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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An Easy DIY Christmas Card Idea

With family arriving tonight for our first ever Christmas in Richmond, we wanted to be sure we shared our holiday card with you guys first (you know we love ya like family). We couldn’t do this little blog-thang (look at me getting all twangy) without you. And we sincerely appreciate you for dropping in on us. We shot this earlier in the month with the help of a bunch of ribbon snagged on clearance from Michael’s last Christmas (some of which later ended up on our tree). It’s actually two pictures photoshopped together, since getting Clara and Burger to sit still that close to one another without doing something weird (like synchronized diaper sniffing/tail grabbing)

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Updating A Dated Kitchen Yourself

We were so happy to stumble upon Beth’s email in our inbox. Her retelling of her kitchen redo had all the elements that we love in a good renovation story: an ugly before (a brown fridge!), lots of DIY details (yesss!), a bit of drama (the counters arrived the day before Christmas, yowza!) and – best of all – a beautiful after. Here’s her note: Hello, Sherry & John! We bought our current home a little over a year ago, and to say it was outdated is the understatement of the century. Like you, we wanted something to fix up and make our own. Our kitchen was dark, ugly, and closed in. No matter how

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A Handmade Holiday Craft Show

Two Sundays ago we hit up the Richmond Craft Mafia’s craft show called Handmade Holiday. As one of my friends described it, it was like Etsy… only in real life. We love supporting/meeting local (and not so local) artists and artisans, so we went expecting to see some cool things, bump into a few people we knew, and maybe even to snag a gift or two. Instead, we saw LOTS of cool stuff, bumped into DOZENS of friends and blog buddies, and snagged a BUNCH of gifts. Well, I guess I should clarify. They were gifts for ourselves. Here’s a snapshot of our handmade bounty after we returned home and laid everything out on the

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How To Add Toe Kicks & A Window Sill

Can’t we just paint some darn cabinets already?! If your patience to see some painted cabinets is wearing thin – just imagine how we feel! When we were planning this kitchen project our big-picture brains said “We retrofit those few doors to match the rest of the room and then we paint. Hooray!” But now that we’re in the weeds (amid holiday madness, no less) we realize that a lot of stuff actually has to happen between those two steps.” There are gaps to be filled, rough spots to be sanded, trim to be added, hinges to be dealt with, hardware to be chosen, primer to be selected, a final paint color to be decided,

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How To Make A Kids Art Desk With A Door

This is the story of a door turned desk turned tinier desk. When Clara came down with a case of the coloring bug a few weeks ago, it became clear that she needed an alternate surface for her artistry than the floor. You know, just in case she didn’t feel like tummy-drawing. We talked about a few fun play tables over on BabyCenter a couple of weeks ago, but finally found the inspiration that we needed to DIY one right in front of our eyes. And no, it wasn’t this leftover-plywood-slash-side-table combo that Sherry rigged up in about 30 seconds of “hey, maybe this will work!” Sorry, Sherry. #playtablefail. Back to the drawing board… Actually,

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Fab Freebie: Things We Love

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** After an excitement and entry filled holiday giveaway we’ve crowned our big winner. Well, random.org has crowned a winner. And she is… Nina (who’s planning to soak up and celebrate the magic of the season with her toddler, babe, and hubs this week as well as do some gift wrapping, toy assembling, and cookie baking by the light of the tree). Congrats! Oprah has Favorite Things. Martha has Good Things. We have Things We Love (okay, so maybe it’s not as catchy or scream-and-cry-on-national-TV-worthy, but we tried). The point is that we’ve rounded up five prizes that we heart, covering a whole range

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Painting A Herringbone Ceiling

Sometimes it’s so easy to forget little spaces like entryways, hallways, closets, etc. That’s why we love Mandi’s complete transformation of her entryway, which we originally discovered when Sherry pinned her awesome ceiling paint treatment over on her home away from home (yes, as a guy I still don’t quite understand the magic of Pinterest but then again Sherry doesn’t quite understand the magic of Angry Birds). Anyway, back to Mandi’s entryway makeover. Here’s her story: I’ve spent the last week and a half making over my entryway and I am dying to show you! This is what it looked like before the makeover: And here’s the after. I love it. The hands down greatest

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Cutting Down Cabinet Doors To Fit

We knew from the moment that we decided to add new (secondhand) cabinets to our kitchen that the doors could be a challenge. Even though we only ended up with 5 missing doors, it was important that we get those to match with the rest of the kitchen for a seamless look (aka: so no one would look around and guess we had some mismatched thrift store cabinets among us). Here are the five doorless cabinets that we had to address: We knew we had a few options to result in a kitchen full of matching doors, so one of them was bound to work. Here they are (in order of expense from most to

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How To Hide A Microwave By Building It Into A Vented Cabinet

So, remember that microwave that we got a great deal on a couple of months ago? Yeah. Well. We returned it. A few of you questioned why we needed “such a big microwave” when we originally posted about it, which did get us thinking that we don’t do all that much microwaving. A bowl of soup here. A bit of reheating/defrosting there. And when we took down the kitchen’s original black over-the-range microwave (which was just as wide as our oven – 30 whole inches)… … we realized just how hulking the new 30″ one would look in its new home next to our pantry. See, we had originally planned to build it in there

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Prepping For A Corian Counter Installation

We were feeling a little less than pumped about how unfinished our “new,” tile-ready walls were looking… … mostly because we found ourselves staring at that mismatched unpainted paneling (shudder) and those ugly unpainted/stained/gross parts of the ceiling that were exposed when we removed the upper cabinets. So what’d we do? Why we got a-paintin’ of course! The paneling took two coats of primer and two coats of paint (just to be safe). And the ceiling took… well, more coats of primer and paint than I care to share (I lost count, actually – maybe five or six?). Since some of it was totally unpainted and other areas were stained, we just wanted to be

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Fab Freebie: Home Sweet Illustrated Home

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Random.org has surprised us this week and selected a male winner for the first time in foreverrrrrrr (shocking, we know). His name is… Thomas (and he’s looking forward to time off this holiday season). Congrats dude! (Congrats buddy? Congrats fella? I dunno, I’m so used to saying “Congrats ladies” I’m kinda at a loss). One of our favorite things to give are custom house portraits (we’ve actually purchased two for my parents in the last year – and even bought one for ourselves). So as we enter the giving-est time of the year, we figured it would be fitting to give one of

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November Superlatives

So yeah… it’s suddenly December? Guess that means it’s time to take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff to keep things spicy. This month we were all over the place as usual, from doing some exterior, nursery, office, ornament, and place-setting stuff to a bunch of kitchen things. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives (you know, just for giggles). Oddest Couple: Little ol’ Sherry and this tall built-in that we made to give our fridge a more finished look

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