Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Creating Custom First Birthday Party Invitations

It’s her party and we’ll DIY invitations if we want to. You would DIY them too if it happened to you if you were us. After all, our wedding invites were homemade… … so how could we phone it in for our daughter’s first birthday party? Even though much-more-talented-invitation-designers like Mrs. Limestone generously offered to lend a hand (so nice), we stubbornly set out to attempt to create our second party invitation ever on our own (well, with the help of a cute baby and a computer). I guess we just have a thing for doing it ourselves (ya think?). So we started out with a very familiar set-up to our weekly Clara photos like

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Fab Freebie: A Break From Boring

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries  – see who won below!*** According to random.org, our two giveaway winners are… Amy I. (who’d enjoyed a weekend away and then a few days at home for her pretend spring break) and DebbieRN (who’d go to Sanibel Island). Don’t you wish there was a no-adult-left-behind official grown-up spring break? Since many of the kids in our county are out of school this week, it made us think about how nice it would be if every adult scored the same week-long break from the office grind. Luckily this week’s prize from The Office Stylist promises to inject some fun (and function) to your desk job. They’ve got loads

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How To Make A Hallway Frame Gallery Wall

Isn’t it strange how you can start a project (in this case the gallery of frames that we wanted to “wallpaper” our hallway walls with) and then just leave the other half of it undone for a month. Not weeks. Literally a month. What’s wrong with us? And it’s not like we weren’t obsessed with the results of the first half of the project (recounted here): We just ran out of frame gas or something, so we switched over to console building and chair painting and closet organizing and ceramic dog gluing and tree trimming and sectional leg spray-painting and all the other odd things that we’ve tackled since our little wall-hole-making spree. It’s so

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Hanging Two Mirrors And Using Them As Dry Erase Boards

In our last office we found that hanging a mirror helped keep us organized. Not just because we noticed if we had something on our face, but also because we could write on it with a dry erase marker to keep track of our to do list (and could even use it to write a welcome message to our guests since that room slept our friends and family as well). When we moved I missed that little organizational corner, so I started taping a comically small piece of paper on the wall with a list of things to do. And then it grew into two lists, one on each side of the large doorway. The

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My Secret: It’s Goo Related

Raise your hand if you think I’m anal. (I’ll pause while you do that). Well, I probably am. I’m definitely type A. But I think there might be a misconception that our house gleams and the faucets are always shined and there aren’t any toothpaste splatters on the mirrors. Yeah right, I wish. We tried to disprove the whole perfect thing with this video (yes, we leave clothes on the floor and mail in a pile like the rest of the population- haha) and it seemed like the masses were relieved. We’re human I promise (although I’m pretty sure if I weren’t human I’d pretend that I was for assimilation purposes), and my dirty goo-related

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A Reason Not To Use Pallets For Certain DIY Projects

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? What do I look like, a woodchuck expert? I have no idea. But I do know the answer to a related yet far lesser known riddle: how many pallet planks could a Petersik pry free if a Petersik could pry free pallet planks? You practice saying that five times fast while I walk you through the answer. You know by now that the plan for our mondo 12′ long DIY console table (last shared here and here) was to build a rustic weathered-looking top out of some old pallets left in our yard by the previous owners (spotted in the background of

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Painting & Hanging Big Metal Keys On The Wall

Remember when we mentioned snagging these old iron keys for $8 in an antique store in West Virginia while visiting John’s grandma? Well I finally got around to painting them and hanging them in our hallway frame gallery (see how we made that here). Where did we squeeze them in? Well, see that card stock placeholder key? That was, well, just a placeholder. I could have easily spray painted them for a quick makeover but since I love to use no-VOC paint whenever I can (especially since I have a huge gallon of white paint around at all times), I opted just to brush on a few coats by hand. It’s the same semi-gloss Olympic

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Painting Upholstery With Fabric Paint Medium

Alternate post title: “In A Minute, I Have To Hairdry The Chair” Guys, I did something crazy. Since we’d like to take our $25 hotel-ish dining chairs to a crisp not-patterned apple green (the curtains I want to make will be patterned, so I just want chairs in a fun color but without a pattern that I’ll tire of) I decided to paint them. I know. Insane. But I didn’t think I had much to lose since the backup plan is to reupholster or slipcover them (both of which would still be entirely possible if I didn’t like how the whole painting thing turned out). I went into it as a hmm-this-experiment-should-be-interesting thing. Nothing was

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Cleaning & Organizing Our Closet

In the words of Eminem… I’m cleaning out my closet. But first a closet-themed dance break for the Marshall Mathers fans out there (I can actually do a mean Eminem impression): Ok, now that we have that out of the way, I’ll get to the meat and potatoes of this post. I’m actually not currently cleaning out my closet, the deed has already been done. And it’s not just my closet, it’s both of ours. We’ve mentioned a few times that before we got a proper dresser we were living for over three months with piles of socks and pajamas on the floor of our bedroom closet. Yeah, it was a disaster, and we just

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How To Build A Console Table

After victoriously completing the two end sections of our three-piece DIYed console table (explained here), I turned my attention to the middle portion. You may recall that this piece will be entirely hidden between the other two (and sandwiched between the back of the sectional and the wall) so I could’ve gotten away with a very simple platform on which to lay the long tabletop that will span across all three pieces that we’re planning to make out of our already-around reclaimed pallet wood. But we figured that would just be wasted space, so we took the less simple route of creating some hidden storage in the middle piece. Allow my sketch to explain: Who

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A Keeping-It-Real House Tour Video

I thought it might be fun to walk around the house with the Flip cam and show you guys how each room can look on an average day. You know, before we pick the clothes up off the floor, put away Clara’s toys, and fold the big blankets that we snuggle under on the sofa. So here’s an impromptu house tour (while John and Clara ducked out to the post office and grocery store) in all of its average everyday glory: Things to note: Ugh, I have a cold. Sorry about my annoying voice. Who am I kidding, my voice annoys me even when I’m not crazy congested. I’m terrible at walking around, talking, and

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12 Design Mistakes We (Hopefully) Won’t Make Again

Q: I have an idea for a blog post. “Design mistakes we won’t make again.” As I look through pictures of all the beautiful work you’ve done, I’m thinking of choosing many similar styles & purchases. But then I wonder, over time – did you ever regret a design choice? – Shannon A: That’s a good one. And now for 1,970 words on the subject. We’ll start by saying that we definitely don’t always know what we’re doing when we do something (us = so not experts) so we just try to take things one day at a time and learn as we go. We make tons of mistakes. You’ve just gotta feel your way

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