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 Kitchen Makeover With Penny Tile And Open Shelves

Ok, we’re calling it. The kitchen is officially done! Of course that’s a lie and we still have a bunch of little things to complete, like: adding decorative molding to the back of the peninsula adding a message center/chalk board to the side of the pantry adding the last of the transitions/reducers to finish the floors (and that rectangle of fireplace tile) replacing the broken light in the fireplace area – most likely with a spotlight that washes down the fireplace wall adding some sort of window treatment (colorful roman shade?) over the sink And of course we dream of refinishing the surrounding oak floors to match the dark mocha cork in the kitchen so

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Our Benjamin Moore Collection Of Favorite Paint Colors

Aw yeah, you know we love a good Britney reference. And you know we love painting (walls, paneling, brick, large ceramic roosters…). A big part of that is picking a paint color. Paint chips are kind of like potato chips to us (we can’t pop just one), and Benjamin Moore has been our snack of choice for a while now. Their color catalog is massive so it’s no wonder we’ve used their tones in nearly every room (Sesame in the kitchen, Moonshine in the living room and dining room, Proposal in Clara’s room, and Dragonfly on the back of our dining room built-ins). Then we used their Advance paint when it came to painting our

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Floating Vases On The Wall

This week my little Dude Get On That Already project involves three floating vases (from CB2 four years ago, but they still sell them) that used to hang right outside our first house’s kitchen. Then, you guessed it, they got stashed in our playroom after we moved, never to be heard from again. Until now! Behold: Yup, I tapped three nails into the wall in the guest bathroom and they’re now officially three more things that are off the floor in the cluttered playroom. Three grocery store blooms work for now, but when they bite the big one, I’m sure they’ll get replaced with leafy branches and other stuff pillaged from the backyard. This is

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Replacing Broken Penny Tile

Tweakity-tweak-tweak. That’s the sound of a little course correction that went on in our house last night. See, our kitchen underwent a little bracket redux. Yup, after taping things off, photoshopping them, and then (ahh!) drilling right through our wall of tile to install our brackets, we were completely sold on their spacing, which we landed on because: Functionally, that’s where the wall studs were We thought keeping the same distance between the brackets on each side of the hood would create balance on an unbalanced wall But then we lived with them for a while and more things kept going into the kitchen (new lighting, a new dishwasher, new art, new floors) and with

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How To Make A Beanbag Pouf

It’s Wednesday the 14th… so 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). I actually tackled a homemade beanbag for Clara’s closet, which I mentioned last Wednesday when Katie, Erin, and Cassie and I issued our little get-off-our-bums-and-make-something challenge. As are the rules, I took inspiration (or Pintspiration, har-har) from the projects below and then I did my own spin. Which added up to this comfy little bean-bag… … for the bean to plop down on… … or the pooch to hang out on… … or for a toddler reading to a chihuahua…

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House Crashing: Elegant And Fresh

We shared a smidge of Kirsten’s amazing house in last week’s Portland post just to get you excited, but here’s the whole House Crashing monty for ya. The exterior of her and her husband Kyle’s house is a rich gray color and the porch has the most amazing over-sized white corbels on either side of the door (note: house numbers have been changed to protect the innocent). Here’s a shot o the outside of the house from further away (wish we had been able to see it in all of its spring/summer glory when more is in bloom). When you walk inside, there’s a charming little entryway directly across from the door between the dining

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A Cork Floor In The Kitchen

Hootie hooo! The cork floor in both the kitchen and the laundry room is complete! Well, except if you count the fact that we still have to add shoe molding, thresholds, and seal it all. Details, details. The point is, we finally get to see the whole picture. Huzzah! The annoying part is that we still haven’t figured out how to photograph it as true to life as we can (it’s a rich mocha color, and actually looks more like brown leather in person, so the pattern is more like soft movement and less like any sort of obvious shapes or anything) – but the two videos from the last post really are the most

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Traveling To Maui, Hawaii With A Toddler

Since we took waaaaaaay too many pictures of our six night stay in Maui, we did our best to go through them all and majorly pare them down – but it still adds up to two posts (you know we like to over-share). We wish we could have taken you all with us in our suitcase, so I guess the next best thing is posting all about it. In this one, we’ll cover: where we stayed where we ate our “neighborhood” how we saved money And in the next post we’ll detail: all of the activities/adventures that we tackled while we were there (with a toddler in tow) the home-related purchase we made to remember

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Can You Smell That Smell?

Yup, the faint smell of bacon, spray paint, and sweat can only mean one thing… it’s Pinterest Challenge time (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie Bower to make us stop pinning and start doing). So let’s do this thing, people. Let’s do it together. In bikinis (let’s be honest, bikinis haven’t been an option for me since having Clara). It all started last June when Katie called me to say that she thought we should challenge ourselves to make one thing each season that’s inspired by all the gorgeous stuff that we’ve pinned (and call it… wait for it… The Pinterest Challenge). It’s a welcome slap of stop-pinning-and-start-doing. Because

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How To Spray Paint A Wood Box

This week’s first project for my little self-imposed Dude Get On That Already challenge is small – but it’s not animal related (so that’s something, right?!). It actually involves a fifty cent wood box that I found at Goodwill about three months ago and then… you guessed it… stuffed it into our playroom, never to be seen again. Until now. Here’s the only before picture that I shot with blue spray paint in it before deciding not to go blue… Nope, I didn’t go gray either- that’s just primer. Yup… I went yellow! I still had some leftover from this horse head bookend makeover of yore, and I thought it would look like a little

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Why We Chose A Cork Floor

Why? Because we’re crazy. And coming home to a partially-finished floor is our idea of a good time. You think we’re kidding, but getting a jump on our cork floors by starting to lay them before we left for Portland/Hawaii wasn’t half bad. Heck, returning from paradise to the idea of finishing them and enjoying a rich, glorious mocha floor is downright titillating to nerds like us. They snap together and float over our old vinyl floors (which have an asbestos liner, so we followed safety recommendations and didn’t tear those up before laying the cork). And the floating aspect of our new snap-and-lock flooring means that our house sitters can just step on the

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Guess Where We Are?!

Last Monday, a surprise snowstorm (in the middle of a super mild winter) made for this picture out of our living room widow:   And Clara went outside and had fun doing this:   Fast forward about a week, and our view looks more like this:   And Clara’s sporting a different kind of outfit:   Yup, true to our anniversary resolution, we snuck off to Maui, Hawaii to celebrate finishing our book, our impending five year anniversary (in July), turning 30 (I will in March and John already checked that box in November), and any other celebration-worthy excuse that we could think of (Clara’s first four syllable words: escalator, helicopter, and anemone!). It’s actually

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