Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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How We Created A Cozy Fire Pit Area In Our Formerly Boring Side Yard

We’ve been enjoying this fire pit hangout spot for months now, but it hasn’t been on the blog… until today. This is basically a lesson in how a fence can make a HUGE difference in defining an area, which can lead to adding some simple outdoor furnishings (in this case, it was four adirondak chairs and a fire pit – which hit the ground and instantly created an entirely new “outdoor room” for our whole family to enjoy). We hang out here and make s’mores at least once a week (and sometimes a lot more than that), so it has been a very welcome addition. Especially during a time when everyone is spending A LOT

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A Loveseat For The Sitting Room

A bunch of you got a sneak peek at this change thanks to Instagram Stories right after the holidays, but here’s a quick update about the new loveseat we got and what the sitting room is looking like these days. We got the loveseat on Overstock, and of course now it’s out of stock – but I did find it here and here in the darker color (ours is the “light gray” one). So far we’re loving it, and it really went a long way in making the whole area feel like a legitimate hangout space. It’s also super comfy, which is really what matters (and you know this post is going to have some

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Updating A Covered Porch With Floor Paint & A Hanging Tent

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about living here, it’s that we do a ton of living outside. Between each at-home learning break the kids are out there running around, we make s’mores at our fire pit every week or so, we sit on our front porch and watch the neighborhood dogs go by, and we often eat or hang out on the second-floor deck (we even work on our laptops up there on especially nice days – which is where I’m writing this post right now). We can really feel the house working extra hard for us thanks to the location/climate (good weather definitely encourages us to be outside a lot), but also due

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Our Kitchen & Sitting Area, Six Months In

*We updated this post to add additional pics & a video, so if you see something here that you don’t remember when you first read it, that’s why. You’re not going crazy ;) We shared this space three weeks after we moved in and now we’re back with a six month update. Much like we said in that first post, we have some long term plans for this room, so this is just what it looks like as of this moment in time (I highly recommend photographing rooms to see how they evolve because it’s so much fun to look back on). Since that three-weeks-in post, we did a series of inexpensive updates that have

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How We Decorated Our New House For The Holidays*

*Aka, the moment I’ve been waiting for since, oh, the day we moved in. There’s something extra special to me about decorating a house for your first holiday season spent there. It’s right up there with seeing whatever pops up outside during your first spring at a new house (I basically scream out the window like I’m the announcer at a football game: “over on the left it’s A PATCH OF DAFFODILS! NOBODY SAW THAT COMING!!” But back to our holiday house tour. It’s looking very sweet & festive around here. Since this move also involved some serious downsizing & simplifying (last week John shared an update on that), it promised to be an interesting

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Holiday Gift Guides For Everyone On Your List (With Stuff Under $15, and even $9)

This year we got our gift guide post up a lot sooner than usual, because we’re highlighting tons of small makers and Black-owned businesses that we love, and we want to give those shops as much lead time as possible (heck, large stores seem to need more lead time than ever these days too). We also included a handful of tried & true items from larger companies that we’ve bought and loved (like a favorite tool or family game). There’s stuff for grown-ups, kids, and a ton of budget-friendly ideas that are under $20, and even under $10 that would be great for teachers, neighbors, coworkers, or white elephant exchanges! Gifts For Grown-Ups Here’s what

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Our Florida Kitchen, Three Weeks In

Well, we’ve almost been in this house for a month. How crazy is that?! We moved on the 14th of last month and this Sunday is the 14th again! The pod is all unpacked and picked up (you can listen in here about what the heck we overpacked & then donated when we got here). It’s so crazy that a single pod of stuff can be too much – but then again, John was a pod-packing champion. Like too good at it. And going from 14 rooms to 6 (and 3150 square feet to 1400) is not a small challenge. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. This was a multiple month long undertaking. But it was

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500+ Highly Recommended Black-Owned Businesses To Support

All week on our Instagram stories we’ve been highlighting Black-owned businesses as a way that you can get involved, vote with your dollars, and show these super deserving small businesses some love. It all started because after getting personal in this post on IG and Facebook, I came across an article that said “…over the past 30 years, the US has seen a sharp decline in independent Black-owned business, and that Black women in particular face so many obstacles getting their business ventures funded.” That SUCKS! So after highlighting some of my favorite Black-owned shops, you guys started flooding my DMs with some of yours. Dozens of enthusiastically recommended shops quickly turned into hundreds, crossing

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Refinishing Pine Floors So They’re Light & Airy (Not Dark & Yellowed)

Alternate title: putting the floor in Florida. I’ll pause while you slap your knee. I’m telling you, I’ve got mom jokes for days. And speaking of days, I googled this topic for days on end. And let me tell you, finding someone who shared actual photos and an exact rundown of what floor products they used on pine floors to get the result we were aiming for was BLEAK. We were looking for a soft and light end result (not darker or more amber-toned/yellowed, which seems to be what pine likes to do, especially if it’s sealed with regular old oil based sealer – even just the clear stuff yellows it significantly). Oak floor refinishing

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The Outside Of Our Florida House: Before & Now!

You guys. I am very excited about this post. And John’s computer froze and crashed two times this morning while we were trying to work on this, and my enthusiasm STILL ENDURES, which is a good indication of just how into this I am. I’m going to try to let the pics do all the talking because I just want to get this post UP AND INTO THE WORLD! So without further ado, here is what our house looked like back in February when we offered on it. Remember it was a super rainy/overcast span of two days when we checked it out (as is our tradition of buying houses – more on that here).

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Two Final House Tour Videos (an “After Tour” & one that shows what we’re leaving behind)

Ok, this post won’t need a lot of words (famous last words from this Chatty Cathy) because the two videos in this post will do a lot of the work for us. You can just click play below to see a final “after tour” of our house, as it looked right before our real estate showings in early March (you can hear more about how those went here in this podcast episode – it was pretty crazy!). And if you have questions about paint colors or where we got something that you saw (furniture items, accessories, blinds, rugs, etc) they’re all sourced right here in this post for you. Note: You can also view this

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A (Before) Tour Of Our Florida House!

Eiiiiiiiiiiii! That’s my excited dolphin sound. I do an IMPRESSIVE impression when I’m extra hyped (according to my kids). Anyway, I’m BEYOND excited to take you on a little tour of our new house in Florida, as it looked when we first laid eyes on it back in February. As luck would have it, that was also the last time we laid eyes on it in person (thanks to our spring break trip being cancelled due to staying hunkered down at home). So it feels like a ton has changed since we were in it a few months ago – both from a global standpoint (worldwide pandemic), and also from a reno standpoint (since we

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