Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Our Thanksgiving Table Setting

At our house, we serve dinner buffet style (setting out all the food in the kitchen so people can pile their plates high) which means I get to have some fun with the table since it doesn’t have to accommodate a million platters and serving bowls. And I figure that even though Thanksgiving is typically a holiday full of orange, red, yellow, gold, and wheat tones when it comes to table decor, who says that’s the only way to do things? Methinks there’s more than one way to skin a cat cook a bird, so I had some fun with a rich green and blue palette thanks to some free wine bottles I’ve been working

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Fab Freebie: Paint Me A Picture

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** The winner of this week’s giveaway can literally make that request. Because Swedish-born Virginia-based artist Erica Eriksdotter is giving away a commissioned painting worth up to $350. That’s right everyone, put on your fancy pants because soon you could be telling your friends smugly “oh yeah, that beautiful painting over there? I commissioned it.” We really like the color in all of Erica’s work, and we love that our winner will be able to guide the color and design of their custom work to fit their home perfectly. You can even pick the best size for your space (from a 12

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The Color Scheme For Our New House

We’re thinking of moving away from the soft, subtle, and beachy whole-house color scheme that we have going on here and towards something more moody, risky, and sophisticated at the new house. Here’s hoping it works for us (you never know… and we’re the first to admit that sometimes we end up repainting). We’re definitely no strangers to covering our mistakes with another coat or two of something new if we don’t like how things look when we step back and check things out (after sharing the “outtake” pics with you guys of course). So it might take us a few tries to settle on a scheme we love, but right now we’re considering something

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Trying To Figure Out How To Reupholster A Rocking Chair

We got this rocking chair for $25 thanks to craigslist, because we loved the simple shape and the low back and the rich chunky wood. Plus I’ve been dying to add a rocker to the new house’s living area (since I feed Clara all the time while hanging out in the public part of the house, as opposed to retreating to the nursery or the bedroom). Plus she loves rocking at John’s mom’s house, so we thought it would contribute to good quality time with the bean. But this rocker is obviously lacking a bit in the seat and back cushion area. No worries, we just figured we’ll reupholster it. Until we realized that we

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House Hunting: Strange, But True

House hunting has been a fun adventure and, like any adventure, it took some weird twists and turns. So we figured since we highlighted some of our close-but-no-cigar finds (here, here, here, and here) we should take a second to share some of our no-way-no-how finds as well. Because they were actually pretty darn entertaining. First, we encountered a mammoth split level. From the outside it looked like your usual split-level home. Until we got inside and realized it had SIX floors. Yes, six. That’s six times the number of levels we’re currently used to. Granted the top (attic) and bottom (basement) weren’t entirely finished, but still – wow. You can thank my brilliant artist’s

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Fall Decorating Ideas

I got all leaf-happy to add a bit of that fall/Thanksgiving vibe to the dining area. It was free and it took about ten minutes total. Here’s the dining table with some pretty branches from the cherry tree out front: And I popped a few smaller branches from the same tree into my floating cb2 hanging vases. Sure, they’re looking a little limp, but after adding some water to the vases, they perked right up. And since they’re free I’m ok with them lasting just a week or so if that’s what mother nature so ordains. Oh and I thought a $2 bag of mixed nuts looked kinda Thanksgiving-ish (saw something similar in an old

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The Floor Plan Changes We’re Planning For Our New House

We’re still holding off on taking you on a full virtual tour of our soon-to-be new home (you know, until the deal is 100% done and we actually live there). But we thought we’d give you a sense of what we’re gonna be working with thanks to this rough floor plan that we threw together with the use of floorplanner.com (it’s a free service, btw). Everything is approximate since we’re borrowing from the measurements that we took during the inspection and copied from the sales flier, but here’s what we’ve got (the washer & dryer are stacked in the small mudroom off of the carport): *There aren’t measurements for the smaller spaces like the bathrooms

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John’s Bee-Day Gift

Yesterday was my sweet hubby’s birthday so I figured I should share what Clara, Burger and I got him. John and I have recently been talking about how we’d love to amass more “real art” to complement all the DIY stuff that we have framed on every wall. This goal is definitely inspired by our friends Matt and Kristin – who we House Crashed here and here. The cheerful original art that lights up their home always has us jonesing to add more color and fun to our walls. So consider this painting to be the beginning of an exciting little collection that will happily hang in the new house: It’s a 12 x 12″

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How To Host A Moving Sale

Apparently gathering over 100 things to get rid of didn’t take as long as we thought (see the full list of purged items here), so we got all crazy and decided to host a last-minute moving sale this past Saturday (just to get rid of stuff while we still had that no nonsense iron will- you know, before we caved and decided to keep a few things around). We took about two weeks to plan our last yard sale, so making the decision to hold this one just two days out was a bit nerve-wracking, but the days aren’t getting any warmer, so we figured why waste time? Plus, hosting a yard sale isn’t rocket

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Fab Freebie: The Target Lady

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** I love today. Not just because it’s my 29th birthday, but because we are giving away a gift card to (drumroll, por favor)… TARGET! We don’t really need to waste time reminding you guys how much we love Target (we’ve got about a million posts like this and this to prove it). I even created this graphic to try to convey how excited we are: Can you handle that enthusiasm? And while I always love a good opportunity to reference SNL’s Target Lady, this time I’m going to mention a different woman paired up with the red bullseye: HGTV’s Sabrina Soto.

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How We Got Rid Of 100+ Things!

Nothing lights a fire under your arse like making a public proclamation that you’re going to get rid of 100 things. So even though we’re not moving until mid-December, we made our way from room to room paring down every single thing that we don’t love/need/use. The mantra as we went? No mercy. Because nothing is worse than packing, moving, and unpacking things that aren’t worth the time they took to transport or the space they’re eating up in the new place. Here’s our getting-rid-of-it office pile: Then we tackled the kitchen (Clara helped): Here’s our outgoing kitchen pile (what you don’t see are a bunch of baskets and towels on the floor): And here’s

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