Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Making A Selenite Crystal Fireplace

If you’ve followed along for a while you’ve seen our bedroom fireplace get a few updates over on Instagram Stories, but today we’re telling the whole sordid tale of how our update ideas recently veered off-course (and how we ended up at Plan B when Plan A went bust). Last time you saw it on the blog, it looked a little something like this: But we should rewind for a second. It was pretty bleak looking when we first started Operation Revive The Fireplace. There was a bunch of dried glue and gunk leftover from some tiles that had once covered the surround (not to mention a rusty screen and general grime). But Sherry had

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Small Kitchen Cabinet Organization

Last week we shared how we painted our cabinets, and today we’re taking you through the whole shebang of how they’re organized. This kitchen has around one 25% of the cabinetry/storage of our last one – and even we were a little nervous about how we’d adapt to significantly less countertop & cabinetry – but the spoiler alert is that it has been great! We can store everything we need and use – and things are pretty easy to grab (no digging behind a bunch of items to find something). So if you’ve been curious about this particular aspect of downsizing – or just like peeking inside other people’s cabinets – this post is for

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How To Add Hidden Hinges To Old Cabinets

When we recently painted our kitchen cabinets mauve, we took the opportunity to swap out the old surface-mount hinges for new, hidden hinges. It’s a small tweak and only cost us $40, but it went a long way towards making this dated kitchen look a little more current (while we wait to take on a full renovation). Plus it didn’t require boring crazy holes into the back of the cabinets like most hidden hinges require! Hidden Hinge Before & After You can see in this photo from our first kitchen post that the cabinets originally had those old surface-mount hinges that are visible on the front of the cabinet. They were painted over at least

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Painting Our Kitchen Cabinets Pink

As you saw in our last kitchen post, we decided to embrace the existing counters and go for a tone-on-tone look for Phase One – just because why the heck not?! When else do you get mauve counters to work with? Note: you can read more on why we prefer to make smaller updates & live with the kitchen we have for a nice long time (versus gutting it right away) here. After doing five quick & easy updates to our kitchen that made a pretty big difference a few weeks back, we knew that painting the old chipping cabinets would also really go a long way in making this room feel a lot less

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A Before & After Look At Our (Only!) Bathroom

By now we’ve shown you every room in our new house, with the exception of this one: our bathroom! And as you’ve probably heard us say, it’s our home’s only bathroom (which has really not been a big deal so far at all – for which we’re extremely grateful). The funny thing is that although there’s only one, it wasn’t even functional when we bought the house. The sink vanity had been torn off the wall, the water was shut off to the entire house due to various leaks, and there was not a functioning sewer or septic system attached to the house at all. As in, even if the toilet flushed, it wouldn’t have

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#181: How The Other House We Considered Came Back Around

There were two houses in our neighborhood that we seriously considered, and today we’re sharing a truly random occurrence that involves the house we didn’t buy. We’re also sharing what we learned from our astrocartography readings. What did the stars say about our move to Florida? Were our readings dead-on or completely off? And what random sentence about a certain mammal made Sherry extremely excited? Plus the tale of a simple outdoor project that took months longer than it should have and the purchase that made us change our tune about outdoor furniture. Also, Sherry did something embarrassing again. What’s New Here’s a look at our new fence that we had installed between us and the

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Five Quick & Easy Kitchen Updates

Quick note: if you missed the update to last week’s post that went up a few days after it was originally published, you can catch up on that here. When we moved in one of the subcontractors said they’d been wondering why we didn’t tear out the old cabinets and mismatched appliances and pink laminate counters and redo the kitchen before we moved in. But if you’ve followed us for a while, you know the answer. We like to live with a kitchen for a nice long time before changing the layout or doing any major upgrades like replacing the cabinets or counters (in our last house we waited three years for our big renovation).

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How To Make A Channel Tufted Headboard

After using our favorite method to make a simple headboard for our son’s room last week, we actually had enough leftover materials to try out a new trick in our daughter’s room – which yielded a completely free headboard for her. Three cheers for $0 projects, right? Especially since she helped us settle on the design and make it, so it’s not only cozy to lean back on (you know that function is my love language), but she’s also super into the finished result because she had a hand in it. Literally. Before we dive into that how-to, we realized you haven’t seen how her room has shaped up since we moved in. In case

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How To Build A Bookshelf

We recently shared how we created the wraparound fabric headboard in our son’s room, but today we wanted to tell you about the custom bookcase we constructed at the foot of his bed. It was a great DIY project to fill that space, while also giving him some super-convenient bedside book storage (plus a secret hidden compartment!). It was a remarkably easy build that anyone could do, plus you can customize it your particular space! Why Create Custom Book Storage? This is the smallest room in our small house and his bed fits nicely against this wall with just enough space at the end for some custom storage. Before building this bookshelf, his book were

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Recent Bedroom Updates (And What We’ve Got Planned)

Yesterday marks two months since we moved, and our bedroom was probably the last room to make the transition from “dumping ground of things to unpack” to “comfortable space that feels like ours.” So here’s where things are currently – and what’s still ahead of us (including some bad photoshop to give you a peek inside our heads). If you recall from our before tour, this space was originally a living room (with another much larger living space upstairs with a nice big deck off of it). Since we quickly realized that we’d rather share that larger room & deck as a family, and sleep on the same level as our kids, we knew this

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#180: Decorating In The Era Of Zoom

The sudden boom of video conferencing in all of our lives is giving us a new window through which to view our homes (and the homes of others – from coworkers to celebrities and news correspondents). So what does your Zoom background say about you? And what lengths will we go to when it comes to altering them to make sure nothing weird gets seen by everyone else on the call? We also realized in hindsight that a family trip earlier this year had a pretty major effect on our decision to move to Florida. Plus we explain the big shiny object on our kitchen counter – and Sherry divulges an embarrassing story from her

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Our Outdoor Shower Makeover

Our Cape Charles beach house quickly taught us the value of an outdoor shower. By giving people a spot to rinse off before coming inside, it keeps sand off your floors and out of your plumbing. It took us a couple of summers to get that outdoor shower fully enclosed and functional (you can see it here in this post), so it was a nice perk that our new Florida house already had one ready to go. Well, if you consider non-functioning plumbing and grime-covered walls “ready to go.” This space kind of baffled us at first. It looked like some sort of open-air sauna thing. And maybe it was just all of the dirt

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