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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The Best Smart Home Tech

It has been almost 4 years since we last detailed the ways we use smart home technology to make our household more efficient. Since then we’ve changed homes, states, and even our smart home systems. So today I thought I’d break down what we’ve added, what we’ve gotten rid of, and what still has a stranglehold on my nerdy tech-loving heart (and even one that was Sherry’s idea!). As usual, none of the products mentioned in this post are sponsored or gifted. It’s just stuff that we have bought and loved – or (in some cases) don’t love so much anymore. So let’s get into it. STILL LOVE: Alexa Voice Assistant Call us basic, but

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Introducing Penny Petersik!

If you follow our Instagram stories, you’ve probably seen the news that we welcomed a new member of the Petersik family recently. But I wanted to take a moment to properly introduce her here on the blog. So… say hello to Penny! After Burger, our chihuahua of 15 years, passed away in October, we were wrecked. It was a huge loss for our family, and in the initial days after Burger’s passing we donated a ton of things he left behind (our vet was able to pass along his treats, food, crate, and heart medication to other dogs in need of those items). Of course we saved a few keepsakes like his collar and blanket,

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How To Add Crown Molding To Cabinets

Updated January 2022 Do your kitchen cabinets feel a little bit unfinished? Or maybe don’t quite reach your ceiling, leaving a weird gap? We’ll gonna show you how we installed crown molding to give our upper cabinets a simple DIY upgrade. It’s one of my favorite, easy kitchen projects – and we completed it in just 3 hours! Why We Added Crown Molding To Our Kitchen Cabinets When we finished our kitchen reno last year we decided to forgo any crown molding on the top of our upper wall cabinets because we decided we liked the clean, modern look of the square edge. Plus we had never installed crown molding before, so I think we

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Costa Rica With Kids

We have so many good things to say about our family vacation to Costa Rica! This was our first international trip with our kids and we’re convinced it was the best possible destination for their first passport stamp. It was relaxing, enriching, and fun all of us. So today we’ll answer all of your questions: where we stayed, what we did, and how we navigated a foreign country with young kids. When you have little kids (ours are 5 and 9) it’s tempting to default to the low-stress, easy-to-plan vacation. So part of our goal with this trip was to break out of that rut, and step outside of our travel comfort zone. It was

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How To Stain Your Wood Cabinets Darker

The stain on our kitchen cabinets was too orange and dated-looking. We loved the wood grain, but just wanted a darker, more contemporary color. We just didn’t love the idea of sanding or stripping off the old finish. Luckily, we found a product that would let us skip that messy and tiring step while still giving us the end results we wanted. You can see our results above, and read below for how we got there! What Stain Product Did You Use? We used Minwax Polyshades for this project, which is similar to a gel stain. Unlike traditional wood stains, which have to soak into the wood to work, a PolyShades coat or gel stain

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#182: A Big Catch Up Holiday-ish Special (Surprise!)

So much has happened since we last picked up the podcast mic, so we have a jam-packed show to catch you up on all the things. We’re talking house updates, embarrassing stories, renovation plans, and we even worked in some bad metaphorical diagrams (because describing graphs and charts you can’t see always goes over well in an audio format). We’re also diving into how house projects have slowed down around here, the remaining projects on our list, and how our attitude towards having less on our to-do list has changed pretty dramatically over the years. Plus an impromptu musical exercise that captured our family’s contentment for living in a smaller home, and why Sherry can

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DIY Floating Kitchen Shelves

We’re big fans of floating shelves in kitchens. They’re functional, stylish, and create breathing space around all that cabinetry. We’ve had some version of them in nearly every kitchen we’ve remodeled, but our favorites are these DIY floating shelves in the kitchens of our duplex. Today’s tutorial will show you how to build them for your own kitchen. Building your own floating shelves is a great way to fit them precisely to your space AND get the exact finish you want. We’ve used storebought floating shelves in kitchens too – like these chunky Ikea shelves and rustic Pottery Barn shelves – but they’ve never looked quite as custom as our DIY floating shelves. Tools &

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6 Fun & Easy Pumpkin Decorating Ideas For Kids

Our kids are very much into the traditional Jack-O-Lantern-style pumpkin carving, often trying to make a scarier, grosser, or goofier face than last Halloween. They’re plenty capable of carving on their own these days, so it has been fun to let them take full control of their creations, but we still remember a time when toddler-friendly (even baby-friendly!) pumpkin “carving” was the name of the game over here. So we wanted to highlight six unconventional pumpkin decorating ideas for kids (all of which are so simple and fun) that we’ve used in the past. Including a “romantic” one we made pre-kids (yes, I’ll pause while you ponder what exactly can be romantic about a pumpkin…).

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The Best 7 Storage Furniture Pieces

Anyone who lives in a small-ish space knows that thoughtful storage can upgrade so many aspects of your life at home when it’s done right (and it can be a daily frustration when it’s not done well or at all). No matter how big your rooms are or how many you have, you just want to be able to access things easily & keep them in a smart spot – and downsizing from our 3150 square foot house to this 1400 square foot home last year definitely challenged us to be even more mindful about how we incorporate the most useful storage systems into our home. Suddenly we were living in 6 rooms (down from

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9 Small Kitchen Ideas

“We just couldn’t figure out why you weren’t tearing out the kitchen.” That’s what one of our contractor’s guys said to us right as we moved in last year. I understood his confusion. We were redoing floors, moving doors, vaulting ceilings, etc – but we left the small old kitchen relatively untouched – complete with mauve laminate countertops. You can see what I mean in this post. But to know us is to know that we strongly prefer to live with an expensive-to-renovate room like a kitchen first, just so we don’t rush into spending major money on big permanent changes that we might later regret or wish that we thought through a little longer.

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Getting A Pool – The Process & The Cost

It’s been a full year in the making, but OUR POOL IS DONE*! Here’s where I imagine someone saying “and the crowd goes wiiiiild” (and the crowd, in this case, is the five members of our household – including Burger shaking a tiny pom-pom). Today we’ve got one HUGE post full of info about the entire process, the budget, and, of course, the finished result. We’re also answering some of the most common questions we got throughout this project. *Well, mostly done. More on that later Neither of us have ever lived in a house with a pool or even in an area of the country where residential pools are very common. So this was

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How To Build A Privacy Trellis

BRB, just changing the name of this blog to “Solving Problems With Plants.” And I know we promised a huge pool post, but the pool is still very much in progress. Hopefully it’ll be done next month and we can write one big breakdown with approximately 473 photos. But back to how plants can not only hide ugly stuff, they can also offer some pretty great privacy, as we’re about to demonstrate below. One of the things that contributes to our house being extra walkable to shops, parks, the beach, and restaurants is that it’s less like a sprawling suburban neighborhood due to the lots being a good deal smaller (you can read more about

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