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 To Paint A Closet

Nothing like a little weekend chaos. Guess what we did this weekend? Here’s a hint: And another hint: And another hint: And one last hint: Um yeah, all that house insanity was for this: Specifically, to paint Clara’s closet. See, whilst standing on a chair in there hanging the little ribbon chandelier that I made last week (you know, right before John asked me how it was hanging), I decided it was high time we painted that little future-reading nook for the bean (we envision a big cushy beanbag and a ton of books in there for her to dive into). Isn’t it funny how one small project can snowball? One minute you’re standing on

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How To Make A Ribbon Chandelier

After admiring various ribbon chandeliers in baby stores, catalogs, magazines, and even over on Pintrest, I decided to try my hand at one for Clara’s closet. Her closet is actually big enough to become a little reading nook when she’s a little older (I have visions of making her a beanbag for chillaxing on the floor with a book). And I love that the closet has its own light but it’s one of those fugly bare bulb ones that you tug on a piece of string to turn on and off. So I thought a happy little ribbon chandy could pretty things up. So I spent $2 for an embroidery hoop (with a 10″ diameter

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Mood Board Making: En Fuego

I was inspired by a chipper yellow table runner and a fiery pendant light to make a warm-blooded dining room mood board just for fun. Whoop, here it is: 1. The wall color could be a soft olive-khaki tone, like the stripe in the background of the mood board (try Benjamin Moore’s Limestone 513) with browns, oranges, deeper olives, pops of yellow, and some crisp white in the furnishings/accessories. Maybe even a smidge of navy if you’re into that sort of thing. And now that I see that stripe of olive-khaki, big wide horizontal tone-on-tone stripes might be pretty fun for the walls if you’re feeling feisty (try Benjamin Moore’s Limestone 513 and Flowering Herbs

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14 Months Of Breastfeeding

Yup, that’s what I did. Well, technically 14 months and three days if you’re really counting. And yup, this really is a post about breastfeeding, so feel free to skip it (you know, if you’re my brother for example). I never thought I’d be writing about it. But I actually get a lot of questions on the subject. And since I blather on about other random things (like cloth diapering) and this blog is really just a way for us to remember things that we might otherwise forget (like paint colors and vacation happenings), I figure that something I did for so long (around 425 days straight) deserved a post about the range of emotions

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Finding Children’s Chairs At A Yard Sale

This weekend we got these vintage kids chairs (they’re just 2 feet tall) for $7.50 each at a local yard sale. They were marked as $10 a pop but we bartered using the old “how about two for $15?” method. Sold! We knew they looked like oldies (we loved the solid construction, steel legs, clean lines) and were pleased when we tipped them both over and saw the word “Brunswick” engraved on the bottom. Not that we knew what it meant, but we thought google might. A little bit of searching turned up this description here: This original vintage 1950’s children’s chair, with its mid-century danish-modern design is actually made by Brunswick – the same

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How To Spray Paint A Metal Outdoor Patio Set

Waste not, want not. That was my attitude when it came to using up the rest of the oil-rubbed bronze spray paint from this project that I had leftover. So I turned my attention to the mismatched patio furniture that we inherited from the previous owners (seen here in an old photo with my dearly departed ceramic dog, sniffle). Sure, I like painting things white (and white ceramic animals, and white chocolate among other snow-colored objects) but sometimes white things outside = grungy. As this shot demonstrates, any time it rained little dirt and leaves splashed into the crevices of the table and looked all grubby. Parts of it were peeling too: And you should

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How To Paint Your Fuse Box So It Blends In

Our freshly painted laundry room is so bright and happy that makes me want to sing and dance like a crazy person. First I repainted all the trim (with Olympic No-VOC semi-gloss off-the-shelf white) and painted the annoying brown quarter round near the baseboards, so it blended in with the white trim. I applied three thin coats of the same Olympic No-VOC paint (no primer because I used the same method with success in the living room five months back and I’m lazy). Then when it came to the wall color, we decided to use the leftover paint that we used in the adjoining kitchen (remember when we painted that beastly paneling here?). Why that

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Spray Painting Chair Legs Oil Rubbed Bronze

Spray paint. Again. Who’s surprised? I’m nothing if not completely predictable when it comes to spraying my troubles away. I mentioned wanting to ORB (that’s “oil-rubbed-bronze” for those not privy to ridiculous decorating abbreviations) the legs of this old chair in our living room for a while. They’re clashy and red in real life… … as opposed to the nice dark ORB legs that we addded to Karl The Sectional: They also didn’t exactly “groove” with the gray-washed beams overhead and the deeper more brown-based wood tones in the console table that we made for behind the sofa (seen fully accessorized here). We plan to refinish the floors someday too – probably in the same

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How To Fill A Wall Crack So It Doesn’t Come Back

Crack is still whack. I couldn’t resist breaking out that Whitney Houston inspired one-liner, even though we already used it here. Why? Because this is a serious hard-hitting blog about real life issues. Just kidding. This time my fifth grade crack joke is in reference to a giant crack that was running across the side of the ceiling in the laundry room. Here’s the craggy before: And the much less craggy after: We had them check that beast of a crack out during inspection and learned it’s nothing like foundation issues (just normal house settling). Whew. And it was nothing that a little paintable white caulk couldn’t fix. Double whew. Tip: always make sure it’s

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How To Tea Stain Pillow Covers

I got into one of my weird rebellious moods (rebellious is a relative term for me) and decided to tea stain two pillow covers that we already have (originally from this cute Etsy shop). Oh yeah, I’m wild and ca-razy like that. I just figured it was an 100% free project and it would (fingers crossed) be an easy way to take two extremely stark-white (as opposed to warm white) pillow covers to a slightly creamier and off-white tone that would help them layer in more naturally with a slew of other off-white, cream, and even super light metallic bronze pillows that are currently living it up on Big Karl (our dark slipcovered sectional from

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Thrifting In The Outer Banks

For those not in the know (like me five years ago), OBX = The Outer Banks. Which is actually where John first took me for our one year anniversary of dating. Cue the collective aw. Anyway, now that we divulged some details of our recent Outer Banks trip this morning, we wanted to share all of the house-related stuff that we found while we were there. One of our favorite things to do when we travel is search for thrift stores, so I just did a quick hunt for “thrift” on my iPhone and it led us to Hotline Thrift (in Kitty Hawk – it’s a big pink store, you can’t miss it). Which is

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Window Shopping At Home Goods

A few months ago HomeGoods came a lot closer to home. Hence the celebratory “holla” in the title of this post. Yeah, I’m psyched. The closest location used to be in Short Pump (about twenty five minutes from our house) but a new one recently opened right in Chesterfield Towne Center (a mall that’s about eight minutes from our door). Score. So we thought it would be fun to run around with our camera and take some photos of whatever caught our eye (just like we occasionally do at Target, Ikea, and even the other HomeGoods location). Let’s go virtual shopping, shall we? This cheerful turquoise bench ($150) caught my attention right away. Apparently Mr.

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