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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Picking A Color For Our Metal Stools

Me + a picture of our kitchen + photoshop = this post. Back in December when we bought our kitchen stools (from a school supply store for $32 a pop) we mentioned we were entertaining a number of ways to tweak them down the line (painting them, upholstering/staining the seat, etc) but just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should live with them a while first – just to make sure we weren’t doing anything rash in the middle of a kitchen remodel. We basically wanted the room to come together, live with them a little, and then make the call. It was actually really nice how they tied into the stainless appliances, felt kind

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How To Organize Takeout Menus

Duuude, let’s go boarding. Clipboarding, that is. I’m not coordinated enough to tackle a surfboard, skateboard, or a snowboard, but this I can handle. And it can definitely be considered a Dude, Get On That Already project, because this old clipboard hails from the playroom, where I plopped it down among the ceramic animal chaos and said to myself: “I’ll do something cute with this later.” But soon I forgot all about it and fall turned into winter and now it’s late spring and completely time to get on it. It was a favor from a bridal shower I attended last fall (it was what we all used to play bride-quiz-games, and since the host

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Switching Out Bedroom Rugs & Accessories

We did a little more bedroom noodling. Noodling, not canoodling. *Blush* Anyway, we last left off after moving our Alaskan prints together over the bed and surprising ourselves by getting a new rug: And there were a few commonly asked bedroom questions in the 800+ comments on Monday’s post, which were: have you considered getting larger bedside tables? can the bed go on another wall? will you repaint? maybe in a darker color? what are your plans for the nook to the left of the bed? what about changing out the pillows/painting the bed & tables/getting a longer bench/switching the lamps, etc? The short answers to those are: yes but it’s complicated, no, we’re open

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Window Shopping At Target

“Would love to see another post about your favourite finds at Target. They’re coming to Canada and I’m so giddy I could piddle! Love your blog!” – Jaye It’s been way too long since our last window shopping adventure (10 months?!?!), so to everyone who has been requesting them (especially if you used the word piddle), we’re psyched to share the goods. For those who remember these things, we just stroll around a store (we’ve done big chains, small local shops, and even random little stores that we find while road tripping) and take photos of all of the things we love. Not for compensation or anything – these sprees are just for fun. So

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How To Get A Wool Rug For Cheap

As we mentioned here, the bedroom is “still looking rough and we’re not sure about a lot of things – just waiting for inspiration to strike – which might involve repainting and rearranging furniture along with refinishing the floors”). We even elaborated a bit in the comments when folks started asking what we meant by that or if we hated the current color by saying: “We love the paint color but something is off about the bedroom and we’re not sure we can rule anything out – including the paint color. Everything is a suspect until proven innocent. Haha. Something is limiting us, so we’re not opposed to changing that thing once we pin it

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Decorating A Dollhouse

Hold onto your miniature hats, it’s time for the fun part of painting and personalizing the dollhouse! Our last post was full of the building process, which you can see by (clicking here) – so let’s move on to how we finished everything off. After it was all assembled, it was time to schlep our 31″ x 31″ creation up into the sunroom for some priming and painting. Just like our office cabinets, kitchen cabinets, and the play kitchen we made for Clara, I used a coat of Zinsser Smart Prime (it’s no-VOC but amazingly good for blocking bleed through when you’re painting raw or stained wood) followed by two coats of Bejamin Moore’s low-VOC Advance paint (really

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How To Cut Your Man’s Hair

Let’s talk about DIY haircuts, shall we? This is one of those posts I never thought I’d write (it’s definitely not very home related) but due to a surprising amount of requests, here it is. I guess anything that has to do with saving money and doing something yourself is fair game, right? I have no idea how I got into cutting people’s hair, but throughout high school and college I just played around, cutting off a guy’s mullet here and giving my BFF a super short pixie cut there (all at my “client’s” requests, of course). Why did they trust me? I have no idea. Maybe I just have a trustworthy face? I most

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A Worm Themed Birthday Party

Aw, yeah. Clara’s second b-day party was full of food, family, friends, fun… and worms (she picked the theme based on her deep love of looking at, drawing, and even dreaming about worms). So… worm to your motha! We were so thankful to be surrounded by the people we love, the bean had the best time, and the 75 degree weather and sunny skies were the icing on the worm cake. Or should I say worm cupcakes. Let’s get this party (breakdown) started… But let’s start at the beginning. Clara was born two years ago today. Wait, that’s too far back. Let’s just cover the party. Here’s the sunroom all decked out for the big

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DIYing vs. Living In Your Home & Enjoying It

Q: Since you decorate/upgrade/reno your house for a living, do you ever feel like you are always working on your house but not ever getting to just live in it and enjoy it? Like when you spend all day cooking in the kitchen by dinnertime you aren’t hungry and don’t even want to eat half the time. If something (like your house) is never quite done and there’s a to do list longer than the purchase contract, is it hard to just peacefully sit without always thinking about the next project and thereby giving yourself low level anxiety? Or….am I the anxious one which is why this even occurred to me? – Rach A: Haha,

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Planning A Worm Themed Birthday Party

As we mentioned for a hot minute back in this post, Clara picked her party theme this year. What does she love more than monkeys, ice cream, firetrucks, and the mailman? Worms. So the first thing on the party agenda was settling on a date (this Saturday the 12th, two days before her actual b-day on the 14th) and figuring out the guest list (our closest family and friends totaling about 30 people, ten who are kiddos under the age of four). Then it was the fun part. Invitations! We made three versions of them before picking our favorite (yes, making invitations is our idea of a good time). For the first one we used

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Calling Miss Utility Before Building A Deck

We were busy bees this weekend. And as some of you noticed in yesterday’s post, in the picture where John was playing the role of the deck, we had already started to clear out the liriope/weeds/bushes that were going on in our future-deck spot. You might remember that we started with this: The first step was to call Miss Utility to make sure digging things up and building a deck wouldn’t endanger ourselves (or our house) by potentially hitting an electrical line or a water pipe or any other booby trap that might be lurking below the dirt. Thankfully we got the all clear. So we transplanted that big bush (seen above hugging the side

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Simplifying Our House & Living With Less

It’s easy to crave less. Less to buy. Less to clean. Less to store. Less to chose from. Less to throw away. And we’re those people who get a rush from consolidating two items down to one or earning more space in the drawer/cabinet/closet by paring down, so this is our idea of a good time (why buy ten bottles to do ten things when one product can do it all?). Three years ago I wrote a post about how we try to keep things simple in small ways, so after more than a few requests for an update/extended list, here it is. Happily, three years after embarking on Project Simplify, we probably have fewer

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