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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How We Got Our Stained Grout White Again

The discolored and dirt-stained grout in the tile floor of our foyer looked super old and gross, but after trying nearly a dozen cleaners and cleaning tricks we nearly gave up. Then we finally find THE SOLUTION to making the grout look white and clean again! Now that we’re done, you can see how the view just got a heckova lot better around here. The crisp white grout lines play off the white trim and make the whole space feel newer and cleaner. The funny thing is, it wasn’t actually cleaning that did the trick. So if you’ve got a similar issue with discolored or stain grout, here’s our official intervention: stop scrubbing! Well, maybe

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How To Paint A Porch Floor

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about living here, it’s that we do a ton of living outside. Between each at-home learning break the kids are out there running around, we make s’mores at our fire pit every week or so, we sit on our front porch and watch the neighborhood dogs go by, and we often eat or hang out on the second-floor deck (we even work on our laptops up there on especially nice days – which is where I’m writing this post right now). We can really feel the house working extra hard for us thanks to the location/climate (good weather definitely encourages us to be outside a lot), but also due

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How To Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets

Painting your cabinets is a perfect way to makeover a dated kitchen without splurging on a big renovation. It doesn’t cost much and, with the proper preparation, your paint job will look great and last a long time. We’ve used the tutorial outlined below to paint cabinets in 4 separate kitchens (not to mention cabinets in other rooms too) so we’re confident it’s a DIY project that will work for you. Follow along below! The kitchen featured in this tutorial is from our second house which had solid oak cabinets throughout (along with wood paneling!). So while steps focus specifically on painting wood cabinets, the process is similar for any cabinet material. You can also

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Our Kitchen & Sitting Area, Six Months In

*We updated this post to add additional pics & a video, so if you see something here that you don’t remember when you first read it, that’s why. You’re not going crazy ;) We shared this space three weeks after we moved in and now we’re back with a six month update. Much like we said in that first post, we have some long term plans for this room, so this is just what it looks like as of this moment in time (I highly recommend photographing rooms to see how they evolve because it’s so much fun to look back on). Since that three-weeks-in post, we did a series of inexpensive updates that have

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Decorating Our Downsized Home For The Holidays

There’s something extra special to me about decorating a house for your first holiday season spent there. It’s right up there with seeing whatever pops up outside during your first spring at a new house (I basically scream out the window like I’m the announcer at a football game: “over on the left it’s A PATCH OF DAFFODILS! NOBODY SAW THAT COMING!!” But back to our holiday house tour. It’s looking very sweet & festive around here. Since this move also involved some serious downsizing & simplifying (last week John shared an update on that), it promised to be an interesting exercise in what would go where in our smaller home. As you heard on

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2020 Holiday Gift Guides

This year we got our gift guide post up a lot sooner than usual, because we’re highlighting tons of small makers and Black-owned businesses that we love, and we want to give those shops as much lead time as possible (heck, large stores seem to need more lead time than ever these days too). We also included a handful of tried & true items from larger companies that we’ve bought and loved (like a favorite tool or family game). There’s stuff for grown-ups, kids, and a ton of budget-friendly ideas that are under $20, and even under $10 that would be great for teachers, neighbors, coworkers, or white elephant exchanges! Gifts For Grown-Ups Here’s what

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Our Downsized Smaller Kitchen, Three Weeks In

Well, we’ve almost been in this house for a month. How crazy is that?! We moved on the 14th of last month and this Sunday is the 14th again! The pod is all unpacked and picked up (you can listen in here about what the heck we overpacked & then donated when we got here). It’s so crazy that a single pod of stuff can be too much – but then again, John was a pod-packing champion. Like too good at it. And going from 14 rooms to 6 (and 3150 square feet to 1400) is not a small challenge. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. This was a multiple month long undertaking. But it was

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500+ Highly Recommended Black-Owned Businesses To Support

All week on our Instagram stories we’ve been highlighting Black-owned businesses as a way that you can get involved, vote with your dollars, and show these super deserving small businesses some love. It all started because after getting personal in this post on IG and Facebook, I came across an article that said “…over the past 30 years, the US has seen a sharp decline in independent Black-owned business, and that Black women in particular face so many obstacles getting their business ventures funded.” That SUCKS! So after highlighting some of my favorite Black-owned shops, you guys started flooding my DMs with some of yours. Dozens of enthusiastically recommended shops quickly turned into hundreds, crossing

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Volunteered Expertise For Black-Owned Businesses

Since sharing our list of Black-owned businesses that hundreds of you so highly recommended, we’ve been receiving messages from all types of experts, professionals, and creatives who would like to volunteer their services to help small Black-owned businesses. We didn’t want them to get lost on Instagram, so we’ve copied their messages and contact info below: Business Coaching Bryn Braaten – “I’m a Recruiting Manager for Amazon that focuses on Software Engineers, Managers, Technical Program Managers, Research Science, Data Engineers, and Program/Product Manager Tech. I’d love to offer 5 Resume Reviews per month to help edit/curate skill set and connect them for applicable jobs within Amazon.” CONTACT: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/ Kathy Campbell – “I would love to

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Refinishing Pine Floors For A Beachy Look

Alternate title: putting the floor in Florida. I’ll pause while you slap your knee. I’m telling you, I’ve got mom jokes for days. And speaking of days, I googled this topic for days on end. And let me tell you, finding someone who shared actual photos and an exact rundown of what floor products they used on pine floors to get the result we were aiming for was BLEAK. We were looking for a soft and light end result (not darker or more amber-toned/yellowed, which seems to be what pine likes to do, especially if it’s sealed with regular old oil based sealer – even just the clear stuff yellows it significantly). Oak floor refinishing

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Our Smaller Home’s Exterior Makeover

You guys. I am very excited about this post. And John’s computer froze and crashed two times this morning while we were trying to work on this, and my enthusiasm STILL ENDURES, which is a good indication of just how into this I am. I’m going to try to let the pics do all the talking because I just want to get this post UP AND INTO THE WORLD! So without further ado, here is what our house looked like back in February when we offered on it. Remember it was a super rainy/overcast span of two days when we checked it out (as is our tradition of buying houses – more on that here).

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Two Final House Tour Videos Pre & Post Packing

Ok, this post won’t need a lot of words (famous last words from this Chatty Cathy) because the two videos in this post will do a lot of the work for us. You can just click play below to see a final “after tour” of our house, as it looked right before our real estate showings in early March (you can hear more about how those went here in this podcast episode – it was pretty crazy!). And if you have questions about paint colors or where we got something that you saw (furniture items, accessories, blinds, rugs, etc) they’re all sourced right here in this post for you. Note: You can also view this

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