Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Posts by Sherry Petersik

Sherry Petersik is one half of the duo behind the award-winning home improvement and do-it-yourself design blog, Young House Love. Together, she and her husband John 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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A Teachers Lounge Makeover

Kids going back to school means that teachers and staff are going back too, so we were psyched to make their return a little brighter for one local public school who reached out to us for help with their teachers lounge. So here’s the scoop. Back in June, someone who had seen our makeover of Hudson’s room reached out to see if we’d be interested in another volunteer makeover for a good cause. The principal and the PTA’s goal was to update the teachers lounge over the summer to surprise the staff when they came back in September. Teachers and school staff are SO DESERVING, so it was an easy yes for us. While the PTA had earmarked

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Using The Same Beige Paint Color In Many Rooms

Beige gets a bad rap in the design world. It’s synonymous with bland, boring, colorless and therefore lifeless. “Nobody’s favorite color is beige,” is something we recently heard. Heck, we’ve probably snubbed it ourselves, defensively saying “oh no, this is a warm gray – or a light sand color – certainly not beige.” We even make ourselves feel better by calling it greige instead. But if we’re being honest, some of our favorite paint colors probably fall under the beige umbrella. Particularly Benjamin Moore’s Edgecomb Gray, which is slowly taking over our house, room-by-room. Ever since we first used it in our foyer, we’ve fallen hard for how it dances the line between gray and tan. Staying neutral,

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Turning Race Medals Into Christmas Ornaments

Sometimes when we mention some random side-note-y thing, that little aside surprises us by becoming the thing people want to know about more than anything else we’ve said. Take this cheeseball picture that we posted after John’s third triathlon almost two months ago on Instagram and Facebook, with the caption: “Third triathlon complete for this beast (and yes, we make Christmas ornaments for our tree from his medals, because we are nerds).” Well, we were completely surprised by how many of you guys commented about that little ornament tidbit and asked for instructions/photos/a blog post. So I’m here a mere two months later with the didn’t-ever-think-you’d-be-interested-but-I’m-game-if-you-are goods. There’s nothing like a little Christmas tutorial in July, eh? The good news is that it’s so

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Our Girl’s Bedroom Evolution

Who’s ready for the coming of age tale of a girl room, just finding its own way in this big beautiful world? Growing, changing, and living life without regrets and a whole lot of heart (*cue the romantic comedy music*). I think Reese Witherspoon should play the room. Some recent updates to our daughter’s room made us realize that this space has undergone quite the evolution since we moved in three years ago. And much like we took you through the evolution of our last house’s master bedroom, we thought it would be fun to do that in here. We’re big subscribers to the whole “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again… and again,

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A Planet & Rocket Themed Bedroom For A Little Boy

We’re sort of at a loss for how to write this post. We could approach it as your typical makeover post, complete with befores, afters, and a budget breakdown. But the room we’re sharing with you today isn’t about how dramatically it changed, how quickly it happened, or how affordable the transformation was. It’s about something much more important than any design or DIY could ever be. Which is maybe why we fear we won’t find the right words to tell you about it. But here it goes anyway. A family in our community experienced the unthinkable: their son Mason passed away very suddenly last month. He was 4. He loved preschool and superheroes. His

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Simple & Inexpensive Holiday Decorating Ideas

Crank up “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” and chug some eggnog, because we’re about to share some festive photos up in hurrrr. First up, the tree. You guys might remember that we set it up in the office the first year that we lived here. As much as we loved the effect of the lights reflecting in the bay window, we’re glad we experimented with a different spot for it (after putting my desk there last year) because we like the new location even better. As we learned last year, Christmas morning feels cozier when you’re opening presents in a living room rather than a home office. I mean, just look at how comfortable this dog is. We’re

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Feeeeeelings

This post was 3,000 words long. They all felt overly complicated and heavy and weird. I clicked delete. Then I just typed what we’re really feeling, complete with things we’ve never said out loud and even a few things we’ve never fully admitted to ourselves before. The truth is that we love you guys. Like for real. Even for the tough love. We know you say it because you care (or hopefully you did at some point), and we want you to know we care right back. We want to do a good job. We want to do this with joy and excitement. We want to inspire you. We know this is an incredible way

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Our Laundry Room Makeover

The laundry room’s finished! And we could kiss Lesley for her idea of carving out a new dedicated laundry room. It’s like it was always there! (Plus a new glass door at the end of a formerly dark hallway with light streaming in = angels singing sound effect to us). When we last checked in, things were looking a little unfinished, but it’s amazing what that last 10% can do for a room. Our first steps were to add the missing filler, baseboard, toe kick, and crown that we had accounted for when we installed the cabinets (to bridge those gaps on the side, top, and bottom). Then it was on to adding the missing

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Teddy’s Birth Story

To everyone who has been asking about Teddy’s birth story, thanks for your patience. I like to let those things simmer a little while before I write about them (Clara’s took me almost a year thanks to all of the mixed emotions I had going on) but Teddy’s birth was a lot less scary and a lot more straightforward. Thank goodness! After going through such a traumatic first birth, nothing sounded better to me than a completely routine, scheduled, no-surprises-at-all delivery this time around – which it mostly was, for which I’m SO GRATEFUL. There were still a few surprises, but the primary challenge of this birth (and the whole pregnancy process) was fending off

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Things That Didn’t Work Like I Thought They Would

Cabinet hanging continues in the laundry room (details tomorrow!) so since yesterday’s post had a giveaway worked into it (we can’t believe over 25,000 of you took the poll, John is beside himself with infographic glee), I thought I’d share a quick post about three recent redos. Sometimes things get wonky when you least expect them to, and the second time ends up being the charm (at least you hope it is). Redo #1. Our cork bulletin board in the office. Back when we made this a few months ago, we used Loctite Spray Adhesive, since the back specifically said it worked for bonding cork to wood. Well… the cork squares slowly started to pop off

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More Tile, Room Plans, & A New Door

Back to THE ROOM THAT DIDN’T EXIST A FEW WEEKS AGO. Pardon my type-screaming, but it doesn’t get much more exciting than that in my world. (Sidenote: I had a dream last night that there was a column in the newspaper called Shellac This! – all about shellacking a different piece of furniture each day – and the world was so enamored with it that normal morning conversation was “did you see what they shellacked this morning in Shellac This?” and it was getting turned into a major motion picture). We left you with a primed-&-ready picture of our new laundry room in Monday’s post, so let’s start there (we used VOC-free Kilz Premium from

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How To Pick The Best Curtain Color

As our laundry room adventures continue (priming, painting, and tile prep are in progress!) I thought it might be fun to share some virtual options that we tried on in the office (we tested out some wall ideas in Clara’s bedroom last fall and checked out a few looks for Teddy’s room about five months ago). Remember when I photoshopped some curtains and a rug into the last picture of this post about our new light and chairs? And I mentioned in the comments that West Elm had a rug sale (making the one we liked $100 off) so we pulled the trigger on it? Well, said rug has shipped and is on its way

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