Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Furnishing Our Living Room With Our Ikea Sofa

So… the living room. First it looked like this: Then it looked like this: Then it looked like this: And now it looks like this: Although the salmon pink walls, orange-brown bricks, and all of that dark wood trim & paneling is a far cry from our vision for this room down the line (we keep changing our minds, but today we’re dreaming of something like this for the brick, coffered ceilings like this, and this for the paneling someday) it definitely feels a lot homier already. You know, with a couch to sit on instead of a pile of non-sit-on-able furniture. Oh and we shared this picture on Instagram/FB a few nights back, but

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Our Last Day In Our Second House

We love being able to look back at the empty photos of our first house, because while they’re definitely bittersweet, it’s so much fun to reminisce. They’re a great reminder that a house is only a house, and it’s the moments that you’ve shared with the people (and the chihuahuas) that you love that really make it a home. So we wasted no time snapping empty photos of our second house. And although I thought “without furniture all these rooms will pretty much look the same” the funny thing is that none of them do. So it’s nice to know that we left our mark on this sweet home of ours. Here’s the dining room/office

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Other Houses We Looked At Before Buying Our New One

Back when we were house hunting in 2010 we shared a series of posts that each profiled a different house that we looked at (you can see them here, here, here, here, and here). And even though our hunt is over this time around, we wanted to revisit 9 other houses that we casually toured (many of them just on Open House days) before we met The One. So we had fun driving around snapping pictures for you and reminiscing (“That was the one with the phone in the bathroom!” “That was the one with the family of deer in the backyard!”). The Lake House: The first house was very modest in size and located

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Our Landscaping Makeover

In honor of moving week, we’re going to share a post full of empty house pics (and a list of what stayed with the house) in a day or two, but we also wanted to take a look back at our exterior progress one last time. We’ve done outdoor video tours in both 2011 and 2012, so this video that we shot a few weeks back (right before we started packing) makes it our third and final installment. *Before you press play, I’m intensely awkward when I’m the one holding the camera and talking, so be warned that I hit on the deck. And it doesn’t respond. Now that we have that out of the

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The First Day In Our Third House

We love being able to look back on Day One at our previous house (as clammy as the photos make us) – so we took a second to walk around our new house on Day One (in this case, the day all of our big furniture finally got moved over) and snapped these lovely photos. What do you guys think? Gorgeous, no? Our work here is done. The living room: The kitchen: Other side of the kitchen: The office: The dining room: The guest room: The hall bathroom: The spare room: Clara’s room (here’s us frantically trying to get it ready so she had a place that felt like home – and a place to

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Did We Make A Profit Selling Our Second House?

We answered this question after the sale of our first house (spoiler: we bought in the bubble and sold in the recession), so now we’re back to do it again – but this time the coins stacked a bit more favorably, thanks both to selling in a slightly better market and by not sinking as much into this house’s improvements (it helped that we didn’t need expensive upgrades like a new roof and windows this time around). We managed to sell this latest house for $23,000 more than we bought it for back in 2010. And our best estimate is that we put around $14,500 into improvements that stay with the house (i.e. not furniture

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Fab Freebie: Arhaus To Your House

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** And our randomly selected winner is… Alyson (who says they use their sofa for “cuddling with our dog while watching tv or reading. My day doesn’t feel complete without cuddle time!”) Congrats! Sit back. Put your feet up. Take a load off. Because someone’s winning a new couch this week, courtesy of Arhaus – up to over $2,500 in value! Arhaus covers a wide range of rooms (from dining to bedroom) in a wide range of worldly styles (from traditional to unique). So to showcase that spectrum, this week’s winner will get to pick one of three sofas: the curvy and tufted Club sofa, the

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What We Did To Sell Our House Faster By Owner

Ok, so today our house looks like this. So – spontaneous decision! – while we get settled and find our underwear, this week is going to be moving week! Turns out you guys still wanted to hear a whole lot about the sale of our current house. So let’s do the dang thing. Here’s what we plan to cover in honor of Spontaneous Moving Week: How we staged/sold our house (including a glance at our real estate flyer, a list of what we changed before showings, etc) What we made when we sold our house vs. what we put in- budget breakdown included! Empty house pics (dude, it’s trippy to see your house all echoey

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A Fresh Start

We’re spending today packing things up, and although we thought it would feel monotonous and tiring, it’s oddly exciting. Even the act of wrapping a bunch of cups in newspaper feels like “IT’S HAAAAAAPPENING! We’re really DOING IT!” Can you believe Clara looked like this last time we moved? Three birthdays (and a significant amount of hair) later, my baby’s gone. Sniffle. But there’s a pretty cool kid (complete with an arm tat) in her place, so it’s a fair trade. Life will change with this big move, and our blog and our process for the new house might feel different to you because we’re approaching it, well, differently. More than any other house that

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How To Install Oak Hardwood Floors

Get on the floor. Seriously, wood, get out of those boxes and do your thing. Oh how I wish it were that easy. Turns out laying oak flooring takes some serious time. But man oh man is it gorgeous when it’s down. So it turns out wood-floor-laying, my friends, is time well spent (picture me saying that as confidently as Ron Swanson says “turkey can never beat cow”). Don’t mind the dusty little path emerging from Clara’s room. We still have a few more spots to sweep… As we mentioned here, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs (plus the stairs) have nice

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Chip & Joanna’s Farmhouse Kitchen Reno

Something about renovating a farmhouse just sounds so idyllic to me. And Joanna’s farmhouse kitchen renovation doesn’t disappoint. She and her husband took it from closed off and dated to open and, well, check it out yourself… Hey guys! I live in Texas and my husband and I are in the middle of renovating our 125 yr old farmhouse. We have been married for ten years, have four kids, and have lived in 9 homes. All of which we bought, lived in, and flipped. After we move into the farmhouse, I am done. I hope. When my husband first showed me this house, I walked right out of it and said there is no way.

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