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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Removing Cabinets For A Kitchen Reno

We knew pretty early on in our appliance shopping that we’d need an oddly tiny fridge to fit into the existing fridge hole that we had going on in our kitchen (yes, fridge hole is a technical term). And after some searching we realized we were probably more likely to discover the Loch Ness Monster than a perfectly sized fridge (preferably in stainless with side by side doors, since we loved that so much in our first kitchen – but we were flexible). So we slowly came around to the idea of removing the built-in box around the fridge to free things up a lot more when it came to dimensions. That way we could

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How To Upholster A Chair Cushion

Well, we can check cheerful desk chairs off of our wish list for the office. You can read all about how I prepped, primed, & painted them here. And now for the quick upholstery deets. I had some leftover fabric from the dining room curtains on hand so I laid it over the detached seats and centered one of the grellow thingies (that’s a technical term) and trimmed the fabric around the cushion, leaving enough that I could easily pull and staple to the backside. Update: Here’s an affiliate link to the same fabric on amazon for anyone looking for it.  Making sure it was staying centered, I carefully turned it over and shot four staples into

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Choosing Between Pergo and Cork For Our Kitchen Floors

Houston, we have liftoff! We made a big kitchen purchase. We ordered the floor! Wait, we should back up. We originally hoped to find hardwood floors running all the way under the linoleum in the kitchen (after finding out that it ran under the fireplace side of the room here)… … but we removed the transition between the kitchen and the office on the other side of the room to find… booo!… plywood. So no refinishing for us. Gotta start from scratch. But there were a few limitations off the bat. We learned from the previous owners that the kitchen floors couldn’t handle tile (they would need to be reinforced/leveled from underneath = $$$), so

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The (Joss &) Main Event

So… our afternoon post is a few hours early. Surprise! Fancy meeting you here. Anyway, after teaming up with Joss & Main on one of our most entered giveaways (apparently you guys love you some Joss & Main), they asked us if we’d be interested in curating a sale event over on their site. Which essentially entailed doing some virtual window shopping (sifting through hundreds of items in their database) and telling them everything that we loved, which would then make up a “Young House Love collection” over on their site. Uh. Let me think about it. YESSSSSSS! Never in a million years did we think that the title of “curator” would ever be used

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How To Paint A Chair

Our $35 secondhand chairs – found here – aren’t quite done yet (picture me tapping my foot as I not-so-patiently wait for the paint to dry) but we thought we’d share our makeover progress in the interest of real-time fun. First a quick rundown of all the colors that John & I talked about for the office chairs at one point or another: emerald green turquoise, aqua, or dark teal dark gray or light gray plum navy white or light celery lime green or grellow Oh and here they are in the office before paint and new upholstery (from a few different POVS), just to refresh your memory: Here’s where our brains went when we

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Wall Stenciling Tips & After Photos

My little stenciling project above the chair rail in the office has officially concluded. Woooo to the hooooo! It only took three 4.5 hour installments spread out over four days (so my hand-claws could turn back into hands between sessions). You can read all about my stenciling process here), but in short: it was well worth all that work and a bag of chips. Behold: Of course since it’s a subtle tone-on-tone effect, the further away that you get the more – well, subtle – it gets. In person when you stand at the doorway to the office you see pretty feathery texture, but of course in photos it’s somehow MUCH harder to capture. Here’s

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Easy DIY Art With Food Coloring

All week I imagined a big office stencil reveal post here. Sadly, it’s not done yet. Oh DIY, why do you take such pleasure in toying with my emotions? Quit playing games with my heart, home improvement. But regardless of the fact that it’s not exactly a quick project, it’s looking awesome and totally going to be worth the blood, sweat, and tears (all three of which have occurred, incidentally). So hopefully by this weekend I’ll be doing some celebratory Rocky laps around the house (yes, with music blaring and fists in the air) and I can share photos & deets of the whole shebang on Monday. Woot! Until then, here’s a still-needs-to-be-finished wall (the

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How To Stencil A Wall

Dude, stencils are no joke. But I did it! I bit the bullet and ordered the stencil that John and I have been pining after for the past month (mentioned here a few weeks back). We loved the idea of adding some subtle tone on tone detailing above the chair rail in our office (we didn’t want anything with too much contrast since it’ll compete with the dark teal built-ins and the fun curtains in the nearby dining room). So we settled on a softer gray tone with a tiny pop of color (leftover grellow paint from the adjoining kitchen). At 54 honking dollars it was hardly a drop in the bucket, but let me tell

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Ten Things We’ve Learned As Pro Bloggers

We thought we’d wrap up blogiversary week with one last post for anyone else writing a blog and/or trying to make a business out of it. We don’t like to think of ourselves as formal blogging experts, but since we always share our learn-as-we-go insights when it comes to home and DIY, we figured it made sense to share what we’ve learned in the past four years of blogging too. Oh and we included pictures of Burger to help illustrate some points along the way. You know, for kicks. Rule #1: A blog should be born from passion (not a business plan). At least for us, that seemed to work. We write about DIY because

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Our Blogging Goals

It’s time for some annual goal declaring (because nothing lights a fire under your arse like a big ol’ public proclamation). Let’s do this thang. Goal #1: Find Balance- We mentioned that we were aiming for more balance in our lives during this 2011 resolutions post. We basically said that we’re going to try our darndest not to fall into the trap of putting all of our time, money, and energy into the house to the point that we have no life, no savings, and Clara is trapped in our casa for her entire childhood (we actually haven’t been on a big vacation since our honeymoon four and a half years ago other than some

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How Blogs Get Sponsors

We’ve once again solicited questions from you guys on Facebook for our blogiversary extravaganza (of the personal, not decorating, variety). And just like we did in 2009 and 2010, we had fun answering a bunch of ’em. We crammed as many responses as we could into 20 minutes, so unfortunately not every one of the 80+ questions got answered, but we figured 20 minutes was already pushing the bounds of an acceptable YouTube video length. Haha. Here are a few things that we cover: Our favorite and least favorite qualities in each other What our neighbors think about the blog If the former owners of our house read the blog Our weirdest fan interaction Who

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A Day In The Life Of A Home Blogger

As we mentioned yesterday, it’s Blogiversary Week, baby (still can’t believe it’s been four whole years). And since we shared a day in the life during our last annual celebration (and about a year before that too) it’s time for this year’s breakdown (similarities: no day is ever the same, differences: now we have a toddler running around and a 260+ page book we’re writing on the side). This year we had fun recording a full day from both of our perspectives so you can see what each of us (and even Clara and Burger) may be doing at any given time. Woop, here it is: 7:30 am – 8:00 am JOHN: Clara’s awake early

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