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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Adding Outdoor Storage

I’ll start this post with a confession: I resented our kitchen porch when we finished it last fall. Resent is a strong and, admittedly, strange word to use for a porch. But I’ll explain it later on in this post. The good news is that I no longer harbor any ill will toward it. In fact, it has become one of the spaces I’m most grateful to have in our smaller home. Especially after some functional additions that we’ve made to it over the last year since you saw it. I love this space so much, that I’m actually writing this post from it right now. Call it Method Blogging. I’m fully immersed in my

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How To Build Modern DIY Nightstands

Upgrading to a larger bed meant we needed to swap our big bedside tables out for something smaller. So we whipped up this super simple plan for DIY nightstands that *perfectly* fit the space. They require only one material (butcher block counters!) and minimal cuts, meaning it’s a building project anyone can do. By using a chunky material like butcher block, you not only get a modern look, but it also makes them super sturdy. You don’t have to do any fancy construction techniques like shelf supports or sliding drawers. Again, super simple! Why Build Custom Nightstands? To fit our new king-size bed in our room, we had to position it slightly off-center on this

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The Best Toilet (Yes, We Really Have A Favorite)

You know you’ve left your mark on the world when people quote you in the pages of Time magazine or you get interviewed by Oprah. But what does it mean if one of your top google results is “young house love toilet” (true story)? And up until now, searching that term on our blog didn’t really lead you anywhere helpful (Sherry talks a lot about our favorite toilet mostly on IG Stories). So if that’s the rabbit hole that led you to our blog and you typed in those infamous words, this post will now have you and all of your toilet-related queries covered. Our favorite toilet is the Kohler Memoirs Elongated Toilet (sometimes also

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How To Add Utility Closet Storage

Today we’re talking about the stock market! Just kidding. Exactly as the title suggests, we’re going to show you how we earned some really useful extra storage in our new kitchen by upgrading a formerly VERY PACKED utility closet. It used to basically just have a water heater and an HVAC system in it without much room for anything else, and now there’s, say it with me… so much room for activities. Ok, not for like cartwheels, but significantly more room to store stuff than before. Like maybe 500% more. Really. If you watched our drawer-by-drawer kitchen organization video, you already got a peek at what we have going on in there, but today we’re

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Painting A DIY Wall Mural

The big, colorful mural we recently painted in our daughter’s room was one of the most fun and impactful painting projects we’ve done in a while. It was a combination of both careful planning and some last-minute improvising that was so easy to do, even the kids broke out some paintbrushes to help. Plus, it extremely was budget-friendly too. The whole thing was painted by hand, just using regular ol’ paintbrushes and rollers. No fancy paint sprayers. No projector. Not even any painter’s tape! So today we’ll talk you through: How to plan your wall mural The materials needed to paint the mural A step-by-step process for painting Why you can’t really screw this up!

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The Easiest DIY Headboard

We’ve made a bunch of headboards over the years and the method shown below is the all-time easiest and most customizable DIY headboard of them all. It doesn’t require any sewing, thread, buttons, or other technical upholstery knowledge. It’s so easy, we even made two headboards for this space. We are making a wraparound daybed-style headboard for our son’s room. It’s gonna turn his basic bed into a cozy nook for lounging, reading, and – of course, sleeping! Here’s what his room and bed looked like before. It’s pretty bare bones because we just moved in. Update: See how his room looks after 2 years of living here, including the installation of his gradient accent

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The Best Outdoor Solar Lights

Some people are surprised to hear that we illuminate our entire pool area using nothing but solar LED landscape lights. As in: the sun provides free evening ambiance with zero effort on our part. Nothing has to be plugged in. Our electric bill feels zero impact from softly illuminating this entire area of our house. So today I wanted to share the 3 solar products we use in case you want to give your own outdoor space a literal glow-up. Technically we have a porch light and in-pool lights too, all of which use traditional electricity, but we almost never turn them on. Honestly, they’re a little blinding and we like a soft glow that

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