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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Fab Freebie: A Literal Fab Freebie

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** You guys hit the 10,000 entry cap to giveaway within 24 hours, so you must love some Fab as much as I do (or perhaps you just like $500). Either way, we’ve crowned a random winner and it is… Whitney (who says “Most of my apartment is muted gray, yellow, and blue, but my kitchen has bright red baking dishes on display.”) Congrats Whitney! I’m a recent addict to Fab (I own more t-shirts from there than I probably should admit). So imagine my reaction when I got an email from them offering to do a – wait for it – $500 Fab gift card

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Two Fun Ways To Use Instagram Photos

What’s better than one fast and easy project with family photos? How about thirty. Just kidding. How about two. Cool? Let’s do this. First up, we have Photo Project Numero Uno. We’ve had fun with the little Sherri Conley cards-turned-art that we hung above our sofa in eight Ikea frames two years ago. First with bright paper behind them and then with some textured fabric as the backdrop around a year later… … but lately we’ve been jonesing for something a little more personal. It all started when Sherry and I were talking about how Instagram seems to capture “real life” better than formal camera pics from a big event. Why? I think because we

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Fab Freebie: World Play

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And the lucky / randomly selected / soon to be quite worldly person is… Briana (who says “London, Ontario is special to me. That’s where I first lived on my own, went to University, met my husband, and I just loved that city. Plus, it has the best spaghetti restaurant ever, Spageddy Eddy’s!”). Congrats! And for everyone else, scroll down to the contest entry details for a sweet little discount the Wallpapered folks added for everyone. One look at Pinterest and I don’t feel quite so alone in my fascination with maps. So to everyone else out there who digs a little cartography

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On The Road Again

Man, it feels like it’s been a month since we had a book tour update for ya. Oh, that’s because it has. We were on hiatus while bookstores and retailers focused on the holiday rush (instead of hosting authors) so last week’s adventures in Texas and Florida were our first stops since finishing up in DC and Richmond in early December. And as much fun as stops in northern cities like Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Minneapolis were – we were excited to enjoy some warm weather in the southern half of the country. #longpostwarning But then Austin had to go and look like this… Texas was apparently in a month-long drought until we (and our

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Adding A Kitchen Banquette Eating Nook

We always love a big kitchen renovation when it comes to Reader Redesigns, but sometimes making over just the corner is enough to get us inspired bigtime. Just check out what Deme and her family did to the breakfast nook of their dated kitchen. Here’s her email: Hi Young House Lovers! Your blogs is one of the highlights of my day and I wanted to share our  breakfast nook with you. After removing a thick lacquered chair rail and scrapping layers of fruit patterned and 70’s wallpaper, we ended up with some pretty fugly untextured walls. We started with a dark dungeon of a corner and ended up with something bright, fresh and uber functional

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How To Make Wood Frames For Large Art Or Posters

This is it. My most favoritest art ever. Yes I know that’s a big statement. A big statement with a non-word, at that. But it’s all deserved because I’ve framed and hung my bike art and I’m in love. Not only with how the final product looks, but how easy and cheap it was to achieve. So forgive me if my enthusiasm is more annoying than usual today. I’m a man with a love of all things bike and all things easy. Wait, that sounds wrong… So here’s that wall before with my retail display cast-offs just pitifully taped to the wall. And here they are all framed up. In frames that only cost us

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Fab Freebie: This Is Your Pilot Writing

***This giveaway  is now closed – see who won below! *** Clearly I’m not the only one who loves a good writing utensil (and Target card) as this giveaway reached our 10,000 entry cap within just 24 hours. Nice work team! So that means we get to crown a winner early. That lucky writer is… Heather F (who “writes notes on the back of envelopes and then loses them. Argh.”) Congrats Heather! This sounds kinda weird, but I’m very particular about my writing tools. So when the folks at Pilot noticed that we tend to write with their products, they wanted to thank us by passing some freebies along. But you know we don’t take

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Some Sunroom Art

From the moment we painted that brick wall in our sunroom, we were itching to get some art hung. And we finally found time to get ‘er done after returning from a six-flights-in-four-days blitz on Friday. It’s weird how much more “lived in” a room feels when you slam some art on the walls. Seriously, I know the feeling of dragging your feet on the hanging of the art, but after nearly seven years of house-fixing-up, it never ceases to amaze us how that little step makes such a difference. In continuing with the general theme of this sunroom design, we’re trying to spend as little money as possible and just use things we’ve already

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Our Free Annual Calendar Template Is Finally Here For You

It was December 30th when it struck me: “Cripes, we don’t have our 2013 calendar ready.” So I spent a couple of hours on New Year’s Eve morning and a couple more the next evening cranking out our fourth homemade calendar – and as always we’re sharing the file so you guys can download it too (and sub in your own pics and quotes to personalize it for yourself) just like we’ve done last year, the year before, and the year before that. I’ll be honest, over the years these calendars have proven more decorative than functional. At this point they may just be considered a tradition. It started back in 2010 and for the past

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December Superlatives: Projects Plus Parties

We’re sneaking in one last look at December, in case there was anything y’all missed – and also just to remind ourselves that we didn’t spend the entire month in a Christmas cookie-induced food coma. We’ve noticed that taking a second to appreciate the items that we have checked off the list each month inspires us to get going on even more projects that we have yet to tackle. So it’s a nice breath of you-did-it-now-don’t-stop to keep our DIY momentum a’ flowin. And if you want to see more of last year (or even the year before) we’ve got each month summarized right here (in 24 posts instead of about 840 – not bad,

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Thrift Store Find: A Dresser We’ll Make Into A Media Cabinet

We’ve been on the hunt for a new media console for our living room since, well, as long as we’ve lived here almost. That “hunt” is mostly defined by periodic stops through our favorite furniture-rich thrift stores to see if anything grabbed us. We were probably a couple of months from giving up entirely. But then I got this text from Sherry. Sherry had run into Diversity Thrift while I stayed in the car with Clara. This is how discouraged this hunt had become… I didn’t even get out of the car anymore. Here’s the pic Sherry sent me, which was enough for me to get my butt out of the driver’s seat and check

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What We Got Each Other This Christmas

Yup, it’s time for the annual gifts-we-got-each-other post. Allow me to do some voice exercises. Mimimimi. Ok. Onnn the first day of Christmassss, my true love gave to meeeee… well, we’ll get to that in a moment. In general we like to treat the holidays as an awesome time to spend with friends and family while being grateful for what we have, so it’s really not all about gifts at our house (people over things and all that). But our tradition is to make Clara a few handmade items – like her fridge and her latchboard – and then we get each other a few “tokens” of our affection (we usually spend around $100 on

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