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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22 Free Holiday Art Ideas

I warned you that I was really excited to go all out for our first “real” Christmas in our new house, so it’s no surprise that I got giddy and decided to tackle an unexpected-ish space for holiday-ifaction. Was that enough hyphenated-not-real words for you? Anyway that space = the hallway. I actually switched out 22 frames (almost two dozen!) in our little hallway frame collection to make things a bit more festive. And it was free. Yeee-haw. Over the top? Maybe. But it makes us smile and was zero dollars. Holla. Let’s get on with the tour… When you look at the hallway from a distance, the change isn’t overly obvious, which we like

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Decorating The Outside Of Our House For Christmas

This holiday season is full of firsts for us. It’s the first time Clara can shout things like “I love you Santa!” to the inflatables at Home Depot (this actually happens quite often). It’s also the first time we got a real tree (even if it’s of the tabletop variety). And it’s our first real Christmas in this house (we moved last December but were still living out of boxes then). But perhaps our biggest first is actually decorating the outside of our house. We’ve never done that. Isn’t that crazy? What the heck were we waiting for? There’s definitely some magic to waiting until it gets dark, plugging everything in, and stepping back to

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Dude, We’ve Lived Here An Entire Year

Which means this time last year, we woke up to a surprise snowstorm… … that resulted in our UHaul slipping into the gutter of our old driveway (more on that here). Man, it feels like that was just yesterday. John and I still remember every word of that truck-snafu conversation… JOHN: Hey Sherry. Walk-through went fine. They’re off to go close and I’m headed to the new house. SHERRY: Okay, be very careful. It’s snowy out there so drive as slow as you need, even if people are honking at you. Just take your time. JOHN: I will. Don’t worry. SHERRY: Great. I just don’t want you ending up in a ditch or anything. [HANG

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A Kid-Safe Christmas Tree With Paint Chips & Ribbons

That she blows! Or maybe I should I say “thar she glows!” Either way, we got ‘er up. And this year the theme was: free stuff we already had (no getting in the car to go fetch anything, since we feared that would cost us another week to get things up) nothing pointy/hard/breakable (for bean safety reasons) color, color, color (just like our tabletop tree in the living room) So yes, we gave our full-sized tree a whole new look (see what it looked like in 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007 here) using stuff that we already had in the house, like a bunch of leftover paint chips from my bin. Yes, I save old

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Our Favorite DIY Tools

Here it is, the much requested post about our favorite DIY tools for all of you folks who are asking Santa for something tool-ish this year (or trying to figure out what to buy a handy guy or gal in your life). None of the items in this list paid us or perked us for the mentions, they’re just actually the tools that we use and love on the regular. So without further ado, let’s chat about the things that help us get ‘er done…. We previously wrote this post about a few things that we pretty much can’t live without (any of which would make great gifts/stocking stuffers), so here’s a quick summary since

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Storage For A Small Room

We’re so impressed with how much style Marianne packed into such a small room. So for anyone out there struggling with the small space blues (our last bedroom was tiny with no closets – so we can totally relate!) hopefully this will inspire you! Enough chit chat, here’s Marianne’s letter: I gave the smallest room in our house a total makeover. And when I say small, I mean small: The room is barely even 4 square meters big (about 43 square feet if I’m not mistaken) but I feel I still managed to give the space some oomph and character. Since I know you guys love  living a ‘simple’ life without a lot of unnecessary

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How To Make DIY Christmas Ornaments

As I mentioned earlier this week, we got a real mini tree! And I finally got some twinkle lights up and some ornaments on that guy. I say this with much enthusiasm and hardly any hyperbole: it’s a life changer. I’m in love. And Clara and Burger love it too (play Where’s Waldo in the dark and find them): It’s so charming and warm and it looks so sweet with all of the handmade Pinterest challenge ornaments that I made here. These are the only breakable ornaments that we’ll be putting out this year (since the tree is up on a table, so Clara can’t get to it). And it glitters like the dickens. So

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Our White Corian Counter Review

Merry Countermas to us! They’re here. And they’re spectacular. Just as a reminder, the cave room looked like this back when we moved in last December: But back to our brand-spanking-new Corian counters. I didn’t expect them to feel as chunky, heavy, and stone-like as they do. They’re like marble without the veins. Seriously. Nothing plastic-y about them. And they’re sleek but sort of matte too if that makes sense, which looks/feels really chic and sort of honed-marble-ish (according to our installer the white matte ones are the only ones that don’t show scratches, which will definitely come in handy). So yeah, it’s safe to say that we’re completely smitten. Of course things were looking

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Updating Our Living Room With A New Rug

There’s something about being nearly a year into living here that makes it feel like we’ve accomplished a fair amount of “evolution” over the last 357 days (not that I’m counting…). I guess it’s because living somewhere for a month isn’t really a lot of time for tweak-age, but twelve of those in a row – well, it’s enough time to get things going. Like living with a floor plan for 11 months (just to be suuuuure) and then knocking out a wall that we’ve wanted gone from day one: It’s also enough time to make a few furniture and accessory changes as we transition from working with what we have (like random stuff carried

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How To Make An Advent Calendar

We’re still working away on the kitchen, so we’ll have update post #561 for you soon (kidding, it’s probably more like #19 or something – but still). This week we’re hoping to share lots of major progress (new counters and a working sink again – finally!). In the meantime, it’s about time we got into the holiday spirit. There’s just something special about spending our first real Christmas in our new house that makes us want to go all out. We moved on the 13th of December last year, so we were technically here for last year’s holiday season, but we were living out of boxes and Clara was too young to really get excited

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How To Turn Family Sketches Into Art

Dude, my dad is an artist. I mean not by trade (he’s a super-genius math teacher), but both he and my mother sketched and drew for fun during my childhood (in turn art was my favorite subject in school and off I went to get a bachelor of fine arts in NYC). I remember being in complete awe about how my mom drew horses and ladies while I loved how my dad drew all sorts of abstract shapes that filled a page with lines and dots and squares. Sort of like this. So about a week ago I was standing in the frame hallway thinking about my dad and his awesome drawings and realized that

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Hanging A Gallery Frame Wall In The Nursery

Some nursery tweak-age has occurred. And because we’re currently working away on the kitchen (stay tuned for those deets tomorrow morning if all goes well), we figured that we owed you the whole gallery-frame-change rundown (along with some well overdue what’s-in-that-frame answers). We’ve always loved the idea of expanding Clara’s art wall as she grows with more and more frames, so here’s how it looked before: And here’s what we have going on now that we’ve added a few more frames to the mix (and shifted the placement of a few of the existing ones): And for those who have been wondering, here’s a quick rundown of the things that we’ve framed (you can find

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