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 | | 252 Comments

DIY Drywalling Tips

As exciting as it is to have both that section of wall and the contractor gone, there’s still a lot of work ahead of us before our opening is finished. Unless this is your idea of beautiful dining room: Oh and speaking of the contractor, locals have been asking for Steve’s info – and now that we’ve worked with him and were extremely happy with his result, we’ll share (we only like passing along people’s info after we work with them, to be sure they’re someone we’d recommend). He’s a licensed Class A contractor as opposed to a handyman (so he doesn’t hang doors or build furniture or do odd little jobs), but if you

[ Read More ]

| By | | 104 Comments

A Yellow And White Checkered Kitchen Floor

Still working on the drywall situation for our new opening! While we get that together and snap some pics for this afternoon, let’s look at an awesome kitchen makeover – you know to keep the momentum up. Of course we perked up when we spotted the words “1948 ranch style house” and “kitchen renovation” in our inbox. Then we saw the awesome before & after pictures attached and, well, see for yourself. This is one of those makeovers that reminds us that whatever the budget, making one or two daring or unexpected choices can make the room (and make it feel like yours). We’re loving the playful choices like the yellow floor and the chalkboard

[ Read More ]

| By | | 182 Comments

Hanging Protective Plastic For A Kitchen Renovation

Things are getting pretty Dexter around here in preparation for our wall opening. Because when walls come down, dust comes out, and therefore protective plastic must go up! So to set the mood I’ve intentionally left these photos kinda dark and eerie. I’m nothing if not theme-y.   Oh and since I affectionately call myself Captain Safety (much like Sherry wishes $herdog would catch on), it bears mentioning that old homes can have lead paint, and therefore call for extra precautions (especially if you have little ones and pets around), so you can find more info on that here. We followed those directions and had our walls checked for lead (it’s the thing to do

[ Read More ]

| By | | 177 Comments

A Vintage Sign For Wall Art

Remember how we stopped at this place in Maryland on our way to our Labor Day beach weekend? And remember how we spotted these cool sign letters there that were made even cooler when we learned that they were meant for a Dollar Tree store and were selling for $20 each? I was obsessed with them and almost took home an E, R, or A, just because (sadly there’s no P, J, S, C or B in Dollar Tree). Well, I finally got me one. Let’s give a lukewarm welcome to letter L. Why L? Well… give that L a little 180 degree spin and whaddya get? Our favorite number AND a happy John (our

[ Read More ]

| By | | 10,004 Comments

Fab Freebie: Colorful Goods

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries (it has hit our cap of 10,000 entries) – see who won below!*** Since we maxed out on entries less than 24 hours into the giveaway, we thought we’d go ahead and crown our winner. Random.org has selected… Jen W. (who’s long had a love affair with the color grey, but has lately been drawn to cheery yellows lately). Congrats! It’s no secret that we loves us some HomeGoods. So how psyched are we to give one of you a $500 gift card this week? Answer: very psyched. And if you’re stumped on how to spend that money, HomeGoods has a new series of “Design Happy” videos to

[ Read More ]

| By | | 151 Comments

October Superlatives

It’s that time again! When we 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 spice things up. This month we were all over the place as usual, from doing a bunch of kitchen things to dipping into a few office projects, some landscaping tasks, and even a few Halloween crafts. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives (you know, just for kicks). Most Destructive: Demoing out our fridge cabinet, which officially kicked off to the kitchen makeover madness. Best Timing:

[ Read More ]

| By | | 69 Comments

Painting And Stenciling A Coffee Table

Will we ever grow tired of seeing a piece of furniture that has been completely transformed with a little bit of paint? Probably not. At least not as long as we’re getting emails like Jesse’s. Here’s an excerpt from his blog about the whole hexagon-tastic transformation of this coffee table that he sent our way: You can see in the photo that this was one of those over-lacquered tables that was pretty beat up. But the curves are all there, and they are nice! The top had really pretty woodwork, a nice diamond inlay. So, continuing with my recent love affair with wood AND paint rather than one or the other, I stripped this table

[ Read More ]

| By | | 137 Comments

Landscaping Around A Mailbox

You know this little online diary of ours is all about keeping you posted on the little stuff along with the big (and the bad and the ugly along with the good). So file this under small but good. Remember our little petunia-fied mailbox? Well, it went from this in June… …to this in August… …to this in October: Womp- womppppp. The petunias were annuals so they weren’t gonna last forever. And between rain washing out a lot of the mulch and the flowers thinning to a scraggly looking vine mess… yeah, it was ugly. But wait, we’ll get to the “good” in a minute. Fortunately I was able to pull them out with virtually

[ Read More ]

| By | | 280 Comments

How To Build In Your Refrigerator

We learned with our first kitchen that building in your fridge is a huge help in making a kitchen look fancy schmancy. And at the moment our floating fridge was looking pretty much the exact opposite. That’s where an also less than schmancy $19 cabinet from the Habitat For Humanity ReStore (mentioned yesterday) came in handy. It’s 12″ tall and 36″ wide, the exact width of our fridge. And when you take off the don’t-match doors (we’re hoping to retrofit extra existing doors to make it seamlessly match the other cabinets later), it starts to look more like a workable piece of cabinetry to sit atop our refrigerator. For the sides of our built-in fridge,

[ Read More ]

| By | | 143 Comments

A Bathroom Makeover With Dark Gray Tile

This latest before & after comes from one of our neighbors to the north, Kahley from Ontario, Canada. She and her husband Steve revamped their home’s only bathroom. And in the process proved that going dark and sophisticated can still be bright and airy. Here’s her letter: We are a young family of four – me, my husband, and our kids Noah (4) and Lexie (2). The only bathroom in our house dated back the 1950’s, so it was HIGH TIME to reno!  Since it was our only bathroom, we wanted it to be insanely multi-purpose. We needed a tub AND shower, some closet space, a dirty laundry area, lots of concealed storage, etc etc

[ Read More ]

| By | | 6,270 Comments

Fab Freebie: Cameo Appearance

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Random.org cut its way through over 6,000 entries and picked our winner as… Stephanie (who would love to have a few hundred laughs with Zach Galifianakis). Congrats! I believe it was the renowned Dave Coulier who once immortalized the words “cut it out” on Full House… but I don’t quite think Uncle Joey had a clue what potential those words could hold when it came to the Silhouette CAMEO digital cutter. You guys may have seen Silhouette cutters mentioned around the blogosphere before (our friends Jessica at How About Orange and Nicole at Making It Lovely did some cool projects with theirs). Now

[ Read More ]

| By | | 517 Comments

Using A Display From The Gap As Home Art

A couple of weeks ago we were at the Gap and I spotted this on the wall. It’s a bicycle from Public Bikes that was disassembled and shot for this in-store display (thereby they’re not for sale). I thought they were pretty darn good looking. I’m more of a bike admirer than an actual bike rider (apologies to my cycling enthusiast father), so I feel like a bit of a poser saying this, but… I really want those posters to hang in our house. Not sure where, but somewhere. Here’s a better shot of one of the panels from the Public Bikes blog. I talked with the manager at my local Gap and they “made

[ Read More ]