weeks you guys have been requesting a House Crashing post with photos of the other six Homearama homes in the show, so we slipped through and snapped a bunch of pictures of each house, just like we did for this Homearama House Crash from 2012 (that’s your warning that this post is extremely image-heavy). Everyone who has attended the show so far seems to have different favorites, which is definitely part of the fun (there’s a “people’s choice” award that everyone who passes through can vote for, and each of the seven boxes have a ton of papers in them). All of the houses in the show sit on a cul-de-sac

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Fab Freebie: Cone And Get It

Who wants $500 to Pine Cone Hill for a little bedding refresh? They make everything from duvets and sheets to pillows, poufs, and even placemats – and they come in classic and neutral patterns or punchy colorful prints (like the Parama Diamond pattern we used in the showhouse’s master bedroom). Their site has styles grouped into categories like “Haute Lodge” and “Cape Calm” to help you find the perfect combo, or of course you can go rogue and mix-and-match from different sets. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up below this paragraph). This giveaway is available to residents of the US

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The Kitchen & Living Room In The Showhouse

Happy May and, well, Happy Opening Day of Homearama! Yep, our showhouse is officially open to the public as of today, along with the six others in the show. Deepbreathsdeepbreaths. Since we last showed you the office, butler’s pantry, and main bedroom (along with the en-suite bathroom & closet) and then took a pause to have a baby, let’s pick back up in the main living spaces of the house: the living room & the kitchen – which you can see from the floor plan below are both pretty big zones on the first floor. The walls in both the living room and the kitchen are Simply White, and then we layered in some colorful

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Fab Freebie: Peel The Love

Got a wall that’s looking kinda plain? Well, the people at WallsNeedLove have an answer in the form of $500 to spend on their site (and it’s open to anyone in the world!). They’ve got a whole slew of decal and vinyl designs to romance your space (and everything’s removable if you ever want to change things up). In addition to cool patterns and shapes in their decal design packs, they’ve also got wallpaper, prints, and even an “Easy Stripe” solution where you can customize the size and color for any stripe pattern that you can dream up. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it

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How To Make A Deck Gate

Today we’re going to show you how we constructed an easy DIY deck gate to help keep our dog Burger from escaping. He loves laying in the sun out there, but we wanted an affordable and attractive way to stop him from running off after a squirrel or something. We also have a newborn and a toddler, so the gate will help with them too. And the whole thing only took a couple of hours and cost us less than $30! We don’t have a fence on our property, and he has gotten more brazen lately and may even wander into the neighbor’s yard. So far our solution has been this very classy plywood boards

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How To Seal Ardex Concrete Counters

Thanks for all the kind words on Teddy’s arrival last week. We’re home now and settling into life as parents to a newborn again (anyone have tips for getting one to sleep between the hours of 10pm and 4am?), so we’ll definitely be on a lighter schedule, but one project that we rushed to check off the to-do list around 48 hours before Teddy was born was finally sealing our kitchen’s recently Ardexed counters. We’ve shared a few other “how to seal” tutorials (like this one about de-hazing & sealing tile, this one about sealing grout, and this one about sealing cork) so here’s what we settled on for protecting our Ardex counters. We read

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Fab Freebie: The Hook Up

HEADS UP! Since baby boy is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, we’re spending some special family time with Clara today. So we’re posting this week’s giveaway early, and hope to stop in later this week (maybe on Thursday?) to officially introduce our little man. But back to the freebie. This week we’re hooking three people from anywhere in the world up with a $500 Target gift card along with a complete set of our hooks (you can see them all here) in the finish of their choosing. I feel like this is the part where I should bust out an Oprah-esque “You get an octopus! You get an octopus!” but it just doesn’t have the same

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A Tour Of The Showhouse Bathroom & Closet

Continuing our showhouse-heavy week of reveals, we’re bringing you a bunch of after photos from three more spaces – the main bedroom’s en-suite bathroom, its attached closet, and cool little atrium space. We showed you the main bedroom on Tuesday (along with the office and the butler’s pantry) so it only felt natural to continue our virtual tour where we left off. The attached bath and closet sit off a corner of the main bedroom and are separated by a space that we’ve been lovingly calling the “atrium” (it’s really more of a vestibule) which you can see above on the right side. Here’s the floor plan for a clearer map of how that area

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