Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Bathroom Drawer Organization

Dude, meet our disaster drawer. I know you guys already got a preview of him yesterday, but you know how a horror movie has that dun-dun-duuuuun sound effect? This drawer needs one too. It’s that bad. Like “what wild animal got in there and rooted around?” bad. So in the name of organization week (and general sanity) it was about time we got on it.   The issue is that we don’t have a medicine cabinet, thanks to the window in front of the sink, as demonstrated by this pic from our House Tour page. The drawer in front of the sink is actually a false drawer, so we can’t use that one for additional

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How To Organize Kid Clutter

OK, it’s day two of our organizing week and we’re currently working on our crazy sink drawer that we shared yesterday. In the meantime, this isn’t one of those organizing play by plays with before, during, and after pics (that’s this afternoon’s post) it’s more a full breakdown of a system that works for us when it comes to taming the Clara-phernalia that threatens to take over our house. Around twice a week we get a question like: “can you do a post about how your organize Clara’s stuff? I could really use some ideas on how to control the chaos!” So here’s the rundown. In the beginning it was pretty simple. She was little

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Fab Freebie: Boys In The Yard

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** After lots of love proclamations for NSYNC, NKOTB and more, random.org has survived boy-band-mania and crowned our winner as… Megan G (who says she loves the original boy band…The Beatles). Congrats Megan! In the spirit of a week of cleaning & organizing, who could use a new lawn mower to tidy things up outside? Well, someone’s getting this puppy (valued at $339) thanks to Lawn-Boy. It’s self propelled, easy to start, and features a “Blade Stop” system that allows you to turn off the blades without killing the engine, which comes in handy if you’ve got a lawn frequently peppered with sticks or

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Organizing The Whole House, One Cabinet At A Time

You Down With O-R-G? Yeah You Know Me. Yes, that’s a Naughty By Nature reference. But why O-R-G? That’s $herdog’s abbreviation for organizing. I’ve gotta be honest. Our house hasn’t been this trashed/chaotic/messy since we moved in 16 months ago. Seriously, I’m not talking about a little dist around the baseboards or some streaks on the windows, I’m talking about serious stuff like not being able to locate anything in our completely ridiculous sink drawer: So although we have two entire sections of our Projects page dedicated to cleaning and organizing posts of yore, there hasn’t been much of that going on lately. At all. It all started to fall apart back in Jan/Feb during three

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Richmond Craft Fair: Spring Bada Bing

Two weekends ago we hit up the Richmond Craft Mafia‘s Spring Bada-Bing craft show (which we told you about via this giveaway). It was similar to their Handmade Holiday event that we checked out back in December, so since that post was such a hit with you guys, we thought we’d share all of the awesomely local craft-y goodness that we happened upon during this show too. Oh, and while we didn’t leave with the bounty like we bought last year – we did purchase one of the many things we loved (times three, actually). So feel free to guess what it was as we lead you on a little craft tour de jour (and we’ll

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A Red, White, and Teal Bunkroom For 4 Girls

Projects like Shannon’s almost make us wish we had four daughters running around. I should emphasize the “almost” on that. Haha. But, once you see the project Shannon took on, you’ll see why the idea of having four girls around sounds kinda awesome (and this is coming from a guy who grew up with three sisters). Hey guys! It’s so funny reading your blog. We were and are where you guys are – but we started almost ten years ago when we bought our first house. Since then we’ve brought our total baby count to five (yup, five!) and we’re still in the same house – trying to make it work. Anyway, with the birth

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Cloth Diapering Review

There’s a vicious cycle going on. We blog about something and then we live with it. And while we do, we tackle other stuff and blog about that. Lather, rinse, repeat. So we’re not always good about keeping you posted on those older things that we’ve already talked about since we’re so busy gabbing about new stuff. Which probably explains why we get asked for updates on a handful of things nearly every day. In other words: it’s about darn time we followed up. So here’s a nice juicy post full of a bunch of those updates for everyone. Cloth diapers: Believe it or not, we’re still using the very same original 12 cloth diapers

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Turning Kid Art Into Custom Fabric

Well, Clara can go ahead and add fabric designer to her resume. With her 23 month photo in the can (see the full photo project here), it means the next monthly picture in line is the big 2-4… otherwise known as age 2. And since we concluded her first year of weekly-fabric-backdropped photos… … with a custom fabric design that we made through Spoonflower by scanning her name drawn out in marker on paper (and tiling it in Photoshop), we though we’d make it a tradition and create more homemade fabric for her second birthday. We thought about doing something similar with Clara’s name for our she’s-two fabric (perhaps in Sherry’s handwriting instead of mine)

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House Crashing: John And Sherry Plus 8

You know how excited we get to snoop around houses and share the goods with you guys (we’ve even crashed open houses and stores), so just picture our excitement to crash EIGHT houses on one block for your viewing pleasure. It definitely wasn’t our most traditional house crashing adventure – it was actually a home show here in Richmond called Richmond Homearama, where home builders team up with local designers to construct and decorate eight houses in a variety of styles. Most of the homes are already sold by now, but you can still stroll around for ideas and inspiration. So we thought we’d show you a few of our favorite nooks and crannies. It

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How To Add Floor Trim, Transitions, and Reducers

Since sharing this photo over a month ago, some of you have asked for more detail about putting the transitions around the cork floor in our kitchen (and around the fireplace’s floor surround). Oh but remember we’re eventually going to be refinishing the rooms with the orange wood flooring to match the darker cork tone, so it should look something like this down the line (pardon the bad photoshop): Finding the right thing for the job was a bit of an effort on our part since our Lisbon Cork doesn’t come with matching transitions. In fact, the guy at Lumber Liquidators recommended against any kind of cork transition because they’re not as durable as a

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Fab Freebie: The Closers

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** We gave random.org the assignment again of helping us choose our winner and they chose… Sarah (who could think of 10 little projects that have added up that she could use this for). Congrats Sarah! Since the early days of YHL, we’ve been buddies with the foursome over at One Project Closer. Ethan, Fred, and their wives Jocie and Kim dish up tutorials, tool reviews and decor posts to help us all get (say it with me) one project closer to our dream house. Recently they’ve launched a series of “Pro-Follows” where the boys tag along with professional contractors to document big projects

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How To Spray Paint Upholstered Chairs

Yup. I spray painted chairs. Upholstered chairs. Dude, I’m the first to admit it’s weird. And it’s definitely not the answer if you’re sane. But when you’re a desperate woman with nothing to lose, well… stuff happens. Remember these Craigslist chairs we found last March? They were originally from an old hotel (with faded and stained eighties fabric to prove it) but we got them for $25 a pop. Then I tried to paint them a soft apple green color like a tutorial I’d seen, but didn’t have as much luck (read more on that hot-mess here). We were set on green for a while (not this neon of course) until we realized it’s a

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