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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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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Inexpensive Holiday Gift Ideas

Here’s our last installment of our recent gift sleuthing spree (see part one here and part two here) and this time we paid Urban Outfitters a visit. It’s always full of cute, quirky, and downright hilarious gift ideas that are usually pretty affordable. Here’s what we found: These sparkly pillows were pretty luxe looking (and around $30, as opposed to something similar that we saw at Crate & Barrel for $99). This $22 book of “Other People’s Love Letters” reminded us of those Post Secret books (we love them, and actually own two volumes of ’em- they’re great for leaving in a guest room so visitors can entertain themselves). For the techie in your life,

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More Virtual Gift Shopping

We’re back with part two of our virtual gift shopping roundup (see part one here) and this time we headed into Pottery Barn to see what we could find. Here’s what we loved. This charming $12.50 rubber stamp kit is so cute for anyone from a well traveled kid to a crafty adult (who might use them to whip up some custom stationery). In the can’t-get-much-cheaper-than-this category, these $3 vases would be perfect for this DIY reed diffuser project that we tackled last year. These $11 “His” and “Hers” knobs would be cute for any married couple who share a bathroom (which is pretty much all of our friends and relatives since we’re not of

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Christmas Gift Ideas For Everyone

As we continue to unpack, we thought we’d share this year’s virtual gift roundup (a la this one from last year). It’s a three-post-in-a-row thing (we couldn’t fit all the pics into one) so stay tuned for two more that’ll pop up today. First we hit up Crate & Barrel. Here’s what we found: These cute wine glasses were on sale for $1.50, and two of them along with a bottle of inexpensive vino could make a nice little gift for someone that doesn’t drain the ol’ bank account: This pretty ceramic serving tray was on sale for $5.95, and could be filled with anything from cookies to candy (I’d do an assortment of fancy

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The First Day In Our Second House

We’re running about a day behind since we didn’t have internet at home until late yesterday, but here’s how things looked on Tuesday (our first full day in the house) with all of our boxes littering every room. Goodbye clean blank slate. Hello chaos. Oh and it bears mentioning that nothing is necessarily staying where we put it (we just dropped furniture and boxes around the house, and will definitely be living with things a bit before committing to final placement for anything). But let’s rewind a bit for a moment. The last time we moved, we were going from NYC to Richmond in a minivan (well, I guess technically we moved one more time

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