Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Sneaky Little Petersiks

S’prise. We’ve been on the road for the past five days and just got home last night at 7pm after a nine hour drive. Did we unpack or snuggle up to Karl the Sectional after our home sweet home arrival? Nah, we threw this post together. Just your typical case of “unpacking procrastination” at its finest. Actually I’m just dying to fill you guys in on our adventures, and typical annoyingly energetic gal that I am, I’m too excited to relax. Anyway, we headed out early Thursday morning for Charlotte, NC and stayed there through Saturday morning. Then it was off to Loganville, GA where we remained until early Monday morning when we hit the

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Fab Freebie: Here’s Looking At You, Mate

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Good news: everyone can get 10% off their MirrorMate order with code VIRAL. And if they get 1000 new Facebook followers or new email subscribers, that code doubles to 20% for everyone. But here’s the better news (at least for one of you): random.org has chosen our winner as… Jessica (who says she’s usually checking the mirror to “make sure nothing is obviously out of place or gross”). Congrats! So maybe I fudged that line from Casablanca a little. Thanks for letting it slide. It’s turning out to be a mirror-tastic day today, so if you’re stuck with a basic builder mirror that’s

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Getting The Scale Right With Furniture

Nope, this isn’t a weight loss post. The scale that I’m talking is this too small had-it-so-we-used-it bookshelf that we shoved into the guest room (just days before my mom arrived) a few months back. Talk about teeny tiny: And somehow we forgot to update you guys about a little switcheroo that took place after we got our new (well, very old) dresser for the bedroom from John’s dad. So here’s a very belated dresser related news flash: we moved our old malm (from Ikea five years ago when we moved to Richmond from NYC) into the guest room. So it looked like this: The scale is definitely better. Someday we’d love to get a

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Gift Idea: A Custom Wooden House Replica

As of last week, my parents officially live in Richmond. This rocks for several reasons (free babysitting) so we’re excited to have them (as free babysitters) just about 15 minutes down the road (close enough to easily babysit for free). Plus, you’ll probably get some peeks at their new digs as they settle in (between babysitting jobs) and as we help them tackle some projects around their house (perhaps in exchange for all of the free babysitting). And if you follow us on Flickr, you’ve noticed that we wasted no time breaking in their community pool as soon as the moving truck was returned: Three days after closing on their new house, my parents also

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How To Make A Wood Plaque With A Number Or Letter On It

I like to consider our hallway frame wall a constant “work in progress” since the art in the frames can be swapped out at anytime. But there was at least one element that was less a “work in progress” and more an “um, you’re not going to leave it that way, are you?” Can you spot it? Yep, it’s the placeholder photostrip in the center. We didn’t have a frame to fit that slot at the time, so we figured down the line we’d cut a piece of wood, paint it white and mount the strip on something more officially looking than, well, a piece of office paper held up with painter’s tape (oh the

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Shopping In Bethany Beach

We snuck off to the beach over Memorial Day weekend to spend some time with John’s family (at their amazing beach house near Bethany Beach, Delaware) so we thought we’d share our house-related adventures. A while back a reader (thanks Ann!) recommended checking out The Old Screen Door in Lewes (about 30 mins from Bethany), so we took a drive out there and it was the cutest little town (which boasts that it was the first town in the first state). Here’s the front of the shop: It’s not very big inside, but there’s a collection of really fun old stuff going on (mixed with some new stuff to keep things interesting). And Clara loves

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How To Dye Fabric Chair Slipcovers

Remember how we envisioned modern and cheerful green leather parsons chairs around a chunky wood table from pretty much the moment we moved in? And how we decided that dyed-green slipcovers were pretty much the same thing when we found chairs for $25 and slipcovers for $23? Well, we were wrong. I dyed two of the chairs green and they were just not “it” (even if we altered the shade of green, we just knew it was the wrong way to go for us as soon as we saw these babies): Especially considering that there would be seven or eight of them around the table at all times (and we have the bold built-ins going

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May Superlatives

Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of May – high school yearbook style. Most Improved: Organizing The Insanely Cluttered “Playroom” (more like “disaster area”). Biggest Procrastinator: Painting The Dining Room (after living with swatches for five months) Most Repetitive: Mounting Prints On Canvases (Not Once But Twice) Most Outdoorsy: Sketched Up An Outdoor “Floor Plan” (not to scale though – oops – the house is way too big & our almost-acre lot

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Aren’t Mother-In-Laws The Best?

When Sherry’s mom was here a couple of weekends ago for Clara’s birthday party she clocked more than her fair share of hours helping us clean the house in preparation. Perhaps her most miraculous accomplish was in the future playroom / second kids bedroom (aka: current junkroom) which looked like this when she arrived (no kidding): Since our junk basically screamed “I Will Topple Over On Your Baby!” we were just planning to close and lock the door during the party to keep all of the littler guests away from certain death. That plan went to pot when we realized that we couldn’t physically close the door anymore (mainly due to the poorly timed delivery

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The Perfect Light Gray Paint Color: Moonshine By Benjamin Moore

It was January when we painted three test swatches of gray on our dining room walls. It took us just days to pick the color but apparently took us, yeah, um, FOUR MONTHS to finally paint the room. I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing – our painting laziness or my rockin’ farmer’s tan. Anyway, I searched my brain for some sort of an excuse for the dining room paint delay. Maybe we were too tired at the end of the day in January that we spent painting the living room and hallway the same color? Or we were too distracted by completing the guest room for Sherry’s mom’s February visit? Or we were too consumed

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Budget Blooms: Birthday Leftovers

You may have noticed a bouquet in the middle of the table for Clara’s party two weeks ago. Well, sadly some of those blooms are no longer among the living: But there are a few that are still going strong, so I decided to drop them into three of my favorite vases (from Ikea a while back) for this happy little effect: And yes, they’re on the windowsill in our bathroom. Just because I realized that we have never had any flowers in that room (there are all sorts of “firsts” in this house for me – including flowers in the bathroom) so I had to revel in the first-bathroom-blooms occurrence. It feels good to

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Full Circle

This is a free Dremel that I got from the DIY Network. I know what this looks like. Like I’ve broken our no-free-swag rule. But this was given to me back in 2003, long before our self-imposed policy took effect (hence its worse-for-wear appearance). Heck, it even pre-dates our blog, our first home purchase, and even our relationship (we didn’t meet until 2004, and didn’t start dating ’til 2005). So now you’re probably wondering what the single, 21-year-old, apartment-dwelling, college student version of me did to deserve a free tool from a home improvement network. Well, it’s because I was currently rocking the prestigious title of “intern.” That’s me in August of 2003 on the

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