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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Buying A Groovy Green Shag Rug

Yes, it’s yet another rambling rug post. What can I say- our old hardwood floors give us splinters (remember this episode when I got one in the badonkadonk while painting?). And rugs are definitely great building blocks for a room – so we lean towards introducing them on the early end whenever possible. And after dragging the ol’ 5 x 8′ yellow rug back out from the guest room for Clara to play on until we got a more appropriate sized rug for large & in charge Karl the Sectional, we finally found something that made us excited enough to whip out our credit card. Yup, we ordered this amazingly textured & bright rug for

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A Large Jute Rug For The Bedroom

We’re doing a little bit of happy dance boogieing on our new rug, hence this post’s title. Yes, it’s like High School Musical over here, lots of dancing and occasionally there’s even some ballad-y singing about our feelings. Feel free to click play and get in on it. Now that we’ve gotten through that little dance interlude, here’s the new rug: Oh happy day, we love it. Here’s a recent shot of the space without it for comparison. Isn’t it amazing what a rug – even a neutral and “safe” jute one – can do to tie things together and add balance to a 15 x 16′ bedroom (15 x 21′ if you count the

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A Larger Bedroom Rug

Short story: we bought a bedroom rug! Now for the long story. Because we’re nothing if not wordy and over explain-y. We’ve known that our giant bedroom was in need of a nice big rug to anchor some of the more showstopping pieces, like big ol’ Ed the Bed and our New Year’s Eve ball-esque pendant light from Ikea. And a piddly little 4 x 6′ rug at the foot of the bed with two faux sheepskins on either side of the bed just weren’t doing it for us anymore. Maybe to some people a 16 x 16′ bedroom (which is actually 16 x 21′ if you include the sink nook) isn’t even that big.

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A Green HomeGoods Lamp

Seeing as this fun little $22 lamp from HomeGoods is one of our favorite Sue The Napkin colors, which we plan to use as our whole house color inspiration (see them all here) I had to make it mine. It’s really cute in person, but it’s kinda ugly with the paneling behind it. Haha. Sorry ’bout that. I knew it would look all purty when it’s glowing – and cast lots of fun shadows on the wall. You know, like this: Except try to imagine it without the soul crushing wood paneling. Slowly but surely we’re working up the energy to tackle the kitchen. Every day that I have to stare at that paneling gets

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A Stellar House Tour (It’s For Sale!)

When Danielle and her husband Nick sent us a link of their newly listed home in gorgeous and charming Church Hill we couldn’t just ogle the listing and let it go. We knew we had to house crash them in the flesh and share all of the eye candy with you. They bought it in pretty rough shape in 2003 and they worked with one of our favorite local organizations, Better Housing Coalition, to restore it to a livable condition. Records trace it back to existence as early as 1855 (although it’s unclear whether it was burned to the ground in 1865 and rebuilt then). Either way it’s extremely old and it needed lots of

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February Superlatives

Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of February – high school yearbook style. Coupon-lovingest: This post about how I try to save money by cutting coupons. Sneakiest: The use-tape-to-catch-drywall-dust trick that we outlined here for ya. Most Mischievous: Painting an old glass lamp shade turquoise while John was out for a run. Best Picture Ever Taken: This post about getting a resin ram at TJ Maxx which resulted in a photo of

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The Guest Bath: Meh, But Functional.

How’s that for a title? Haha. We’re about 20% there with this room, but we’re sharing these pics in the name of the work-in-progress reality that is our new house. We definitely think some paint on the walls (we’re flip-flopping between soft gray and mocha) will tie things together and better integrate items like the shower curtain and the bathmat along with the sweet vintage yellow tile. And of course bringing in better art, fun window treatments (maybe a bright roman shade?), changing out the light fixture, and implementing other tweaks down the road will hopefully take it from “meh” to “how you doin’?” The good news is that it works and it’s clean. You

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An Inexpensive Guest Room Makeover

Sometimes, you just gotta let things “shake out” – haha. John kept rolling his eyes while I ran back and forth from the guest room to try “one more thing” all day yesterday, but I just love playing around, tweaking things, adding this, subtracting that, and seeing where we end up. It’s probably my favorite part of the whole process, all that final-hour-switcheroo business. And we’re so glad that we shared yesterday’s in-progress pics to show how just a few tweaks in the last 24 hours can really change things up. Not über dramatically, but enough to make a difference for sure. Sometimes it’s those last minute changes that make you step back and go:

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Guest Bedroom Progress…

Update: We brought in a few of the items on our to-do list below and it changed everything! Well, not everything, but a few things came out (the brown blanket is history, at least in this room) and a few other things moved around. Gotta love those last minute tweaks. Check out the whole shebang here. Here’s what things are looking like right now (well, as of an hour ago when we snapped these pics and uploaded them): Which is definitely an improvement on Monday’s more spartan look… … but we still have lots to do (an quite a few things aren’t in their “final resting place”) but here’s what we’ve checked off so far:

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How We Cut In When Painting A Room

We finished painting the guest room. And boy is it bold. Seriously, it’s like no room we’ve ever painted before. And we luuurve it. With a capital urv. This is probably the most accurate pic (well I guess it’s as accurate as your monitor) of the dark teal that we went with: The color was of course inspired by none other than Sue the Napkin. It’s kind of similar to Dragonfly (the color that we painted the backs of the built-ins in the future dining room) but when we held up a ton of swatches in the guest room we preferred this color (Dragonfly was darker and greener). It’s called Plumage by Martha Stewart, but

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Inexpensive Home Decor Ideas

And let’s just say I’m an eternal, unapologetic, and annoyingly chipper optimist. Anyway, we’re back to share the homely group of odd items that we picked up with our $100 shopping budget on our little end-of-winter beach vacay in Rehoboth. Since we were staying at John’s parents’ beach house for free (I have the best inlaws ever), we figured that a hundred dollars to put towards light fixtures and wall decor and other new house items sounded about right to two cheapskates like us who were happy to have saved at least three times that amount by avoiding hotel fees and driving to the beach in the winter instead. Hah. They’re not exactly a group

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Shopping And Thrifting In Rehoboth Delaware

Remember we mentioned on Monday that we were taking it easy and enjoying some family time? Well we were actually at the beach! We snuck away to John’s parents’ beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware for a nice long weekend of R&R (while the guest bedroom took care of itself- just kidding it was just as messy when we returned, darn). We had lots of fun going on long walks, eating seafood, getting our thrift on, and bringing Clara down to the beach on a particularly warm day (it was 65+ degrees on Monday!). So we thought we’d share some of our adventures with you guys. First, we hit up our favorite secondhand shop in Bethany,

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