Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Two Fun Ways To Use Instagram Photos

What’s better than one fast and easy project with family photos? How about thirty. Just kidding. How about two. Cool? Let’s do this. First up, we have Photo Project Numero Uno. We’ve had fun with the little Sherri Conley cards-turned-art that we hung above our sofa in eight Ikea frames two years ago. First with bright paper behind them and then with some textured fabric as the backdrop around a year later… … but lately we’ve been jonesing for something a little more personal. It all started when Sherry and I were talking about how Instagram seems to capture “real life” better than formal camera pics from a big event. Why? I think because we

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House Crashing: Cozy & Full Of Character

Who’s in the mood for some snooping? When Lori and her husband Greg (and their sweet son Owen) invited us over to crash their charming Richmond home, we jumped at the chance. Isn’t that little tin roof over the door awesome? I also love that the front steps are tiered on three sides instead of being closed in on the ends. Bet someone could DIY that… Lori and Greg are actually veterans of the House Crashing experience. They had us over their first home back in 2010 (when both Lori and I were both prego). We loved that house so much that we couldn’t wait to see where they lived now… … especially since in

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Cutting Down A Table To Make A Kids Table

The walls of Clara’s big girl room are dry and the few items of furniture that we have (mainly just a daybed, an old side table, and two small wooden thrift store chairs that I don’t think we’ve even shown you yet) are back in the room. So here’s how it’s looking now: Totally done and magazine ready, right? Just kidding. But it’s a huge improvement from this so we’re psyched. The new wall color is awesome. Pardon these not great pics of it (Monday’s pics did it more justice). In person it’s subtle and warm and cozy but not too yellow-y or peach. And since it’s not too bold or compete-y, it’ll allow us

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How Much Money Do You Make When You Write A Book?

Let’s take a second to chat about how the book bid-ness works, at least for us. Sometimes we get hilarious and adorable comments like this: “Holy cow, your book was a New York Times bestseller! Congrats! You must be rich!!” … … and it makes us realize that other than fleetingly mentioning how the whole book deal thing works in this blogiversary video (around 17:10 near the end), we haven’t really talked about it at all. So since folks have been requesting more behind the scenes details on the subject (even from as early as September of last year when we did the Q&A video below) this post is well overdue. Let’s dive in and

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Fab Freebie: World Play

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And the lucky / randomly selected / soon to be quite worldly person is… Briana (who says “London, Ontario is special to me. That’s where I first lived on my own, went to University, met my husband, and I just loved that city. Plus, it has the best spaghetti restaurant ever, Spageddy Eddy’s!”). Congrats! And for everyone else, scroll down to the contest entry details for a sweet little discount the Wallpapered folks added for everyone. One look at Pinterest and I don’t feel quite so alone in my fascination with maps. So to everyone else out there who digs a little cartography

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The Slow Journey From Junk Room To Playroom

About a month ago we were walking around the park and Clara pointed to a dogwood tree and said “wow, that’s a big big tree in a big big world.” John and I cracked up. So now when I think of Clara’s playroom/big girl room, I also think of the big big tree and the big big world of ours. Hilarious. Anyway, back to the room that we have affectionately (and ironically) called the playroom. Remember that it looked like this when we moved in? And then it got all cluttered up with junk and looked like this? And then we organized it with the help of my mom and it looked like this? And

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On The Road Again

Man, it feels like it’s been a month since we had a book tour update for ya. Oh, that’s because it has. We were on hiatus while bookstores and retailers focused on the holiday rush (instead of hosting authors) so last week’s adventures in Texas and Florida were our first stops since finishing up in DC and Richmond in early December. And as much fun as stops in northern cities like Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Minneapolis were – we were excited to enjoy some warm weather in the southern half of the country. #longpostwarning But then Austin had to go and look like this… Texas was apparently in a month-long drought until we (and our

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Adding Storage With An Ikea Expedit Bookshelf

We’re trying to redo the sunroom on a budget using as much that we already have as we can (since we have other projects like Clara’s big girl room, a guest bathroom, and a porch & carport overhaul that we’re saving our pennies for). But there’s a delicate balance between function and saving money. Sometimes you can use 100% of what you already have and achieve 70% function in a room, or you can spend a little money along with using 90% of the things you already have and end up with 100% function. So as you might guess, we’re going for 100% function on a small budget. So far all we’ve bought is one

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Adding A Kitchen Banquette Eating Nook

We always love a big kitchen renovation when it comes to Reader Redesigns, but sometimes making over just the corner is enough to get us inspired bigtime. Just check out what Deme and her family did to the breakfast nook of their dated kitchen. Here’s her email: Hi Young House Lovers! Your blogs is one of the highlights of my day and I wanted to share our  breakfast nook with you. After removing a thick lacquered chair rail and scrapping layers of fruit patterned and 70’s wallpaper, we ended up with some pretty fugly untextured walls. We started with a dark dungeon of a corner and ended up with something bright, fresh and uber functional

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Our Whole House Color Palette

Q: Hi guys! I was snooping around your blog to try and find a floor plan of your new home with the colors you used for each room (like you did in the post from Feb 24/2010) but I didn’t find one! I would L-O-V-E to see what your new house looks like now, with a visualization of the color scheme per room. Is this possible, or am I asking way too much? HAPPY NEW YEAR by the way! – Danielle A: Oh yeah – we’re way overdue on that! So when Danielle submitted that comment here, we officially bumped it to the top of our to-do list. We did one of them for our

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How To Make Wood Frames For Large Art Or Posters

This is it. My most favoritest art ever. Yes I know that’s a big statement. A big statement with a non-word, at that. But it’s all deserved because I’ve framed and hung my bike art and I’m in love. Not only with how the final product looks, but how easy and cheap it was to achieve. So forgive me if my enthusiasm is more annoying than usual today. I’m a man with a love of all things bike and all things easy. Wait, that sounds wrong… So here’s that wall before with my retail display cast-offs just pitifully taped to the wall. And here they are all framed up. In frames that only cost us

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Fab Freebie: This Is Your Pilot Writing

***This giveaway  is now closed – see who won below! *** Clearly I’m not the only one who loves a good writing utensil (and Target card) as this giveaway reached our 10,000 entry cap within just 24 hours. Nice work team! So that means we get to crown a winner early. That lucky writer is… Heather F (who “writes notes on the back of envelopes and then loses them. Argh.”) Congrats Heather! This sounds kinda weird, but I’m very particular about my writing tools. So when the folks at Pilot noticed that we tend to write with their products, they wanted to thank us by passing some freebies along. But you know we don’t take

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