Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Window Shopping: Beachy Shops & Thrift Stores

Last week I promised a post about all the window shopping slash actual shopping that we did during our week at the beach with the fam. And that includes the two items we actually purchased: the whale sign for Clara’s room (made from wood, a five year anniversary material)… … and the thrift store basket that I’d love to turn into a hanging pendant somewhere in our house (more on those items here). But I owe you guys the rest of the eye candy that we perused, so here we go. As we mentioned, we stopped at the Ole Sale Barn in Maryland where we found the L-turned-7 in our office last Labor Day. And that’s

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Painting The Bedroom Rockport Gray

The deed is done! Rockport Gray is all up in this hizzy. We love how much more things like the extra thick crown molding and the trim around the doors and windows pops now that the color is deeper and more… sleepy? Can you describe a bedroom color that way? In love. It’s such a mutating color. Sometimes it looks lighter and grayer. And sometimes it looks moodier and more mocha. We think it looks especially good with our cheap-o Ikea curtains (Vivan panels for $9 a pop) and other crisp white things, like this old side table from our first house’s den and the white lamp shade on our floor lamp. So yeah, we

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Fab Freebie: A Splash Of Color

*** This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** After quite a color-filled few days here on YHL, random.org has selected our winner as… Daffodil (whose kitchen gets almost zero natural light, so she painted it a cheerful bright yellow). Congrats! And I think we have an idea of what color sink you might be choosing… Jonathan Adler has been a big inspiration to us lately, especially as we learn to embrace more color in this house than our first one. And as excited as we were by his new color-filled collaboration with Kohler, we were even MORE excited when Kohler agreed to give one of you a new kitchen sink and faucet

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Finding The Perfect Medium Gray Wall Color

Yup, we went for it. We slapped up two paint colors that we love (and already had on hand) in our bedroom to see if darker walls (which is something John that has been campaigning for over the last few months) is the way to go. Remember when we poorly photoshopped it a while back? Except picture it more brown-gray, like a putty color (instead of blue-gray), since there are plenty of colors in the rug and the bedding already. We tried one of our favorite smoky gray colors (Gray Horse by Benjamin Moore) which is under the chair rail in the office and also tried the darker and moodier color that’s more of a

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A Dreamy White & Gray Bathroom With Box Molding

Okay, so maybe the red bathroom Melissa and Ian inherited with their house isn’t bad enough to deserve a nod to The Shining, but it was pretty killer on the eyes. Fortunately they remedied things with an awesome redo that they sent our way. Here’s their letter: Hi John and Sherry! We bought our second home up north in good ‘ole Canada in April of 2011 and started our DIY magic – or whatever you wanna call it ;) So far we’ve done 2 bathrooms, an office, a guest room, and our bedroom and I still feel like we have tons to do (I’m sure you know the feeling). However, we’re really happy with how

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How To Decorate A Dining Room Buffet

Yes, that’s an SNL reference. But before I go any further I have to say thanks and I love you to you guys. Your kind words from this morning have literally lifted me up on a day that has been soggy and sad. You guys rock. Hard. Now onto a very important post that many of you have requested. Photos of what I put on our new craigslist buffet. I tried to pick a variety of items that are functional and special to us (hence the title of this post). So this is what the entryway looks like now: And just for fun, this is what it looked like when we laid eyes on our

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Love & A Few Tears

Over the years of jabbering on about house stuff I occasionally get questions about my family. How many siblings I have, how I grew up, etc. I always say it was a somewhat un-traditional childhood… in the best possible way. I was raised by my mom and dad, who split up when I was very young (a few years after my younger brother Daniel was born) so we just had two houses and bounced happily between them. I remember when a kid at school once teased me for having divorced parents and I put the “I have two houses and you only have one and I get double the holiday presents” spin on it. Looking

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Our Beach Vacation To Bethany Beach, Delaware

Last week we spent a lot of time reciting the first line of her song Starships: “Let’s go to the beach, each, let’s go get away.” Why? Because we were at the beach, that’s why. Surprise! And since a bunch of you have asked what we did for our fifth anniversary (which happened to fall over our family beach vacation) we’re here to fill you in. You know we love sharing lovey dovey stuff and road-tripping stuff alike. Last week was our annual family vacation to Bethany Beach along the Delaware coast (where we go with a bunch of relatives to spend time together as one big group). And since this year’s beach week just

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Our $230 Bathroom Makeover

The ceiling hole is patched (see more on how I get that done here, complete with a ridiculous video of the process) – although admittedly the paint is probably still drying. But we’re ready to call this turkey done. For now. This is one of those makeovers that wasn’t a total gut job, but was a series of smaller tweaks that added up to something pretty darn noticeable. In fact going into this we thought this just might be a “for now” fix that we’ll eventually redo completely (all that beige tile was hard to get behind) but now that we’ve made these upgrades we’re surprised how much we like the room – especially since

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How To Move A Ceiling Light

Ever since we updated the light fixture in our bathroom back in April, one thing has been bothering us: its proximity to the shower curtain. Okay, two things actually: its proximity to the shower curtain AND the fact that we didn’t have the energy to remedy the situation back in April (when we switched out the old light for a new one and did some slight drywall patching and painting- nothing nearly as involved as relocating the fixture box by a few feet). So now that we’ve spent three months building up the energy to shift that light into the right spot, once and for all, we were ready to get going. The process began

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Fab Freebies: Them Bones

***This giveaways has reached it’s cap of 10,000 and is now closed – see who won below!*** Wow, you guys really have an appetite for great pieces! After less than 24 hours of giveaway madness, we have crowned our random winner as… joyfulcanary (whose favorite piece is a tie between her $30 thrift store China cabinet and her great grandmother’s Hoosier Cabinet). Congrats on your big win! You don’t typically think of chemistry students writing home design books, but then we learned one of Sherry’s brother’s old classmates at Columbia wrote “Good Bones, Great Pieces” with her mother. It’s a beautiful book about how to combine seven essential elements, er, pieces of furniture in any

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How To Add The Joists To Build A Deck

Alternate punny post title: Joist to the world. (I’ll pause while you golf clap) Good news! My dad made it back from my grandma’s house in West Virginia so operation double-up the girders and bolt them to the posts was able to commence with him at my side. As I started to tell my dad “Okay, you’re going to hold the board in place in the air while I drill pilot holes…” he cut me off and suggested we just put both girder boards on the ground, nail them together and that way they’d both rest on the notched posts – no air-hold required. Smart. I knew there was a reason I picked him as

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