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 Make Built-In Cabinets

There’s no better kind of storage than built-in storage, especially when you can integrate it with the architecture of a space. So when we finished our attic into a bonus room, we were excited to make use of the recessed niche around the window. Today we’re going to show you how we designed and installed built-in cabinets using stock cabinets. Spoiler: it’s actually an Ikea hack! This post covers the wall-to-wall, built-in cabinets, but you can also read about how we built the DIY floating shelves too. The two features work together to make a functional feature wall, but it’s a bit much to cover in one tutorial! Step 1: Plan Your Built-Ins Because this

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How To Make DIY Floating Shelves

We’ve done tons of DIY shelving projects in our homes, but these simple floating shelves in our bonus room are some of our favorites. We love this tutorial because the shelves turn out modern & thin, unlike most DIY floating shelves that are super chunky. Although if these are too narrow for your taste, you can see how we adapted this tutorial for some thicker floating kitchen shelves. You can also read about how we built in the cabinets under the shelves too, since they were another key part of building out this niche. In that post, we also cover how we planned the layout using Ikea’s online kitchen planning tool. You can also see

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How To Hang An Outdoor Daybed (On Video!)

Last week we shared how we built the DIY outdoor hanging daybed that we installed on our front porch. And as promised, I’m back to share how we hung it since, if you’re like me, hanging things that are meant to support the full weight of a human body (or two!) can make you a little nervous. It was actually extremely easy to do. So easy that we did it more than once (ha!) so that it resulted in the smoothest and most non-tipsy sway possible (our first hanging attempt made it tip forward and backwards a bit, which wasn’t ideal). Thankfully the second attempt worked like a charm. Plus it meant we could document

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How To Build A Hanging Daybed

Back in October we mentioned our plans to add a hanging daybed to the covered portion of our front porch and our entire family couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally done. Hanging daybeds like this are super popular in our area, and we’ve always had a soft spot for them. Is there anything better than reading/napping outside on a lazy Saturday afternoon? One of the Airbnbs that we stayed at in Costa Rica last January had one that pretty much cemented our feeling that they’re just about the perfect outdoor lounge spot. Sherry and our daughter spent hours there, each leaning up against a side arm with their legs extended towards each other, reading

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How To Build A Modern Fireplace Mantel

We mentioned in this year’s holiday decorating post that we wanted to get some sort of fireplace mantel built this month and, well, Santa delivered! ::pats self on back:: Yes, setting a goal to have a place for hanging our kids’ stockings is a little random, but we were happy to have the motivation to check this project off our list sooner rather than later. If you recall, our fireplace looked like this when we moved in: Here’s a wider shot of that area right after we got here, just for kicks. Ah, those packing blankets as curtains are #MEMORIES. So yeah… it feels good to be here: Sherry did some work to freshen it

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What’s It Like To Downsize?

Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way. This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you

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Making A Media Cabinet With Ikea Besta Cabinets

Downsizing from 3200 square feet to 1400 means storage is a big deal to us these days, and a couple of weeks ago we got two major upgrades in that department. We still have some “hacking” to do to the simple Ikea cabinets that we bought, but we’re stupidly giddy over just having them assembled and installed. They basically add up to 8 more large cabinets worth of storage – and our kitchen only has 7 cabinets, so the excitement was palpable when those flat-packed boxes arrived (they had about a 4 week wait time, but otherwise delivery was smooth and uneventful for those wondering how the ordering experience was during this time period). They

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Front Porch Makeover (We Painted The Ceiling!)

It has been about five months since we first introduced you to the outside of our house. That was our very first week of living here, and our outdoor spaces have been getting a lot of use ever since. You’ve already seen how our second-story deck has come together, so today we wanted to update you on our front porch as well as the covered area that we call the side porch and some new landscaping that we’ve added too. We’ve made some functional and organizational improvements, some strictly aesthetic enhancements, and have some other upgrades that are still in the works. So won’t you join us on the front porch? Here’s how it’s looking

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Adding A Sisal Stair Runner

Sherry recently hinted on Instagram Stories that we were up to our old staple-coloring antics. And by that I mean we were installing another stair runner (admittedly one of the less popular definitions of “antics”). But after installing one in our old house 7 years ago it has become one of our favorite projects – just because we truly believe anyone can do it, and whatever runner you choose can give you a totally different look (and a nice grip underfoot, but more on that functional upgrade in a minute). Why We Wanted A Stair Runner Before we get into the “how” of adding this runner, let’s talk about the “why.” We’re not people who

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DIYing A Colorful Wood Wall Treatment

Hoo boy, today’s post has all the good stuff: murder, mystery, INTRIGUE! Just kidding it actually has none of that. But it does have a riveting step-by-step tutorial that involves ten test pots of paint and a whole lot of lattice. So let’s get right into how we created this colorful wood wall treatment in our son’s room. Last time you saw this room in July, we had installed this easy upholstered headboard and built-in bookshelf. It made his room so much more functional (and extra cozy), but we mentioned that we were all looking forward to adding some more color & personality in there for him over time – especially on that wall at

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A Deck Makeover Using Low Maintenance Outdoor Furniture

In addition to our 1400 square feet of indoor space, we’re lucky that our house also has some pretty great outdoor spaces – including a large second-story deck off of our family room. Having all of this bonus living space up in the trees has quickly become one of the “rooms” we’re most thankful for, and you’ll see why in this post. It was raining when we bought the house back in February so we didn’t spend much time out here, but you may remember this before photo that we shared along with all of the exterior before & afters back in May. You know, before we painted the house and replaced all of the

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