Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Picking A New Siding Color & Updating Our Exterior Trim

As if all the blue and mauve trim on the inside of the house isn’t enough, we had some outside trim that needed some attention. When we bought this house we knew we had four major things to deal with: the roof and the furnace, a few bad trees, and this last bear: some rotting areas of siding and trim that needed to be replaced along with a fresh paint job for the whole house. But at least we knew about all of them going into the house purchase (and the first two didn’t end up draining our wallets) – so maybe that softened the blow a little? Speaking of soft, I give you… our

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How To Repair A Hole In Your Deck

Again? Already?!? If you had told me 10 months ago that I’d be doing deck construction again less than a year later, I would’ve punched you in the face. Okay, not literally. I’m not the punching type. But I would’ve thrown you a look that said “I would be punching you in the face right now if I were the punching type.” It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the process of building a deck in the heat of summer… I just wasn’t really looking forward to doing it again so soon. But at least it wasn’t an entire deck this time. It was more of a patch job. Remember this puppy? That’s the hole leftover

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Fab Freebie: Infrared, White, And Blue

Tis the season for watermelon slices, corn on the cob, and good stuff on the grill. Which is why Char-Broil is hooking someone up with one of their top commercial-grade gas grills this week. This 4-burner baby sells for nearly $500 at Lowe’s and is built with their exclusive Tru-Infrared cooking system, which comes with a bevy of benefits: more even heat, juicer foods, and faster cooking times. It’s putting me in the mood for kebobs already… Please enter using the Rafflecopter widget right here (it might take a second to load, but it should pop up right below this paragraph). This prize ships anywhere in the United States and Canada (so Happy Canada Day

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One Month In

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been here a month! And let’s not sugar coat things… this house is looking pretty crazy right now. Blue trim out the wazoo, wallpaper at every turn, bright salmon living room walls, old carpeting that still covers the stairs & our closet, and a whole lot of furniture that we just plopped down on moving day (so it’s safe to assume that nothing is staying where it is for the long haul, this is just where it landed). On one hand it’s like “moving day literally feels like yesterday” but on the other hand, in a few rooms (especially the ones upstairs), we’re like “wow, it’s hard to remember

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HGTV’d

As some of you guys have already discovered, we had the great pleasure of having our house photographed for the latest issue of HGTV Magazine. Well, our last house (we’d probably bat someone away with a stick if they tried to snap pictures of our new place just yet). And since a bunch of you have been asking for the behind the scenes scoop, here it is. That day was such a blur that we weren’t even sure that we had any behind the scenes photos to share, but when we looked back in iPhoto, it turns out we remembered to snap a few photos. This is Clara the editor. She’s telling us what we

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Installing White Faux Wood Window Blinds

Our house gets really nice sunlight – especially upstairs and especially in the afternoon when the sun hits the front of the house directly. We love it for everything from hanging out to taking photos. And Burger, well, he loves it for just about anything: napping, grooming, sniffing things, more napping. But the beams of sunlight streaming in also highlighted a shortcoming of this house: no window blinds. I think we took it for granted that the bedrooms in our last house came with nice white faux wood blinds, so it was kind of a shock the first night when we realized we had nothing for privacy or to keep the light from creeping in

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A Shared Nursery With A Crib & A Bed

Cindy had fun making a room for her daughter Sarah, but then plans changed and she had to make a quick adjustment. We loved that she made a mood board to keep herself on track, and hunted things that she loved until she found some great deals. Here’s her letter: Hello John & Sherry! I want to share the latest update in our home. In the beginning of the year we decided to let our kids have their own room. Around March of last year this room became our little girl’s bedroom… A couple months after finishing this room we found out we were expecting #3 and since our home is a three bedroom home

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So, There’s A Big Tree That’s Way Too Close To The House

In the words of Cher… “If I could tuuuuuuuuurn back tiiiiiiiime. If I could fiiiiiiiiiind a waaaaaaaay. I’d plant this pretty oak tree not on top of the house.” No doubt it started out a lot smaller, but it grew, and with it grew the danger of it messing with our house. So when the home inspector crawled out from having assessed the roots and their proximity to the foundation, we were sad (but not surprised) to hear him say “this tree has got to go.” Even if we could somehow do a root-growth-suppression-rain-dance to get them to avoid the house’s foundation, we couldn’t deny that about 50% of the tree’s canopy was precariously suspended

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Digging Up And Moving A Japanese Maple

If you guys have read this old post, you already know half of this story. For the rest of you, here we go. Way back in 2007, right before we got married – and before we even started this blog – my parents gave us a tiny Japanese maple. It was a little 24″ offshoot that had started growing near the large maple in their backyard. We planted the tiny little thing in our backyard, said a few plant prayers for it, and it grew a smidge in the 3+ years it lived there… though we don’t really have any photographic evidence of it. Since it was meaningful to us – having some wedding significance

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Fab Freebie: Uncommon Areas

What fun is a house without a little weird in it? For those homes lacking some quirk, uniqueness, or “points of interest” then this week’s $250 gift card to UncommonGoods may do the trick. Their site is well stocked with home decor, servingware, organizing accessories and even kids stuff that has a hint of fun injected into it. Personalized family pillow? Check. Cardboard side table? Check. Terrarium-slash-table-lamp? Yeah buddy. Once again, we’re using Rafflecopter, so you should see a box load under this paragraph (might take a second) and that’s where you can leave your entry. This week the prize ships to the United States. a Rafflecopter giveaway  

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Using Hot Water To Strip Wallpaper

Send out the ravens! (yes, that’s a Game of Thrones reference). Wallpaper stripping has commenced. I was actually really excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal project, because I am a strange breed of human and that’s my idea of a good time. And since we have five rooms full of wallpaper (the foyer, the half bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, and our bathroom), I decided that I would try a different removal method for each one and report back with the pros/cons about each approach as I went, all in the hopes of sussing out which ones bite the big one and which ones seem to work the best. I’m telling you

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You Can’t Take It With You… Or Can You?

As exciting as it has been to move into this new house, it was certainly sad to say goodbye to our old house and leave behind all of the parts (and projects!) that we couldn’t take with us. The penny tile backsplash. The deck. The fireplace. Wait, scratch that last one. Let’s zoom in a bit closer on that little item sitting on the mantel. Well, what do we have here? That, my friends, is an amazing miniature replica of our fireplace. Miniature as in completely portable and yes-it-totally-came-with-us-to-the-new-house. It’s the creation of Lisa Harrold, a recent fine arts graduate in the UK who specializes in miniatures. She emailed us to say that as a

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