Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Decluttering Tips To Try Before A House Showing

How do we learn around these parts? By doing. And sometimes by panicking. So when someone called us to see our house out of the blue, and wanted to drop by in an hour, we panicked. But only for five to ten minutes. Then we used the other 50 minutes to do the ahh-someone’s-coming-to-look-at-our-house shuffle. Luckily the house was already pretty clean since we knew we would be showing it sooner or later. But what about that recommended pairing down step to reduce clutter and make cabinets and closets look bigger (so you don’t seem like you’re bursting at the seams)? Here’s how that went: Step 1: Take two large plastic bags (ideally big black

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Mo Mortgage, Mo Problems

One of the first steps we took when we officially dubbed ourselves “house hunters” was to find out how much house we could afford. Sure, we knew what was in our bank account and what sort of mortgage payment we could handle… but it’s not about what we think. It’s about what the banks think. So we made an appointment with our lending agent (the same guy who helped us buy & later refinance this house) so he could analyze our assets to estimate what loan amount we’ll get – which obviously will help us determine the price range of the new house that we should be hunting for. We were cautiously optimistic about this

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Farah’s Living Room Makeover: We’re Done!

Here’s where we explain the second half of Farah’s home makeover (click here to read our first post on the subject). Basically HomeGoods offered us some free merch for our house and we asked if we could pay it forward and transform someone else’s casa instead. Unbelievably they agreed. And we decided that we couldn’t stop at just sprucing up Farah’s mom cave after we laid eyes on her family room. So we have another before and after for all you transformation loving fiends. Here’s her cute family again, just to refresh your memory. And here’s their family room before: Here’s the same room after we got our mitts on it: It was pretty much

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Word To Your Motha Cave

Move over man cave, this post is all about a mom cave. When HomeGoods contacted us to offer us a gift card to create a mom cave in our house, we asked if we could pay it forward instead. And they were game. Oh and then we asked what the heck a mom cave was. It’s actually a little haven for any mom in her own home. The mom’s answer to the man cave if you will. It can just be a small corner of a bedroom with a chair for relaxing and reading or an entire room devoted to crafting, pedicuring, or anything else that your little mom heart desires. So I set out

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We’re Selling Our House

Holy bananas. We just stuck the For Sale sign in front of our house (the one in this post was photoshopped in case you couldn’t tell). Big day. So it’s official. Our house is really on the market. We’re still in the process of doing a ton of things to woo potential buyers both inside and out (stay tuned for those details as we go) and we’re actually trying the for-sale-by-owner route… at least for a little while. Being such big DIYers it seemed odd not to give it a go (especially since my mom and dad have sold nearly every house they’ve ever owned themselves). Although we’re definitely not opposed to turning to a

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Using Gourds To Make Fall Decor

Yes, that was a gourd pun. Although I must admit that my all time favorite post title ever was Oh My Gourd (see that post here). Anyway, in case you couldn’t tell, this post is about gourds. I like injecting a little seasonal interest into our home in a few fun and inexpensive ways (think Halloween decor like this and Thanksgiving decor like this). And given my love of all things white and ceramic I couldn’t help myself when we came across these faux gourds at JoAnn Fabrics for 50% off their $2.99 price tag (so I grabbed all five for $7.45). Then I spray painted the heck out of them with some white glossy

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Blogiversary III: You Asked, We Answered

Just like last year (here and here) we decided to answer as many random and personal questions from our Facebook & Twitter friends as we could in honor of this year’s blogiversary. With over 200 questions to choose from (you guys are curious!) we couldn’t tackle them all, but we did our best to answer a bunch. Here’s hoping we don’t sound as lame to you guys as we sound to ourselves. Q: What is the weirdest question you have ever been asked? – Jessica Sherry: Someone actually asked me while I was prego if I was a thong wearer. I assumed they were from the UK and replied that I wasn’t wearing flip-flops anymore

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Blogiversary III: Goal Tending

Every year when our blogiversary rolls around, we like to take a moment to outline our goals. So it’s time to officially state three things that we’re going to work really hard to accomplish over the next 365 days. After all, there’s nothing like a public proclamation to light a fire under the ol’ buns. So enough chit-chat. Here are the three biggest things on our list (speaking of big, check out my ridiculous calves). Goal Numero Uno: Move On- As we recently shared, we’re saying peace out to our lovely and amazing casa. It’s definitely bittersweet, but we can’t wait to get our mitts on something new-to-us and shine it up like a lucky

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Blogiversary III: Our Days Are Numbered

For every blogiversary that rolls around we like to have some mathy fun with numbers to break down some funny (and admittedly horrifying) facts when it comes to all things YHL. 1527- Our number of published posts to date (crazy considering we only had 380 on our first blogiversary) 258,904- The number of comments we’ve amassed from you, our lovely readers 13,039- The number of comment questions that we’ve answered to date (we do our best to answer every single one) 4- Number of people who live in our house (counting Burger, who thinks he’s a person) 3- The number of days we were in the hospital after Clara was born 0- The number of

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