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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Finishing The Office Makeover

Our office continues to creep towards the finish line (tortoise style) with the addition of an overhead light… … and new desk chairs. You might recognize the light because it’s none other than the one we used to have hanging in our kitchen (loosely meeting both the “old” and “borrowed” criteria from this post’s title). We loved the light itself, but mentioned a few times in the comments that after living with it for a little while, we weren’t sure we loved it as much as we initially thought we would in the kitchen. So we figured we’d try it in the office. The second it was up, we were sold. It feels polished and

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How To Hang And Hem Curtains

This isn’t as exciting as our big laundry room reno (nothing is!) but let’s talk about curtains for a second. Remember when our bedroom was all naked and afraid? (Sidenote: if you’re not watching that show, you should be). We added frames and hung curtains at the same time, but it took us way longer to actually finish said curtains. We knew we wanted nice white linen-like ones for our dark-walled bedroom, and had heard a lot of good things about the Lenda curtains from Ikea around blogland (they’re their nicer/thicker white curtains with a convincing linen-looking weave, as opposed to the cheaper/thinner/breezier ones we’ve tried in previous houses). After seeing – and feeling –

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How To Cover A Wall With Fabric

Favorite project ever! Ok, I probably say that to myself every month or two, but this one might reign supreme for a while. Especially in the small/easy division (our sunroom reno and Teddy’s built-ins might have given it competition if it fell into the heavy-duty upgrade category, but there’s no way it belongs there because it was so simple). Ladies & gentlemen (gentleman?), I give you… Clara’s closet: I’ve been obsessed with the idea of covering the back wall of Clara’s closet with something fun for a while, especially since images like this inspired me to add some playful to make it feel more like a little hideaway within her room. Right after we moved

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Celebrating Seven Years Of Marriage

Every year we like to celebrate our “I Do”s by doing stuff, like recreating our wedding menu, taking a day trip near our engagement spot, cooking up one of our favorite honeymoon meals or even taking a big ol’ trip to Hawaii. This year was no different as we continued some of our anniversary traditions (like our annual picture, which a bunch of you asked about) and we threw in a couple of new celebrations too, like showing our wedding video to Clara for the first time. It was kind of comical because we realized we had no other way to watch it than on the miniscule screen of John’s old camcorder, so we were

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Buying A Teil Duncan Painting For Our Anniversary

As of Monday, John and I have been married for seven years. Or a hand and two fingers, as Clara likes to joke (“what’s seven?… A HAND AND TWO FINGERS!” *maniacal laughter*). As you can imagine, when you get married on 7/7/07, your seventh anniversary feels like a special one. The golden birthday of anniversaries, if you will. We went to Hawaii for our fifth anniversary, and have always thought we’d end up going somewhere awesome for our seventh (Australia is the ultimate dream – maybe for our tenth – but for lucky seven we were thinking about somewhere in the Caribbean). But as this summer approached we realized the last thing we wanted to

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How To Convert A Lamp Into A Pendant Light

After over a year of living without one, another bedroom has been upgraded to have a ceiling light fixture – and this time it’s Teddy’s room. Woo to the hoo guys. It’s the best thing ever. I know that sounds like an overstatement, but you don’t know how convenient ceiling light fixtures are until you buy a house without any in all of the rooms upstairs except for the bathrooms. When I saw this stick light on Joss & Main I thought it was fun and beachy-yet-geometric. And call me crazy, but I immediately looked at it and saw a ceiling pendant. To make sure I wasn’t being weird, I ran the idea of converting

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Adding Overhead Lighting & Extra Outlets

Yes, that’s an electric slide reference. And I’d bet money that it’s cracking my mom up while my brother is rolling his eyes and vowing never to read this blog again. Let’s talk about electrical updates, like hanging a new capiz chandelier in the bedroom, and putting our heads together to gain a few bonus outlets and cut down on drywall holes while running electrical wiring. After last week’s post about our four new outdoor sconces, we mentioned we had some other wiring work done inside at the same time, so here’s the rundown on everything we added, where it went, and how much it all cost. We’ll start with the prettiest result so far

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How Our Ardex Concrete Counters Are Holding Up

You guys have been curious about everything from how our concrete counters are wearing and how our refinished foyer grout is holding up to how our new blogging schedule is working for us. And since we’re not always great at updating you guys (blogging tends to follow an “on to the next thing!” pattern), here’s a big ol’ rundown, which marks the third one in this series (here’s our first one and our second one so you can check out if we covered other topics you’ve wondered about there). Our Ardex-concrete counters: These guys have largely been awesome, and our sealer choice has made them even more durable than we expected. For example, we thought we’d

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Picking The Best Egg Chair For The Back Porch

Since I’m Genetically One-Quarter Egg Chair… (John described me that way in this post, and it made me laugh because let’s face it, it’s true). I’m also one-quarter dog fur (it’s always all over me) and one-quarter ceramic animal (no further explanation required). How quickly this post got off track. Anyway, now that we have a sofa and a coffee table on our back porch, the next thing on our list was a little more seating to round out that side of the room in the form of a comfy chair. Our first option was just to buy the $749 chair that matches our sofa. We liked that it would definitely tie into the color/look of

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Fab Freebie: Shine Bright Like A Diamond

How does $500 towards new lighting for anyone in the world sound? We’ve added four new additions to our lighting collection at Shades of Light, so we figured a giveaway was a fun way to introduce them to you guys. Nearly a year and a half ago when we launched our first collection with them (more on that here), we knew we wanted a cool flush mount light (you know, to fight the good fight against boob lights everywhere), which was solved with the Diamond Ceiling Light. And our yearning for a geometric table lamp was remedied with the Metal Strap Lamp Base. We also added another larger scale hanging option to the mix (these

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Our House’s Original Owners

One of our favorite posts in our entire archive is this one about hearing from our first house’s original owners. It was so much fun to see photos of their family in our house back in the 60’s, and we studied every inch of each picture and relished every detail that they shared in their letter. We were also friendly with the people who sold us our second house, so although we never heard from the original owners, it was really great to know the sellers who had lived there for 22 years! So we always hoped to hear from the original owners of our current house. For a while… nothing. And then it happened!

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Organizing Our Home Office

As promised, we’re back with the details of how we organized the six new shelves and eight new drawers in our office, along with the drawers in my floating desk and the filing/printer cabinet on the other side of the room. In other words: what went where. It’s awesome to have so much more storage space, both out in the open and behind closed doors, so let’s spin over to the left and face our new desk/bookcase wall first. Here are the animated GIFs that John mentioned on Monday. You were on the edge of your seat for these, right? Or were you excited about donuts? I can’t remember. Here’s the bookcase to the left

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