Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

| By | | 362 Comments

How We Use Photoshop For Blog Photos

Since Photoshop is our go-to tool around here for blog picture editing (and we get asked for a post with tips, tricks, or pointers pretty regularly) here it goes. But first, you should know a few things… 1. We’re not Photoshop experts: I took a digital photography course in college (in 2003) that taught me some basics and a few tricks, but it was by no means exhaustive. Sherry has a similar background, having used it a bit in art classes in high school and college. But both of us consider most of our skills to be self-taught. Basically just playing around and seeing what button created what effect on our photos. Sherry was a

[ Read More ]

| By | | 260 Comments

How To Replace Shower Tiles

First a little Facebook diatribe: we’ve been hearing from folks who no longer see our posts or Instagram pics hitting their Facebook feed and have learned that FB made a few changes, so if you’d still like to see our posts in your feed again, just take a second to do this: Click over to our Facebook page Hover over the button that says “Liked” Make sure the box next to “show in news feed” is checked. If it isn’t, just check it. Then everything should permanently show up in your feed again. Sorry for the trouble! And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging… In case you missed the post where the tale of

[ Read More ]

| By | | 235 Comments

Window Shopping At World Market

We’re doing our best to keep our word to those who have requested more window shopping posts, so we decided to keep the fun going by hitting up World Market (and taking you with us). For those who remember these things, we just stroll around a store (we’ve done big chains, small local shops, and even random little stores that we find while road-tripping) and take photos of all of the things we love. Not for compensation or anything – these sprees are just for fun. So let’s all go skipping through World Market together, shall we? First there were the pretty drinking glasses that were the reason for our visit (we got a few

[ Read More ]

| By | | 261 Comments

How To Remove An Old Shower Tile Border

We no strangers to removing unsightly trees. In fact, taking care of the dead/dying/dangerous trees that we were warned might fall on our first house during our home inspection was a big part of the transformation of the front yard. But taking out these particular trees was a new challenge… because they were in the form of tile in our bathroom: We’ve never been crazy about the beige-on-beige color scheme going on when it comes to the tile in that bathroom, but at least most of it is neutral enough to not call that much attention to itself. Except for that tree-tacular border. Every time we walk in the opening chant from The Lion King

[ Read More ]

| By | | 6,212 Comments

Fab Freebie: Home Depot Gift Card & Tools

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Thanks to random.org’s trusty randomness, we’ve got our winner and it is… Gretchen B (whose husband is “a mastermind with wood. He can make almost anything, at times he has surprised himself at what he canters up.”). That sounds familiar. Congrats Gretchen! Sorry this post is a few minutes late (380 pages of book proofing = crazytown). But Happy Almost Father’s Day everyone! To help us celebrate, Home Depot is giving away an $100 man card, er, gift card so one lucky reader gets a fast and easy way to show their handy hubby/dad/uncle/brother/grandpa/neighbor how much they care… or how much they really

[ Read More ]

| By | | 205 Comments

How To Gather Materials To Build A Deck

Good news: we made progress on deck building. Huzzah! Bad news: we didn’t make as much as we’d hoped. Harumph. I’m kind of having flashbacks to our bathroom remodel project back in 2009, when we’d schedule a long weekend with my dad to hopefully complete the whole thing but found ourselves just having started tiling by the end of the last day with him. But that’s just how real DIY life tends to go. So let’s rewind to the middle of last week when we got all of our materials delivered from our local 84 Lumber store (totaling about $1,000 including delivery and screws/metal hardware/concrete for footers/etc). That all went smoothly, especially when we realized

[ Read More ]

| By | | 219 Comments

Sweet & Personal Gift Ideas

Woot! Yesterday we OFFICIALLY BROKE GROUND ON THE BIG DECK PROJECT! Although breaking ground is a bit of an overstatement since we are not even close to digging post holes yet – we’re still working on getting our ledger board up (those are the support beams that run along both sides of the house to start the deck frame). Let’s just say that cutting and drilling into brick – especially brick that makes up the side of your house – is not for the faint of heart. So we still have a long way to go, but we’ll be back on Monday to share our progress! Until then here’s an Instagram sneak peek that I

[ Read More ]

| By | | 83 Comments

A Boy’s Bedroom With A Wood Plank Ceiling & Checkered Curtains

Since we don’t have any excuse to decorate a little boy’s room, we live vicariously through friends and readers. Which is one of the reasons we’re excited to share Kat and Mitch’s awesome transformation of their son Ryder’s room. They not only did a bang-up job on the whole thing (and took on lots of DIY projects to keep it affordable) it was all inspired by a free bed they found. Here’s Kat’s letter: We just finished my son’s room and we’re so proud of how it turned out. First things first, this is what this room looked like prior… well several years ago anyway when Ryder was a baby. What made us decide it

[ Read More ]

| By | | 353 Comments

Adding Bright Red Adirondack Chairs To Our Side Patio

Enough about our colorful stools… …and on to our newest set of colorful chairs. Oh yes, we’re officially on a bold-colored seating kick. Remember we already have these $35 thrift store guys that we gussied up with green paint and fresh upholstery in the office? And this zero dolla (holla!) hand-me-down highchair for Clara that we happied up with some sunny yellow paint? Apparently it’s nothing but the best brightest for our buns. And this might be kind of shocker, but this time… we’ve gone red! A pretty tomato red, to be exact. And it looks pretty darn tasty with the blue hydrangeas around the paver patio that we DIYed last May. When we shared

[ Read More ]

| By | | 738 Comments

How To Spray Paint Metal Stools

Well, after reading every last one of the 750+ suggestions you guys left on this post (no doubt about it – there are definitely a million ways we could have gone with these guys!) and putting lots of thought into pretty much every possibility under the sun, we ended up going with our very first instinct. A chipper turquoise-y-teal tone. So here’s the rundown of how we transformed these basic $32 stools from an online supply store. The funny thing is that there were probably the most votes for blue from you guys too (closely followed by yellow). Although there were definitely suggestions for a ton of other options (four different colors, tones like orange/coral/purple/pink, upholstered

[ Read More ]

| By | | 125 Comments

May Superlatives: Ninja Turtles & Hairy Sherry

As our freshly painted stools dry in the sunroom (woot! pics tomorrow!) we thought we’d finally catch up on the May superlatives that we owe you (sorry to those who have been asking about them!). So here’s a look back at all the stuff that we check off in May. We even tossed in some never-before-seen stuff for kicks. You can check out all of our superlatives dating back to January of 2011 right here (it’s over a year of projects crammed into 16 posts). Plus, since I got to play model a lot this month (hair model, permit-getting model, etc) I threw in a new shot of me sporting next season’s hottest look at the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 420 Comments

A Rug For The Kitchen

Our new kitchen rug has arrived! Yes, it was actually something we ordered online, which is somewhat nerve-wracking since finding a rug for this spot has proven difficult so far (although we have had success with online rug orders before). But based on what we learned from our little rug fashion show, we were pretty confident that we’d figured out the winning formula. At least we were hopeful… The “winning” rug was actually from Urban Outfitters. The color, pattern, and price were all great – so we thought we’d give it a shot. With a spring discount code they were running, it came to just $69 with shipping – which is obviously a lot cheaper

[ Read More ]