Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Hiding Damaged Tile With Trim

Sometimes I go crazy and I demo stuff without really thinking too hard about what I’ll do after the demo dust clears. See, for some reason when I stopped and stared at all those crazy towel racks in our hall bathroom for the five hundredth time… … I decided it was time to get the hammer and take a stand. Because who really needs that many towel bars? And who decided to put that one on the left so crazy off-centered below the window so it would protrude halfway out of the shower curtain? Especially when there’s room for a cute little hand towel ring on the un-tiled wall next to the sink near the

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Buying A Groovy Green Shag Rug

Yes, it’s yet another rambling rug post. What can I say- our old hardwood floors give us splinters (remember this episode when I got one in the badonkadonk while painting?). And rugs are definitely great building blocks for a room – so we lean towards introducing them on the early end whenever possible. And after dragging the ol’ 5 x 8′ yellow rug back out from the guest room for Clara to play on until we got a more appropriate sized rug for large & in charge Karl the Sectional, we finally found something that made us excited enough to whip out our credit card. Yup, we ordered this amazingly textured & bright rug for

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Spring Flowers Are Blooming

Spring is in the process of sprung-ing here in Richmond and we’re boiling over with excitement. Warm weather? Yes please. Green trees? Bring it. Flowers blooming? Duh, winning. So to those of you who aren’t on the brink of spring yet, we thought we’d send a virtual dose of the season – courtesy of some photos of what’s starting to happen around here – like the little buds that are showing up on the hydrangeas that we’ve inherited. Spring is especially exciting this year because we get to be surprised by whatever magically decides to pop up around the new house – and we finally get to see what our property looks like in all

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Making Five Dollar Art With Colored Paper

Remember that grid of eight Ribba frames above our sectional (that we got right the second time around)? Well, we figured out some in-the-meantime “art” for them (so we don’t have to stare at those brown squares every night). You know, until we come up with something better. And it only cost us five bucks. Okay, $5.17 if you’re being picky. So worth it. We’re still not 100% sure what we want there in the long run, but we’re leaning towards something graphic and colorful. And since the brown frame back is the opposite of that, we wanted to at least put something in there temporarily that wouldn’t cost much or take any time to

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A Large Jute Rug For The Bedroom

We’re doing a little bit of happy dance boogieing on our new rug, hence this post’s title. Yes, it’s like High School Musical over here, lots of dancing and occasionally there’s even some ballad-y singing about our feelings. Feel free to click play and get in on it. Now that we’ve gotten through that little dance interlude, here’s the new rug: Oh happy day, we love it. Here’s a recent shot of the space without it for comparison. Isn’t it amazing what a rug – even a neutral and “safe” jute one – can do to tie things together and add balance to a 15 x 16′ bedroom (15 x 21′ if you count the

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A Larger Bedroom Rug

Short story: we bought a bedroom rug! Now for the long story. Because we’re nothing if not wordy and over explain-y. We’ve known that our giant bedroom was in need of a nice big rug to anchor some of the more showstopping pieces, like big ol’ Ed the Bed and our New Year’s Eve ball-esque pendant light from Ikea. And a piddly little 4 x 6′ rug at the foot of the bed with two faux sheepskins on either side of the bed just weren’t doing it for us anymore. Maybe to some people a 16 x 16′ bedroom (which is actually 16 x 21′ if you include the sink nook) isn’t even that big.

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How To Hang A Grid Of Picture Frames

2, 4, 6, 8, Who Do We Appreciate? Planning! And why do we appreciate it? Because we get burned when we don’t do it. At least we did on the frame arrangement we just hung above our sectional. Here’s the story. We’ve always planned to take the big empty space above Karl and do a grid of large picture frames. We sort of envisioned it as a larger version of the frame grid that we hung above the couch in our old den… … but instead of 8 x 10″ frames we’d use oversized 20.5 x 20.5″ Ribba frames from Ikea for more impact (since we already own and love four of them – and

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A Green HomeGoods Lamp

Seeing as this fun little $22 lamp from HomeGoods is one of our favorite Sue The Napkin colors, which we plan to use as our whole house color inspiration (see them all here) I had to make it mine. It’s really cute in person, but it’s kinda ugly with the paneling behind it. Haha. Sorry ’bout that. I knew it would look all purty when it’s glowing – and cast lots of fun shadows on the wall. You know, like this: Except try to imagine it without the soul crushing wood paneling. Slowly but surely we’re working up the energy to tackle the kitchen. Every day that I have to stare at that paneling gets

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A Stellar House Tour (It’s For Sale!)

When Danielle and her husband Nick sent us a link of their newly listed home in gorgeous and charming Church Hill we couldn’t just ogle the listing and let it go. We knew we had to house crash them in the flesh and share all of the eye candy with you. They bought it in pretty rough shape in 2003 and they worked with one of our favorite local organizations, Better Housing Coalition, to restore it to a livable condition. Records trace it back to existence as early as 1855 (although it’s unclear whether it was burned to the ground in 1865 and rebuilt then). Either way it’s extremely old and it needed lots of

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How To Remove A Fan And Hang A Light

Happy New Year!!! (that sentiment will make sense in a little while – hold tight) The time had come to bid adieu to the fan in our bedroom so we could introduce a light fixture with a bit more interest. Hold on fan lovers. Put the pitchforks (or fan blades?) down and let me explain. We also removed the ceiling fan in our first home’s bedroom and picked up a high-powered Hunter table fan that did the trick, which we plan to use regularly in the warmer months here as well. It’s not that we’re anti fan – my wife likes to make the beyond corny joke that we’re “fan fans” – but we just

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Covering Drywall Cracks With A Ceiling Medallion

Whitney Houston once famously said “crack is whack.” I don’t think she had the ceiling of Clara’s room in mind when she said it, but hopefully she’d agree that the situation around Clara’s aqua-colored capiz chandelier could indeed be called “whack.” You never saw this in any previous photos – nor could you really notice it that much in real life – but when installing Clara’s light fixture (which we got here for $50) we became well aware of this unsightly ceiling problem that was previously hidden beneath the larger based ceiling fan. So we finally got around to fixing it. And it was easy thanks to this $19 ceiling medallion that we got at

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February Superlatives

Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of February – high school yearbook style. Coupon-lovingest: This post about how I try to save money by cutting coupons. Sneakiest: The use-tape-to-catch-drywall-dust trick that we outlined here for ya. Most Mischievous: Painting an old glass lamp shade turquoise while John was out for a run. Best Picture Ever Taken: This post about getting a resin ram at TJ Maxx which resulted in a photo of

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