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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Pondering Layout Ideas For A New House

Since a bunch of you guys have requested more details on what layout changes we’re pondering and what paint colors we’re currently leaning towards, we thought we’d share a giant brain dump about what’s flying around in our heads at the moments (which will change as we go I’m sure!). Y’all ready for this? Lots o’ words. Lots o’ diagrams. Lots o’ links. Please fasten your blog-reading seatbelts and be sure that your desk chair is in its upright and locked position. This is what the first floor looked like when we bought our house (we’ve since removed the three sets of the double doors off of the kitchen).  But here’s what we’re thinking we’d

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Painting The Back Of Your Front Door A Bold Color

Alternate post title: Paint Me Like One Of Your French Girls. Yes, much like Rose once begged Jack, the dusty blue back of our front door was just begging to be painted (ok, so Rose said “draw me like one of your French girls” but it’s close enough). The new paint color of choice? The same happy teal tone that’s on the front of it. There’s no hard and fast rule about carrying the color that’s on the front of the door back around to the inside of it (in our last two houses we chose bright colors on the front and plain old white for the back) – but for the first time ever

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House Crashing: Calming & Clever

Psst- Sorry about yesterday’s truncated post, Reader users. There was some bad code in a video we embedded (we like to feed full posts, so if you ever see a shortened one, something wonky’s going on). We’re painting something again today! Who’s surprised? Anybody? Nobody? We’ll be back with the goods tomorrow, but in the meantime we thought this house tour was so charming and creative that we had to share it. It’s a great example of a someone buying a house and just going for it, without being even a little afraid to make it theirs. And if there’s one thing that we’ve learned in this whole home-making journey of ours, it’s that the

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How To Paint Trim Without A Paint Sprayer

“I’m Blue Da Ba Dee Dabba Da-eeeeee” (anyone remember that song?). Picture us maniacally singing it while priming and painting trim for hours days. We’re slowly losing our minds, but we’re having fun doing it. Please feel free to click over and jam out so we feel less alone (and slightly less certifiable). Ok, so when we last left our hero, er, our foyer, he was sporting some snazzy blue trim. We had stripped down all the wallpaper, and had also removed two closet doors and the bathroom door so we could take them out to the garage and use our paint sprayer to apply a coat of primer and two coats of white semi

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How To Use A Steamer To Remove Wallpaper

Things are getting steamy in the foyer! As a refresher, we have five rooms full of wallpaper and we’re attempting to take five different removal methods for a spin, just to see what ends up working (and what bites the big one). For our first time at the wallpaper removing rodeo we used hot water and a spray bottle, which actually worked out pretty well. And in this week’s hard-hitting Wallpaper Exposé we’ll be tackling the foyer with this guy. His name? Steamer. His game? Steaming clothes. He’s actually John’s sister’s, but it was free to borrow and we thought we’d see how it worked out for wallpaper too. But first, a moment of silence

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Priming & Painting The Bathroom

When we last shared our hall bathroom adventures, we had removed the old wallpaper and were left with this: Not only were the yellowed walls crying out for a fresh coat of paint, the mirror had some functional deficiencies. As in, John couldn’t see his whole face when he looked into it. Just about anything from the nose up was cut off, so while he could still perform is-there-something-in-my-teeth checks, if he was having a Something About Mary hair moment (uh, but not for that reason) he wouldn’t have even known. Beyond having a too-small mirror, the other issue was that the light fixture drooped about 8″ from the area that it connected to the

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How To Pick A Color And Paint Your Front Door

“The door is the smile of the house.” John likes to make strange declarations like that. For example, after talking about how both bacon and mustaches were trending, he once proclaimed that “the mustache is the bacon of the face, and bacon is the mustache of breakfast.” But back to the front door. Our first house had a red door. Our second house had a yellow door. And our new house has a…. Yup, it’s a happy little blue door. It’s sort of a peacock meets teal with enough gray to keep it from going neon when the sun hits it. When it came to picking the shade, first we taped up a bunch of

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How To Add Shine To Dull Hardwood Floors

Whoops, I almost forgot to tell you about how I scrubbed and re-sealed the existing hardwoods right before we moved in (literally, like 26 hours before we moved in). The new hardwoods upstairs were looking so glossy, I didn’t want the ones in the office, living room, and dining room to feel so 2000 and late. So I gave them some love. Wax on, wax off, baby. First I swept up the random dust and old faux Christmas tree leaves and all the other stuff that was left behind. Not a bad pile for an empty looking room, eh? Then I bought this Bona stuff at Home Depot because I had heard good things about

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Picking A New Siding Color & Updating Our Exterior Trim

As if all the blue and mauve trim on the inside of the house isn’t enough, we had some outside trim that needed some attention. When we bought this house we knew we had four major things to deal with: the roof and the furnace, a few bad trees, and this last bear: some rotting areas of siding and trim that needed to be replaced along with a fresh paint job for the whole house. But at least we knew about all of them going into the house purchase (and the first two didn’t end up draining our wallets) – so maybe that softened the blow a little? Speaking of soft, I give you… our

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One Month In

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been here a month! And let’s not sugar coat things… this house is looking pretty crazy right now. Blue trim out the wazoo, wallpaper at every turn, bright salmon living room walls, old carpeting that still covers the stairs & our closet, and a whole lot of furniture that we just plopped down on moving day (so it’s safe to assume that nothing is staying where it is for the long haul, this is just where it landed). On one hand it’s like “moving day literally feels like yesterday” but on the other hand, in a few rooms (especially the ones upstairs), we’re like “wow, it’s hard to remember

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So, There’s A Big Tree That’s Way Too Close To The House

In the words of Cher… “If I could tuuuuuuuuurn back tiiiiiiiime. If I could fiiiiiiiiiind a waaaaaaaay. I’d plant this pretty oak tree not on top of the house.” No doubt it started out a lot smaller, but it grew, and with it grew the danger of it messing with our house. So when the home inspector crawled out from having assessed the roots and their proximity to the foundation, we were sad (but not surprised) to hear him say “this tree has got to go.” Even if we could somehow do a root-growth-suppression-rain-dance to get them to avoid the house’s foundation, we couldn’t deny that about 50% of the tree’s canopy was precariously suspended

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Using Hot Water To Strip Wallpaper

Send out the ravens! (yes, that’s a Game of Thrones reference). Wallpaper stripping has commenced. I was actually really excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal project, because I am a strange breed of human and that’s my idea of a good time. And since we have five rooms full of wallpaper (the foyer, the half bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, and our bathroom), I decided that I would try a different removal method for each one and report back with the pros/cons about each approach as I went, all in the hopes of sussing out which ones bite the big one and which ones seem to work the best. I’m telling you

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