Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

| By | | 312 Comments

Window Shopping At Garden Ridge

So many people have told me about the miracle that is Garden Ridge, but I’d never been to one. Until yesterday. Yes, one finally came back to Richmond (we heard a lot about the one that used to be out by the airport but it was gone by the time we moved here 4+ years ago). Anyway, here’s what I found on my maiden voyage to the big Costco-ish warehouse full o’ house, garden, and other random stuff. My first reaction was “man this place is huge” followed by “Teresa Guidice would like it here” (NJ Housewives reference anyone?) since there are oversized urns and stone columns a plenty. Klassy. Let’s just say it’s one

[ Read More ]

| By | | 334 Comments

Setting A Goal To Clear Out 100 Things Before We Move

I want to get rid of (via donations, craigslist, ebay, freecycle, etc) at least 100 things before moving day. On one hand the number sounds kinda high, but on the other hand, I know there are at least 100 things in our house that we never use, need, or should spend time and effort moving. And I actually plan to keep track, writing all 100 items down on a piece of paper in list form. Why? Because I’m weird like that. To kick things off  I went through my shoes (pun intended). Amazingly, I realized that I hadn’t worn a good amount of them since leaving NYC and moving to Richmond 4+ years ago. How

[ Read More ]

| By | | 195 Comments

How We Sold Our House By Owner

Well, I guess we haven’t actually sold our house by owner yet. That’ll happen at closing in mid December (fingers crossed). But here’s how we got an offer. We’re hardly real estate experts, so this post is just a roundup of things that happened to work for us. Here’s hoping they help anyone else attempting to DIY their house sale too. The cool thing is that the people buying our house aren’t blog readers (they’d never heard about us or YHL- but we disclosed the blog to them to ensure that they were cool with images of the house with our furniture remaining on the site). Anyway, we thought it would encourage other FSBO peeps

[ Read More ]

| By | | 3,342 Comments

Fab Freebie: Love Is Blinds

*** This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** Sure, we’d all love to gaze out of our home’s windows at some breathtakingly beautiful vista. But in reality, some windows are portals to the back of the neighbor’s fence, an unwelcome glare, or even the view of a man walking around in his tighty-whities all night because he doesn’t realize his curtains are sheer (true story from my New York City days – yup, just like the naked guy from Friends). All the more reason to appreciate window coverings, like these beauties from Next Day Blinds: This week Next Day Blinds is shucking out $200 to one lucky lad

[ Read More ]

| By | | 112 Comments

How Showings Worked When We Sold Our House By Owner

We showed our house a total of 16 times. So eventually we got to be old pros at it. At first we had no idea what we were doing. I mean of course we: cleaned the house like mad (vacuumed, dusted, etc) picked up all dog and baby toys turned on all the lights so everything looked bright and welcoming baked something yummy beforehand (so it would smell as good as it looked) removed the cutting board and the dishtowel from the counter in the kitchen so there was more granite on display removed the bath mat in the full bathroom (to show off more of the stone floor tile) polished all the faucets and

[ Read More ]

| By | | 647 Comments

The Process Of Selling Our House By Owner & Buying A New House

To the tune of Katy Perry’s “Hot N’ Cold”… WE’VE BOUGHT AND WE’VE SOLD! Well not really, but we’re headed in that direction. As of 5:57 pm yesterday evening we got word that the the last of our negotiations with some potential buyers of our house have gone through, so the contract on our home is officially “pending.” Which means that the contract that we’ve got in on our sweet new house (yes, we fiiiinally found one) should move right along as well (since it was contingent on selling ours first). In fact if all goes well, in a little over a month we’ll be moving from our current house directly into our new casa.

[ Read More ]

| By | | 144 Comments

A Hunting Lodge Chic Home Mood Board

We have no idea what our future living room will actually look like, but today this is what I’m loving: Soft gray walls (like Benjamin Moore’s Light Pewter) with crisp glossy white trim A huge comfy sectional (with washable covers- score) in a gray-brown hue. The fact that this baby is $848 has me permasmiling. Some sort of woven round ottomans (like these) that can be moved around for casual texture that can double as extra seating in a pinch. This sleek TV stand in high gloss gray from Ikea (we figure a room that’s big enough for a large sectional will probably dwarf our current TV stand, so we might need to go a

[ Read More ]

| By | | 164 Comments

How We Picked A Yellow-Green Front Door Color

Mmm, pickles. That will make sense in a minute. But first we’ll show you what John’s sister Emily’s front entryway has looked like for the past three years that she’s lived in her amazing casa (which you can virtually tour here). And here’s the after, thanks to a new color on the door and some semi-transparent stain on the deck that leads to it (oh yeah and some pumpkins). Here’s how we landed on the door color and the stain hue. First I came over with a bunch of paint swatches and we held them up to the door to see what would work with the smoky gray color of the house. We easily narrowed

[ Read More ]

| By | | 75 Comments

An Old Ikea Coffee Table Hack

Every once in a while someone asks us where we found the table in the sunroom and it reminds us that we owe you some details. We actually DIYed it a few years back with a $7.99 lack table from Ikea and the old tabletop that came with the inexpensive thrift store pedestal that we bought to create this table in the corner of the very same room (see how we removed the original square tabletop and replaced it with a larger round top from Lowe’s right here). And since that original square tabletop was then up for grabs we decided to put it to good use as the new top for our lack table.

[ Read More ]