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 Prep and Level A Paver Patio

Digging is right up there with the Kardashians for me. As in, I’m getting tired of it (What? I’m a guy – we don’t like those shows). I knew there’d be a lot of it involved in DIYing our patio (digging, not Kardashians), but I think I got a false sense of confidence after all of that liriope came up relatively easily last week. Next up was removing the brick path which, based on the looseness of some bricks on the edge, I said to Sherry “shouldn’t be that bad.” At least I can pinpoint the very moment I jinxed myself. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the universe laughing at me. As

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Fab Freebie: Sew Sweet

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Thanks to random.org, these three ladies are getting a kick start to Mother’s Day: Traci (who inherited her mother’s worrying skills!), April (who got her mom’s love of shopping, travel and new things) and Stacy (who inherited the gift of being a good cook from her mom). Because becoming a mom has mysteriously given Sherry the urge to learn how to sew (more on that here and here) we thought we’d use this pre-Mother’s Day giveaway to dish out TWO fabric-tastic prizes to THREE lucky winners. And they won’t have to sew a stitch because it has already been done for ’em. The

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Our New House’s Exterior

First of all, the outpouring of kindness and support that you guys showed to our family yesterday is both humbling and amazing. Thanks for the helpful words of encouragement and for sharing your stories. But enough with the heavy stuff. How about something light and fluffy? Let’s go on a looooong overdue photo tour of our yard (a la Katie B’s), shall we? You’ve gotten a few select glimpses of what we’re working with in this post about our carport/driveaway, this post about our “alley”, and this one about the magnolia out front. But there’s plenty more to show (that’s your warning that this post will be photo-heavy – so much so that it took

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Easter Bid-ness

We’re pretty sure Clara has a new favorite holiday (although it could be that Easter is just the first major holiday that she’s finally old enough to really enjoy). Either way, someone had a fantastic Easter weekend. Her love of Easter could also be skewed because as far as she knows, the festivities stretch over at least 5 days. We actually kicked things off last Wednesday with an egg hunt at a local park with her older cousins Jake (who turns 13 today! Happy Birthday Jake!) and Olivia (age 10), since they’d be spending Easter weekend with their dad’s side of the family this year. She found two eggs (aka, Sherry and I handed her

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Fab Freebie: If Walls Could Talk

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – look below to see who won!*** First, a reminder that you can always get 15% off your WallQuotes.com order with code YHL15. But the three people who are getting $100 credit to go along with that (thanks to random.org) are… Kaycie Christine (whose walls would talk about episodes of shows like American Idol and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Michelle (whose walls would say “these people are nuts!”) and Bette (whose walls would complain “too many photos already!!”). Congrats ladies! WallQuotes.com is hopping on the giveaway train this week and hooking up a trio of winners with $100 worth of vinyl wall quote-y goodness. They’re removable and

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How To Add A Rain Barrel

Happy Earth Day everyone! (And Happy Birthday to Sherry’s little brother, who’s also known as Almost-Doctor-Dan <– warning, very cute baby Clara pics here). In honor of this eco-tastic holiday, we thought we’d share a story about driving down the street and noticing this sign: We’d been meaning to get a new rain barrel since we left the old one that we made at our first house when we sold it. Of course we would have been happy to make another one, but we had yet to get to that part of our to-do list (and sign up for a local course to get our mitts on a large food safe barrel). So we took

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Giving The Gift Of Painting

Sherry, Clara, Burger and I took our little home-improvement-hungry hands on the road this past weekend to help out a few family members in Northern Virginia who, by coincidence, have also moved recently. There must be something in the water – or at least in our gene pool – that has us all relocating lately. First up was my little sister Carrie, who we managed to get zero pictures of so here’s a random shot that she sent me after the fact (that guy on the left is her boyfriend, Robert, who will be making another appearance momentarily). Carrie just rented a new apartment in Northern Virginia last month (you may remember us helping with

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How To Build A Console Table: It’s DONE!

Well, it took us 3+ weeks, but our 12 foot long DIYed living room console table is officially finished! Before I get into any more pics of the final piece in place, let me back up a bit and recap some of the most recent constructions steps that got us there (since the last time you saw our console table it was stained but still topless). As you know, we had to turn to Plan B for the top since the pallets didn’t play nice (more on that here) so after lots of driving around town in search or something reclaimed that we could use (where sadly nothing was the right width or available in

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Something’s A Little Off

If this post were a fable, its moral would be – when something in your home just doesn’t feel quite right, do something about it. Or wait for it to randomly die on its own accord and take it as a sign. We’ll use this light hanging in our living room as our story’s lead character. You may remember that there’s always been something “off” about it – it’s the only permanent fixture in that huge room, and it’s placed awkwardly in a corner (which is why Sherry tried to distract us from the annoying placement by adding a bit of color to the glass shade to cheer things up while I was out for

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Creating Custom First Birthday Party Invitations

It’s her party and we’ll DIY invitations if we want to. You would DIY them too if it happened to you if you were us. After all, our wedding invites were homemade… … so how could we phone it in for our daughter’s first birthday party? Even though much-more-talented-invitation-designers like Mrs. Limestone generously offered to lend a hand (so nice), we stubbornly set out to attempt to create our second party invitation ever on our own (well, with the help of a cute baby and a computer). I guess we just have a thing for doing it ourselves (ya think?). So we started out with a very familiar set-up to our weekly Clara photos like

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Fab Freebie: A Break From Boring

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries  – see who won below!*** According to random.org, our two giveaway winners are… Amy I. (who’d enjoyed a weekend away and then a few days at home for her pretend spring break) and DebbieRN (who’d go to Sanibel Island). Don’t you wish there was a no-adult-left-behind official grown-up spring break? Since many of the kids in our county are out of school this week, it made us think about how nice it would be if every adult scored the same week-long break from the office grind. Luckily this week’s prize from The Office Stylist promises to inject some fun (and function) to your desk job. They’ve got loads

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A Reason Not To Use Pallets For Certain DIY Projects

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? What do I look like, a woodchuck expert? I have no idea. But I do know the answer to a related yet far lesser known riddle: how many pallet planks could a Petersik pry free if a Petersik could pry free pallet planks? You practice saying that five times fast while I walk you through the answer. You know by now that the plan for our mondo 12′ long DIY console table (last shared here and here) was to build a rustic weathered-looking top out of some old pallets left in our yard by the previous owners (spotted in the background of

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