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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Bathroom Drawer Organization

Dude, meet our disaster drawer. I know you guys already got a preview of him yesterday, but you know how a horror movie has that dun-dun-duuuuun sound effect? This drawer needs one too. It’s that bad. Like “what wild animal got in there and rooted around?” bad. So in the name of organization week (and general sanity) it was about time we got on it.   The issue is that we don’t have a medicine cabinet, thanks to the window in front of the sink, as demonstrated by this pic from our House Tour page. The drawer in front of the sink is actually a false drawer, so we can’t use that one for additional

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How To Organize Kid Clutter

OK, it’s day two of our organizing week and we’re currently working on our crazy sink drawer that we shared yesterday. In the meantime, this isn’t one of those organizing play by plays with before, during, and after pics (that’s this afternoon’s post) it’s more a full breakdown of a system that works for us when it comes to taming the Clara-phernalia that threatens to take over our house. Around twice a week we get a question like: “can you do a post about how your organize Clara’s stuff? I could really use some ideas on how to control the chaos!” So here’s the rundown. In the beginning it was pretty simple. She was little

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Organizing The Whole House, One Cabinet At A Time

You Down With O-R-G? Yeah You Know Me. Yes, that’s a Naughty By Nature reference. But why O-R-G? That’s $herdog’s abbreviation for organizing. I’ve gotta be honest. Our house hasn’t been this trashed/chaotic/messy since we moved in 16 months ago. Seriously, I’m not talking about a little dist around the baseboards or some streaks on the windows, I’m talking about serious stuff like not being able to locate anything in our completely ridiculous sink drawer: So although we have two entire sections of our Projects page dedicated to cleaning and organizing posts of yore, there hasn’t been much of that going on lately. At all. It all started to fall apart back in Jan/Feb during three

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Cloth Diapering Review

There’s a vicious cycle going on. We blog about something and then we live with it. And while we do, we tackle other stuff and blog about that. Lather, rinse, repeat. So we’re not always good about keeping you posted on those older things that we’ve already talked about since we’re so busy gabbing about new stuff. Which probably explains why we get asked for updates on a handful of things nearly every day. In other words: it’s about darn time we followed up. So here’s a nice juicy post full of a bunch of those updates for everyone. Cloth diapers: Believe it or not, we’re still using the very same original 12 cloth diapers

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How To Spray Paint Upholstered Chairs

Yup. I spray painted chairs. Upholstered chairs. Dude, I’m the first to admit it’s weird. And it’s definitely not the answer if you’re sane. But when you’re a desperate woman with nothing to lose, well… stuff happens. Remember these Craigslist chairs we found last March? They were originally from an old hotel (with faded and stained eighties fabric to prove it) but we got them for $25 a pop. Then I tried to paint them a soft apple green color like a tutorial I’d seen, but didn’t have as much luck (read more on that hot-mess here). We were set on green for a while (not this neon of course) until we realized it’s a

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Busted (My Run In With Eminem)

Ok, so I naively thought this day would never come, but I have been busted. I mistakenly believed that I could get through my adult life without this being brought up 13 years later, but people are smart and the internet is wide. So after more than a few “Who me? I don’t know what you’re talking about, haha” comment denials, I’m coming clean. My name is Sherry $herdog, and I was on MTV when I was 17. And it was easily the most embarrassing compilation of moments that could ever be edited together. I’m an over-sharer, so some folks might wonder why I’d try to hide from this video. And to you I’d say:

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Selling A Kohler Toilet On Craigslist

Remember the almond toilet that came with our master bedroom (which we recently switched out for a taller and cleaner-looking white one)? Well, for a while the old almond guy – who looks oddly white in this picture below – just sat in our entryway. What, is that weird? The reason? We decided to try our hand at Craigslisting it. Once John found out it was an over $1300 (!!!) toilet by Kohler (more on that here) he was convinced we could get some money for it from someone in search of an upscale almond toilet. You’d be amazed what people buy on Craigslist by the way. And a few days later… we sold it!

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Clearing A Path To Our Front Door

Let’s do the path (I’m not good at math, but digging up a path, I can do). And John’s good at both. Overachiever, much? Anyway, this is just a photo from before we started working on the garden beds on either side of the porch (more on that here and here) so you can see how that clump of bushes in front of the porch was kind of weird and reversed. Don’t you think plants on either side of the porch would look nice and balanced while the path to the door and the porch should be more open and airy instead of crowded by overgrown boxwoods? It was like things were backwards. Business in

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Listy McListerson (Updated)

Psst- For everyone asking what we did for Easter and what Clara found in her basket – check out those details here on Young House Life. Brace yourself. This post is full of a whole lotta words. So feel free to skim. Or read this in one sentence intervals over the next two years. Haha. This actually came about when people asked how we organize all the stuff we have on our to-do list. We explained that we basically just have one long run-on document, and when folks kept asking us to share it (and update it as we went along), it sounded like our idea of a good time. So it’s high time that

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Planting A River Birch Tree

No? Me either. But it’s coming. Slowly but surely. After tackling the area to the right of the porch, next on the ol’ to-do list was: the area to the left of the porch the side lot next to our house (a giant valley full of moist soil that we want to naturalize into a pretty forest) But before we get to the planting bed next to the porch, we wanted to share this gorgeous sight courtesy of the side lot: Just kidding. Unless by gorgeous we mean just-one-reason-we-hang-our-heads-in-shame-when-neighbors-walk-by. Those are old clumps of grasses that we were told to cut back each March so it’ll grow in nice and fresh and clean this year.

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From Christmas Mantel & Halloween Mantel To Spring Mantel

Having a fireplace in the kitchen is definitely something that we think is charming (it’s the heart of the home, and even though it’s not functional, just tucking a basket of Clara’s toys or books in there and having a spot to display stuff above the mantel is our idea of a good time). Well, maybe I should say it’s my idea of a good time, since I’m pretty sure John could commit to whatever we have up there at any given time for the next ten years. I, on the other hand, like to turn surfaces like the mantel into a rotating display or sorts. Not every day or even every few weeks, but

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Planting A Dwarf Pieris Japonica Variagated Tree

Yup, we’ve been digging. And my arms are sore. But they don’t look like Madonnas yet so it couldn’t have been that bad. We still have a ton of things to do outside, so this is one of those it’ll-take-years-things, and not a ta-da-here’s-the-after-by-the-end-of-the-post things, but it’s nice to focus on one small area at a time to keep from getting overwhelmed (last year we limbed up the magnolia, transplanted/removed a lot of the bushes, and painted the front door). And for this installment of Petersiks Vs. Wild, we tackled the sad little garden bed to the right of the front porch: If you look closely, you’ll see what looks like a rectangular brick patio

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