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 Replace An Ugly Doorbell

Which eyesores? The wicked ones in our hallway of course. Because if we were going through all of the trouble to install board and batten, we didn’t want a blah light fixture, a dingy old ceiling vent, and a gaudy doorbell stinking up the view. So here’s an overdue rundown of those other little updates that you might have noticed in last week’s big board & batten reveal (while we steadily add crown molding to the playroom, guest room, and this very hallway – which we can’t wait to share!). Although updating the light fixture, the doorbell, and the ceiling vent sound small-ish in size, they definitely were detracting from the view. So those little

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Fab Freebie: Bestå Friends

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And our lucky-slash-friendly winner this week is… Jennifer M (whose best friend is her husband. They met in college studying architecture together and now work together). Congrats! If you saw that title above and thought “oh, like the Bestå media storage system from Ikea” instead of “typo alert!” then you may be just as into the fine purveyor of flat-packaged Swedish furniture as we are. And if you’re not the only Ikea lover in your circle of friends, then you’ll be happy to learn that this Saturday on March 9th Ikea is celebrating BYOF (Bring Your Own Friend) day as part of their

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How To Install Crown Molding

Feeling too nervous to install crown molding yourself? We were too. But we just installed crown molding in our daughter’s bedroom and it was surprisingly cheap to pull off (less than $100!) and easy to execute. *PATS SELF ON BACK*. All it takes is the right tools and some attention to detail. So let me back up, tell you how I did it, and explain why installing crown molding went from one of my most dreaded projects to one I’ll surely be doing again. Steps To Install Crown Molding We’ll provide a more detailed photo and video tutorial below, but here are the basic steps to installing crown molding in any room: Adding Crown Molding:

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Board & Batten For Less Than $60

Yesterday you saw how our board and batten project came out for the Pinterest Challenge, so today we’re back with the full tutorial shebang. And hold onto your safety goggles, it’s 2,000 words long. But don’t let all the words fool you, we’d say that this was one of the biggest bang-for-you-buck / most fool-proof ways to make an easy upgrade that we’ve encountered in a while. Wow, just realized I’m five sentences into this and I’ve already said “bang” twice. Not sure if that’s a good sign or what… We had long known that adding some sort of molding feature to our hallway was in our future… and now we’re just kicking ourselves for waiting

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A Dining Room Makeover With Yellow Wallpaper

You know Sherry and I strive to develop the skill of brevity, so receiving Avis’ submission was a reminder that it can be done. While her email gave us the main parts of her story, her pictures did all of the talking (somewhat literally). You’ll see what I mean below: Sherry and John, HI!  I’m Avis. I started reading your blog this year and fell in love! Although we have no Clara (who is the cutest accessory EVER!) we do have a few Burgers running around the office. Aside from designing stationary I occasionally do DIY re-modeling in my Decatur, Ga condo. I was inspired by you to do a dining room re-do that I

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Fab Freebie: City Love

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** This week’s TWO lucky winners are… Maria G (who loves Kansas City despite being under 12-15″ of snow at the moment) and Fiona (who loves her hometown of Washington DC so much she even loves the traffic). Congrats you two! Today marks the seven year anniversary of our move to Richmond, VA. Woo hoo! It’s crazy to think that it has been that long, and to celebrate this week’s giveaway is from a city-minded artist: Kimberly of Albie Designs. We’ve had her charming illustration of New York City hanging in our hallway o’ frames for as long as there has been a frame collection there

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The Big Apple to The Big Peach

This may sound hard to believe – but this is our very last book tour recap post. Yup, all of our scheduled tour stops have officially wrapped up so we’ve just got these last three cities to share our adventures from: New York, Charlotte, and Atlanta. If you want to see our previous recaps, they’re all linked up on this page. And like all the other recaps, this guy is just as long. But I personally think our insane conversation with Mark McGrath (!!!) makes this whole post worth reading. New York City was actually supposed to be sort of our big kick off event back in November. But then Sandy happened and the date

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January Superlatives: From Big Girl Room to Big A$$ Coat

We can’t believe we’re halfway through February already (January was kind of a blur). So in an attempt to take a minute and appreciate the things that we checked off the ol’ list (which keeps our momentum up and combats any “we didn’t get anything done” nagginess that sneaks up when the to-do list is still super long), here’s our yearbook-superlative-style January round-up. And if you want to look even further back, we’ve got each month of the last two years summarized right here in 24 posts instead of 840. But let’s start with something not-yet-blogged about (and an off the wall theory about bacon and mustaches)… Most Likely To Sport A Mustache: Anyone in

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Kid’s Views On The Coolest House

During our book tour stop in Palo Alto, someone brought us the funniest gift. It wasn’t a ceramic animal. It wasn’t cupcakes. It wasn’t stickers for Clara. It was a thin set of stapled paper that looked like this: Inside was this note: “Dear Sherry & John (And Clara & Burger), I have been a loyal blog reader since Fall 2010. I am currently a teacher and I thought it could be fun for you to see what kids think makes a house comfortable, fun, and exciting to live in. Therefore, I had them freewrite about their future house or their dream home. Enjoy! – Jacqueline” The dozen or so entries are sweet, imaginative and

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Choosing The Right Lamp Shade Pendant

I kinda want to jump on The Voice bandwagon. Not in the sense that I want my shot at getting Adam Levine to turn his chair for me – at which point I would look him dead in the eye and say “keep your hands off my woman, Levine!” (it never hurts to lay clear boundaries with a guy like him). I want to jump on the bandwagon in the sense that The Choice (spinny chairs meets dating), The Taste (cooking) and The Face (modeling) have. Only my spin-off would be called The Shade and it would be a competition to find “the next great light for Clara’s big girl room.” And no one would

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Fab Freebie: Be Jeweled

***This giveaway has reached is now closed – see who won below!*** Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! And an especially happy one to our randomly selected, lucky winner who goes by the name of… Oona (who will likely celebrate tonight with dinner at “a lovely vegan restaurant”). Congrats Oona! We love celebrating Valentine’s Day with you guys by giving away some free jewelry, and this year Sherry’s especially stoked because the prize is coming from none other than Kendra Scott – one of her favorite places to request that I buy her earrings for various occasions (like the past two Christmases). Kendra Scott has definitely earned me a few husband points, so this (are you ready

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The Wild Wild West

Can you believe it’s been three weeks since our last tour update? But even though you haven’t heard much about it, we’ve been on the road (and in the air) quite a lot lately. It took us nearly to the end of our book tour, but we finally made it all the way to the other side of the United States. So let’s dive right in with our recap of our stops in all three west coast states. #warningitslong We started off in Tacoma, Washington at the Tacoma Home & Garden Show on Friday, January 25th. The people running the show did a great job getting the word out that we’d be there, even scoring

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