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 Dragon Themed Kids Birthday Party

Who smells smoke? Don’t panic, that’s just Clara’s dragon party, rollin’ into town (er, the internet?). Note: you can’t really smell this party through your computer, so if you smell smoke, please look into it. This year’s party was lower key than our last two (here’s her first birthday party, and her worm party from last year) and even though it was rainy and wet outside, eight kiddos and twelve adults jammed out inside. It was fun. And Clara made me cry. She’s just so big and sweet and hilarious and I’m the luckiest mom in the world. Plus, dragons. I mean if that’s not a trump card for a party, I’m not sure what

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How To Make A Whole House To Do List

Exciting times guys. Operation Ditch The Blue Trim is currently in progress! So while we sweat our way through un-blue-ing things on the second floor – that’s four bedrooms, a nice long hallway, and at least 10 doors – we thought it was high time we shared our master to-do list for the new house (and for anyone jonesing for trim-painting info/photos, we hope to finish up and be back with a full report for you on Wednesday). These posts came about when people asked how we organize all the stuff we have on our to-do list. We explained that we basically have one long run-on document that we update as we go. Folks kept

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Pricing And Picking Oak Hardwood Flooring

Let’s talk about wood, shall we? As we mentioned on Tuesday, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs along with the stairs themselves have a nice medium toned oak already (pretty similar to the hardwoods in our first house that ended up being super dog/kid friendly). As for where to get it, first we looked on craigslist to see if anyone had a large quantity of something in the right tone/amount (no dice) and then we headed to Lumber Liquidators, since we’ve had luck with them when it came to buying hardwood floors for half of our first house back in 2007

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How To Draw Floor Plans With Floorplanner.com

Just like our first house floor plan and our current house floor plan from yesteryear, a bunch of you have requested a new house floor plan. So here ya go! They definitely help visual people like us see what walls are where, and what flows into what. So we whipped this up with floorplanner.com (which is, as the name might suggest, a free floor planning site). One big difference from the last two floor planning posts that we shared? This time there’s a second level. Who’s got two thumbs and a set of stairs? This girl. The funny thing is that when we shared a video tour of the new house, some people said “wow,

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How To Remove Carpet & Prep For Hardwood Floors

Dude, removing wall to wall carpeting (and all the layers under it) is no joke. We learned that when we finally tackled that task this weekend – and lived to tell the tale. Let me just tell you, progress smells a lot better than old carpeting. Even when there’s a substantial amount of sweat involved… When we bought this house we knew that the four bedrooms upstairs (along with the hallway) needed new flooring since the once-cream (now mostly tan) wall to wall carpets were stained, threadbare, and even holey in some areas. Thankfully a few areas were so loose we could peek under them during our very first walk-through to see what we were

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How To Paint Exterior Siding

Remember back when we debated painting the siding on the front porch way back here in fall 2011? Hence the creepy Halloween wreath on the door. We had picked a color and everything (Flagstone by Martha Stewart – the one on the right in the photo above) but before we got around to doing it, the temperatures dropped too much to paint. Then the test swatches – which lived on our porch for several months (sorry neighbors) got painted over when it was time to shoot book photos out there. The project literally became out of sight, and out of mind. Then we redid the columns. And when we did a few of you guys

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How To Hang Window Boxes

Word up my fellow Pinterest playas. Hope you got down with some baking, crafting, painting, organizing, sewing, building, or knitting fun because it’s time to share this season’s (completely unofficial) Pinterest Challenge (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie to make us stop pinning and start doing). The only rule is to pin something you’ve wanted to get done (big or small) and do it. You know, instead of sitting on your duff pinning other things… which I’ll admit happens a whole lot in my world. Our mission this season? Window boxes! I actually pinned two window-box related pics, this picture just for the eye candy of it (at $90+

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Planning A Dragon Birthday Party

In keeping with our annual tradition, we thought we’d give you a peek at Clara’s invitation and a few of our party supplies like we did last year and the year before. And since a lot of you are trying to guess the theme that she picked this year (after choosing worms last year)… well… say hello to our little dragon. The dragon theme came about a bit more gradually than last year’s theme, which was born from her worm-laden dreams. Somewhere between declaring that the book Dragons Love Tacos is her favorite (we even read it to her preschool class last month) and frequently requesting to wear her dragon cape around the house – it

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A Video Tour Of Our New House

Now that we’re wrapping things up at our current house and we’ve spilled the new house beans it’s like we’ve finally given ourselves permission to LOSE. OUR. MINDS. So yeah, this new house video tour is full of chirpy excitement that only a home in your dream neighborhood can produce. Forgive me. It’s not a good look. And watching it produces the same embarrassment that my way-too-enthusiastic mom elicited back in high school. Which confirms that I’m turning into her. Uh oh… Woop, there it is. The first set of stairs we ever owned, and the house that’s attached to them. A few notes: I’m not awkward at all in the beginning. We used John’s

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New House Q & A

Holy cow did you guys have questions about the whole selling/moving/buying process since yesterday’s little announcement! So we decided an FAQ post would answer as many as we could. We originally planned to share it tomorrow but you guys are still sending questions our way so furiously that we decided to share this guy today and our regularly scheduled DIY post will go up in the morning. So heeeeeeeere we go! #warningitslong Q: Will you sell your current house by owner like you did with your first house? Since it worked out so well for us last time, we’d love to! So other than possibly paying a few hundred dollars to have it listed on

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Let’s Get A Little Spring Mojo Up In Here

First of all, I’m sending a huge wet internet kiss (yup, you’ll need to wipe your mouth afterwards) to everyone for their awesome excitement and kind words about yesterday’s announcement. We’re freakishly giddy to share this new chapter of our lives with you guys. There may have been misty eyes going on… Speaking of sniffling, can you smell that smell? It’s spring Pinterest Challenge time (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie Bower to make us stop pinning and start doing). The whole thing started nearly two years ago when Katie called me to say that she thought we should challenge ourselves to make one thing each season that’s inspired

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Fab Freebie: Party Time

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** The randomly selected party girl (or guy) this week is… Mackenzie (who said “In 2 weeks I am attending a welcome home party for the return of two very close friends who just got done completing service in The Dominican Republic through The Peace Corp!”). Congrats! Clara’s turning three in two short weeks, which means our minds are shifting into birthday party mode. And to get the celebration started early, we’re dishing out $500 worth of festive party supplies to one lucky winner. First we have $250 to SmashCake And Co, where you can stock up on everything from pretty paper straws to

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