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 Spackle Uneven Drywall

This morning, while Clara was doing this: I attempted to tackle this: A few days ago I slapped some spackle on the walls in the bathroom (we like Dap Crackshot), because as happy as we were with the big bathroom overhaul, you could tell it was definitely our first rodeo when it came to drywalling. And in our hurry to get paint on the walls we were a wee bit less careful with the mudding and taping than we could have been. But thanks to Operation Sell This House we’re making all those never-got-around-to-them tweaks to get things looking as close to perfect as possible. You know, tackling all of those projects that we’ll never

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Mood Board Making: Dark Teal, Wood, & White Bedroom

I can’t promise that we’ll execute this mood board to a T when it comes to our future bedroom – heck, the entire vision could easily shift by the time we move into a new home. But as of right now, this is what I’m loving (and John’s surprisingly right there with me): 1. I’m dreaming of a cozy and enveloping room painted in a rich and saturated teal like the stripe of color across the top of the mood board (Benjamin Moore’s Rendezvous Bay 726). I’d temper the bold color by adding some white furnishings/accessories and some rich dark woods to ground things. And then I’d add a pop of tangerine, just because I’m

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How To Make Puffy Paint Pumpkins

I know, I know. The idea of puffy paint in most craft projects makes you skeptical. Me too. But a few weeks ago John and I were brainstorming about what we should do to our pumpkins this year, after painting them last year: … and carving intricate designs into them the year before: Anyway, so somewhere along the line John said “too bad we can’t use nail polish or something to build up shapes on the pumpkins.” I sort of looked at him sideways at the nail polish suggestion, but I liked the idea of somehow creating raised designs on them… and so the idea of puffy paint was born. We figured it was made

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Hanging With Nate Dog

This post might be filed under the annoying “teaser” category but we can’t tell you anything other than to cryptically announce that you might want to watch The Nate Show next Monday (the 25th) or DVR it if you’re fancy like that because… we’re going to be on it!!! It’s a syndicated show, so we don’t know what channel or time it’s on in your area (in fact it doesn’t even air in Richmond, which is the bane of our existence) but if you hit up thenateshow.com you can use their station finder feature for more info. We’ve always been huge fans of Nate and his work, so we can’t wait to check out Monday’s

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How To Paint Metal Cups To Make Two-Tone Votive Holders

When we spotted these odd little metal cups for $1.50 a pop at Goodwill (which you may have noticed in our recent Halloween post) we decided to take them home for a speedy little spray paint makeover. We fell in love with the little cut-out shape and since we already had yellow and white spray paint around (thanks to this project and this project) we got right to work. Our concept was to make the inside of each cup yellow and the outside of each one white, just for a little two-tone fun. So we thought up a few ways that might work when it came to accomplishing that effect. First we debated spraying the

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When The Thing You Really Want Sells Out

I was going to do it. I was finally going to buy the Coco mirror from West Elm that I’ve been obsessing over forever. Yes, we’re moving, but it’s such a classic piece that it could be hung anywhere in this house or the next one. And I was just gonna go for it- all $199 of it. Even though I’m usually too cheap to buy things full price (even if I’m head over heels in love) I had this whole talk with myself about putting on my big girl pants and bucking up and just splurging for something that I’m 99.9% certain would make me happy for decades. Then I saw this when I

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Katie Bower In The House

Well not anymore, but she was this weekend. Along with her main man Jeremy and their adorable bambino Will. And if you don’t know who the heck I’m talking about, you can read up on the Bowers over at their blog: Bower Power. We had tons of fun feeding them, showing them around and just generally having a grand old time from Friday all the way through Sunday. We even squeezed in a little video (as is the tradition whenever we’re together- check out this original one along with these three shot during our rendezvous in Nashville last summer: hotel inspiration part 1, hotel inspiration part 2 and shopping for DIY inspiration). We went back

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Adding A Baseboard Heater For More Finished Square Footage

How did we gain a ton of extra square footage to take our for-sale casa from 1300 finished square feet to 1550 in the last 48 hours? We’ll give you a hint: we didn’t add an overnight addition. We just added a permanent heat source to our existing sunroom… and now it counts as livable square footage! A realtor friend of ours advised us that rooms don’t need to be heated and cooled to count as “finished” here in Richmond –  just heated. Meaning the only thing keeping the biggest room in our house (our sunroom) from getting counted as official square footage was a source of heat. So we called a few electricians and

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Making A House Hunting Wish List

First off, my cheeky hubby has decided he’s deserving of a public “you were right.” So here it is. Check out this video from a year ago where he calls that we’ll move someday while I vehemently deny it (skip to 5 minutes and 45 seconds). Who’s married to a know it all? This girl (points to self with thumbs). Before I climbed on the moving bandwagon UHaul with my smarty pants spouse, we rethought a bunch of potential layout adjustments to this house and even entertained the idea of an addition instead (which we also tossed out as an option in the above video over a year ago). But the fact that the already-here

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Halloween Decorating With Crows, Candles and Skull Photos

Halloween is in just a few short weeks so we broke out the old creepy raven along with a bunch of other spook-tastic props from last year (see our big Halloween ’09 set up here). And other than springing for some candy for the kids in our neighborhood and some candy corn for ourselves we didn’t spend a dime (hindsight: candy corn is the worst- it’s basically just a stomach ache waiting to happen). Oh and we grabbed some $4 carnations too. So here’s the console table all decked out: Nothing too fancy, just a piece of burlap as a casual runner with things like some eerily titled books that we dug up along with

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An Inspired & Inexpensive House Tour

After Jordan and Landon shared their amazingly affordable (and drop dead gorgeous) kitchen overhaul with us (here), we definitely were left wanting more. So when they offered up the opportunity to House Crash them, we said “uh… yes please.” And we figured since it’s their house they’d be the best at showing you around, so we’re passing the virtual mic over to them for the tour while we clean our house within an inch of it’s life in an effort to woo a few more potential buyers this weekend (fingers crossed). Enjoy the tour! Welcome to our home in Columbia, South Carolina! We’re Jordan & Landon from landonjacob.com. You’ve already seen the kitchen (here), but

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Decluttering Tips To Try Before A House Showing

How do we learn around these parts? By doing. And sometimes by panicking. So when someone called us to see our house out of the blue, and wanted to drop by in an hour, we panicked. But only for five to ten minutes. Then we used the other 50 minutes to do the ahh-someone’s-coming-to-look-at-our-house shuffle. Luckily the house was already pretty clean since we knew we would be showing it sooner or later. But what about that recommended pairing down step to reduce clutter and make cabinets and closets look bigger (so you don’t seem like you’re bursting at the seams)? Here’s how that went: Step 1: Take two large plastic bags (ideally big black

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