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.

| By | |

Free Summer Reading Printable

With our kids’ summer break kicking off this weekend, we came up with a fun twist on our usual summer reading goals. We had the idea while playing “would you rather” on a family walk this morning, came home and whipped up a paper template, and an hour later Sherry mentioned it in passing on Instagram. Then Sherry’s DMs filled up with people asking her to share a copy of the bracket or tell them where we got it (we whipped it up in Photoshop), so we decided to drop two free printable options of it here in this post. I even had some fun myself, as a 41-year-old man, making this filled-out sample above

[ Read More ]

| By | |

Adding Ikea Floating Shelves In Our Bedroom

For over a decade, one of our renovating mantras has been “the middle makes no sense.” Basically, don’t fret if your house is mid-reno, not fully furnished, or otherwise in limbo. Take your time, try something out, and just course correct as you go. See what you like and what you use. Live with something for a little while (or a long while). Take the expectation of having a finished perfect house right away and throw it in the trash (it always takes us years to get to that point!). Just keep letting spaces evolve in ways that work for your family and make you happy. And eventually, you’re very likely to end up with

[ Read More ]

| By | |

How To Build Easy Closet Shelves

Storage is useful in any closet, but it’s especially important in small ones like our laundry closet. That’s why we built some suuuuuuper simple DIY closet shelves as soon as we moved in. It’s an easy project that anyone can tackle! They require very few materials, take only a few hours, and can be customized to fit your closet and storage needs. And as a bonus, we’ll even show you how to build a laundry counter that matches your shelves. It’s even removable so you can easily access your washer and dryer when they need servicing. Our shelves have been going strong for nearly 4 years now and they look & function just as well

[ Read More ]

| By | |

4 People Sharing A Bathroom: How & Why It Works For Us

Any time we mention having only one bathroom it spawns a flurry of interest in our Instagram DMs about how we manage that with our four-person family. Although we’re definitely not intrepid for having this setup in any way (so many families in the US & abroad live a wonderful life in a smaller home with one bathroom), and we also have an outdoor shower that we can use almost year-round (which definitely takes the pressure off of our single indoor bathroom), there’s a surprising amount of curiosity around the topic. So we’re here to break down why it has worked so well for our family and what we’ve done to make it extra efficient

[ Read More ]

| By | |

How To Fit A King-Size Bed Into A Small Bedroom

This is a meandering journey of a post, so make yourself comfortable. We mentioned in this side table post that we traded our queen-size bed for a bigger king-size one. The reason might seem obvious – because it’s bigger, duh! But we happily sailed through over 17 years together without ever wanting one. So why the sudden about-face last fall? Well, it essentially boiled down to: “the things we do for our dog” (more on that in a second). We also had to carefully plan how we’d squeeze the biggest bed we’ve ever owned into our smaller bedroom. And we had a big realization about larger furniture in a smaller house in the process (it’s

[ Read More ]

| By | |

The Best Grout – And How To Pick The Right Color

If you’ve got a tiling project in your future, remember, bookmark, voice memo, tattoo, or do whatever you need to do to remember Mapei Flexcolor grout. I know this sounds like I’m overreacting, but take it from people who have grouted 7 bathroom floors, 3 showers, 3 mudrooms, and 2 backsplashes in the last two years: this grout has been life-changing. And no, this is not sponsored by either Mapei or Floor & Decor, which is where we typically buy ours (sorry, necessary disclaimer because this post is going to sound pretty gushy). Why We Love Mapei Grout I’ll explain WHY we love Mapai grout so much AND toss in some tips for picking the

[ Read More ]

| By | |

How To Protect Plants From Freezing

Last month’s arctic blast brought surprisingly frigid temperatures to Florida. We had three consecutive nights with temperatures in the low 20s – and an ultimate low of around 18 degrees! A lot of our outdoor plants aren’t built for that kind of freezing weather (in the 3 winters we’ve spent here we can remember one other low of about 32-degrees, but things went right back up to our more normal lows of around 45 degrees within a few hours). They’re calling our recent deep freeze a “once-in-a-century event” here in Florida. In other words: the ultimate test. So here are the steps we took to protect our plants, including a few things that worked better

[ Read More ]

| By | |

5 Ways To Prevent Frozen Pipes

We thought frozen pipes were a worry we’d left behind by moving to Florida, but last month’s arctic blast sent our temperatures plummeting into the low 20s for three nights in a row (with an all-time low of 18 degrees, which they’re calling a once-in-a-century event here in Northwest, FL). This was especially concerning because Florida homes in our area aren’t always constructed with this weather in mind. Frozen pipes are bad news because water expands when it freezes, potentially causing pipes to burst or crack, leading to leaking or flooding. Luckily, with a few easy prevention steps we successfully kept our pipes from freezing! Which, sadly, isn’t something a lot of our neighbors can

[ Read More ]

| By | |

The Rooms We Don’t Miss After Downsizing

Sherry’s post a few months ago about what furniture & decor we still own after downsizing was the first time I’d looked back at photos of our previous house in a while. It was a fun walk down memory lane (how has it been 2.5 years since we moved?!). It also jogged my memory about how much “extra house” we used to have. As in, full rooms that were so under-utilized that I’d almost forgotten about them! Don’t get me wrong: we loved that house. But, as you know, it was a much bigger house than we realized we needed (spending an entire summer in our smaller pink beach house really clarified that for us

[ Read More ]

| By | |

Ikea Besta Hack: Turn Them Into Built-Ins

Want to turn Ikea Besta cabinets into custom built-ins? We made 3 simple “hacks” to make our Betas look like higher-end custom storage with a high-end price tag. So now we’ve got extra storage and bonus architectural detail in our bedroom. Built-in storage is helpful anywhere, but especially in a smaller home like ours. We’ve added built-in Pax closets in our bedroom, a custom desk & bookcase to our son’s room, and the wall-to-wall media cabinet in our family room. So when we needed a solution to the empty spots next to our fireplace, we knew more built-ins were in order. Why Choose Ikea Bestas? The fireplace you see above is directly across from our

[ Read More ]

| By | |

Are Robot Vacuums Worth It?

We owned a Roomba robot vacuum almost a decade ago because it sounded so good in theory. But in reality, we had SO MANY ISSUES with it. It was extremely loud, frequently got stuck, and didn’t cover much ground before the battery died. It required so much babysitting someone that our time was better spent just vacuuming ourselves. We finally ended up selling it on Craigslist. So imagine our surprise to now be declaring that we actually LOVE having a robot vacuum and the technology has come SO FAR. It feels lightyears ahead of the one we owned before – and it was much less expensive! In fact, we’ve owned our new robot vacuum for

[ Read More ]