Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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We’re Opening The Kitchen Wall Up!

This is it. The big wall-opening week (aka: w.o.w). So… woot! The first order of business is to share a few details that we’ve been asked about a bunch: how we went about picking a contractor how we’ve dealt with permits how we planned out the exact spot for the opening (would hate to knock everything down, only to wish we had shifted it a little to the left or the right) First, here’s why we need a contractor: we love DIY as much as the next guy, but there are some things that we’re happy to leave to the pros, especially when it comes to the structural integrity of our house. We’re no strangers

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October Superlatives

It’s that time again! When we take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff to spice things up. This month we were all over the place as usual, from doing a bunch of kitchen things to dipping into a few office projects, some landscaping tasks, and even a few Halloween crafts. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives (you know, just for kicks). Most Destructive: Demoing out our fridge cabinet, which officially kicked off to the kitchen makeover madness. Best Timing:

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Painting And Stenciling A Coffee Table

Will we ever grow tired of seeing a piece of furniture that has been completely transformed with a little bit of paint? Probably not. At least not as long as we’re getting emails like Jesse’s. Here’s an excerpt from his blog about the whole hexagon-tastic transformation of this coffee table that he sent our way: You can see in the photo that this was one of those over-lacquered tables that was pretty beat up. But the curves are all there, and they are nice! The top had really pretty woodwork, a nice diamond inlay. So, continuing with my recent love affair with wood AND paint rather than one or the other, I stripped this table

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How To Pick A New Siding Color

Duuude. We painted our house. Clarification: we painted a few tiny test swatches. The creamy color wasn’t exactly hurting our eyes, but there are a few gorgeous homes in our neighborhood with gray hardboard siding + brick and we love the look, so we decided to give a few swatches a try. Having such a light creamy color on the hardboard siding (it’s solid wood) and all of the trim isn’t doing the trim any favors (it’s not popping at all since it’s all the same color). And the pairing of the light cream with the darker richer brick is sort of jarring – like it’s two houses. So we thought by going with a

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38 Homemade Christmas Ornament Projects

It’s Wednesday the 2nd… so it’s time to share this season’s (completely unofficial) Pinterest Challenge (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie to make us stop pinning and start doing). I actually tackled ornaments (since the winter edition of our little Pinterest Challenge won’t be until January), which I mentioned last Wednesday when Katie, Ana, Erin and I issued our little get-off-our-bums-and-make-something challenge. I know, I know – it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. I’m one of those one-holiday-at-a-time peeps too. But it was actually oddly satisfying to feel so “prepared” for the upcoming holiday season. And I’m kind of in love with all the happy little ornaments I squeezed out.

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Landscaping Around A Mailbox

You know this little online diary of ours is all about keeping you posted on the little stuff along with the big (and the bad and the ugly along with the good). So file this under small but good. Remember our little petunia-fied mailbox? Well, it went from this in June… …to this in August… …to this in October: Womp- womppppp. The petunias were annuals so they weren’t gonna last forever. And between rain washing out a lot of the mulch and the flowers thinning to a scraggly looking vine mess… yeah, it was ugly. But wait, we’ll get to the “good” in a minute. Fortunately I was able to pull them out with virtually

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How To Build In Your Refrigerator

We learned with our first kitchen that building in your fridge is a huge help in making a kitchen look fancy schmancy. And at the moment our floating fridge was looking pretty much the exact opposite. That’s where an also less than schmancy $19 cabinet from the Habitat For Humanity ReStore (mentioned yesterday) came in handy. It’s 12″ tall and 36″ wide, the exact width of our fridge. And when you take off the don’t-match doors (we’re hoping to retrofit extra existing doors to make it seamlessly match the other cabinets later), it starts to look more like a workable piece of cabinetry to sit atop our refrigerator. For the sides of our built-in fridge,

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Using Secondhand Cabinets For A Kitchen Renovation

We knew we weren’t likely to find $1 cabinets again (like we did for the office built-ins) but we couldn’t resist checking out the Habitat For Humanity ReStore for the four cabinets that we need to create the peninsula and build in the microwave/fridge (we’re able to reuse the 36″ cabinet that used to live where the stove now sits, so that saved us some major money). The good news is that we found three out of the four we needed! And only spent $90 total. Yup, we got a corner base cabinet for the peninsula for $50 and two upper cabinets (one for over the fridge and one slightly taller one for over the

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Bowers In Da House

I promised more Bower visit deets on Wednesday when we dorkily spilled the beans that Katie B and I had been together in a series of photos that can only be described as awkwaaaard (get to the root of that joke here). You know we love a good Bower Visit Breakdown (like this one, this one, this one, and this one of yore). But before we get to all the stuff we did together, we’ll share the little video that we made for ya. Because KB and I always get the same few questions: how did you guys meet? are you real friends or just blog friends? how long have you been friends? what were

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How To Compare Counter Options And Pick One

We’re inching right along in the kitchen (wish we could share kitchen updates every day but we’re doing this thing real-time). Which brings us to our latest decision: the new counters that we’ll be going with. We’ve been debating possibilities for weeks (there are a junkload of options out there with pros and cons to each one). And ten people would probably make ten different decisions, so it can feel especially hard to hone in on the “right” thing since there are so many variables. So here’s how we landed on the choice that we like best for our kitchen/family/life. But first the thing we’re sad about: although we had high hopes of DIYing concrete

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Hanging A Gallery Wall Of Frames In The Home Office

This art wall makes us so happy – and we didn’t overthink it (to the point of what-should-we-frame paralysis – which can happen if we’re not careful). Although we did talk about a few other options and eliminate them based on certain factors, such as: one giant piece of art on each side of the window = too symmetrical for our taste, and too repetitive with the big rectangular window in the middle (so it would look like three big boxes) open shelving = too much shelving since there are two walls of it thanks to the dining room built-ins (it would be shelving with more shelving beyond it) mirrors = too much, since we

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It’s baaaack…

Yup, Katie B (and Will & Jeremy) drove up to VA to pay us a visit this past weekend. Sneaky little Bowers. And among other things, we posed in the yard holding big white signs. You know, the usual. We’ll share more what-we-did details a little later in the week, but for now we’re here to issue the second ever Pinterest Challenge (it’s not actually sponsored or endorsed by Pinterest – we’re just obsessed fans). My Pinterest addiction runs deep (as you know from this heartfelt post of yore), so a few months back when Katie called me to say that she thought we should challenge ourselves to make one thing each season that’s inspired

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