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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Our West Elm Duvet Arrived

Remember the West Elm duvet cover that we ordered on sale last week? It’s here! Oh, I guess it would make more sense to show it in our space now: Of course we’ll be adding in some bolder accent pillows down the road, but we love it. It’s a smidge greener than we expected, but it actually reminds us of the bold blue-green color that we used to paint the back of our built-ins. We filled it with an über-cushy king sized Ikea comforter (we think it’s this one, but we’re not 100% sure since there are so many). And can I just say that we’re so glad we didn’t try to make do with

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How To Paint The Back Of Your Built In Bookcases

We’re back with the after pics of our freshly painted built-ins. As we mentioned in the last post, we went with an inky blue color with hints of green called Dragonfly from Benjamin Moore’s Affinity line (color matched to Lowe’s No-VOC Olympic paint for the bambino). We only needed a quart, and since we used objects that we already owned on the shelves this entire built-in makeover only ran us $10.97. You can read more about how we planned the shelf placement here. Oh and here’s a poorly lit progress pic from last night, just for fun. Yes John’s shirt does say “Talk Nerdy To Me” on the back. I love it. But here’s what

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Reducing Bookcase Clutter

We painted the back of our built-in bookcases last night! Which is totally our idea of a good time by the way. It’s the equivalent of a “Date Night” for us, if you will. So we figured we should post about the pre-planning process that went on so we can share the “after” pics as closely to real-time as possible (once the paint dries and we can put the shelves back up to snap some final photos for ya). So here you go: We decided we needed to roughly layout the objects on the built-in bookcases before painting the backs of them (we’ll explain more about that in a minute). We were planning to put

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Finding A Deal When Buying A Washer & Dryer

What the dealio, guys? Remember how we mentioned a few times that we’d like to upgrade to an energy efficient front loading washer and dryer sometime down the line when we saw a killer deal (we heard they pop up around February since new models are often introduced then)? Well, one found us a lot sooner than we expected. Yesterday actually. We were walking through Lowe’s on Saturday when we noticed a sign that said 10% off all appliances. Not much of a deal, but enough to make us take a detour through the appliance section for fun. And while we were in that shiny-new-appliance-induced-euphoria, we noticed a big sign on an energy efficient Whirlpool

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Twenty Eleven Resolutions

Every year we publicly proclaim a few of our resolutions in the hope that it’ll light a fire under our arse (arses?) and help us “get there.” So without further ado (except for this gratuitous Clara picture) here they are… Resolution #1. To be more bold with our decorating & renovating choices. We want to embrace color and contrast and just have fun without worrying that we’ll mess up. Mistakes are always when we learn the most about a project or our style, so we’re going to welcome them with open arms. And we hope to do our best to resist always going with the “safest” decisions in favor of taking a few chances and

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We Ordered A West Elm Duvet…

When we saw the amazing after Christmas sales at West Elm we had to spring for a new king sized duvet buddy for Ed the bed (get acquainted with Ed here and here). Even though Ed’s a queen sized bed, we wanted a king duvet cover because we thought it would drape a bit more over the sides (our old full/queen sized duvet cover was looking a little tight). Plus it’ll hopefully result in fewer sleep fights about who has more of the covers. So here’s what we got: We love that it’s bright, bold, geometric, and full of energy. It just looks nice to wake up to. Plus it has a lot of the

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Listy McListerson

Wahoooooooo! A list post! I loooooooooove lists! Oh haaaaaappy day. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, this post will continue without the excessive exclamation points & extraneous vowels. Lots of people have been asking what we’ll tackle next, what order we’ll be doing things in, etc. And our answer is usually: it’ll honestly just depend on our mood and what supplies we have on hand. When it comes to big projects we like to save our pennies and plan things to death, but for small things (which we always recommend doing first so you can live with the house for a while before making any dramatic changes that you might regret) we

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Why You Should Always Test For Radon When Buying A House!

Thank goodness we learned something from buying our first house and decided to pay a few hundred dollars for radon testing this time around. As part of our new home’s inspection, we paid a local radon company to conduct a multi-day test to ensure that dangerous levels of radon aren’t present (for any locals who are wondering who we used, we went with Radon Ease, because they don’t remediate, they only test- so there’s nothing in it for them to find radon). Sure enough the readings came back above a 4… which means there were dangerous levels of radon present in the home – enough to call for professional remediation as the solution. But instead

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Buying A Bed Frame From Ikea

After over two weeks of doing it, sleeping on the floor is officially getting old. So we bought a bed frame. Oh happy day! We had big plans for possibly building one (using one of Ana White’s amazing tutorials). And we debated just getting a cheapo-metal frame and laying slats of wood across it so we could rest our mattress on that (so we could DIY another upholstered headboard down the road). But in the end the four poster bed that caught our eye back when we whipped up this future bedroom mood board won out (click here for more mood board details). One of the issues is that our organic mattress (which you can

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Using A Silver Sharpie To Decorate Mugs

This is a weird DIY thing I tossed together three Monday nights ago in front of the TV in our old house. The first reason I’m calling it weird is because we no longer live there, so it’s funny that this post somehow got buried and now it’s getting published with our old walls and shelves in the background. And it’s pretty darn close to Christmas, but I figured it might be a fun little last minute gift idea for someone. Better late than never, right? Hence the idea of hitting publish on it (as opposed to delete). The second reason I’m calling it weird is that I totally didn’t use the right materials to

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The Best Light Pink Paint Color For Nursery Walls

Alternate title: Breaking Out John’s Painting Belt It was like old times. For those who don’t get the painting belt reference, check this out for further explanation. Anyway, as we mentioned yesterday, we painted Clara’s nursery. And instead of cloning the exact space that she enjoyed in our old house, we took the move as an opportunity to switch up the wall color. We figure since we’re working with the same furniture and even the same light fixture and curtains (since I was too sentimental to leave them behind) we thought a new wall color would make things feel a little fresher- like the room is subtly evolving over time as opposed to being totally

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Decorating A New House For Christmas

We actually got our tree back up a few days ago amidst boxes and general chaos (here it is the first time when we set it up in the old house). We figured we’d never be 100% organized and unpacked before the holidays hit, but taking an hour to get into the spirit in our brand new house for our bean’s first Christmas was just what the doctor ordered. We found the perfect spot for our tree in the corner of the living room (right near the sliders that lead out into the sunroom and the doorway that connects to the kitchen). We also hung my beloved Pottery Barn wreath (a gift from John’s mom

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