Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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How We Decorated Our New House For The Holidays*

*Aka, the moment I’ve been waiting for since, oh, the day we moved in. There’s something extra special to me about decorating a house for your first holiday season spent there. It’s right up there with seeing whatever pops up outside during your first spring at a new house (I basically scream out the window like I’m the announcer at a football game: “over on the left it’s A PATCH OF DAFFODILS! NOBODY SAW THAT COMING!!” But back to our holiday house tour. It’s looking very sweet & festive around here. Since this move also involved some serious downsizing & simplifying (last week John shared an update on that), it promised to be an interesting

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Realities Of Downsizing: The Good, The Bad, & The Unexpected

Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way. This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you

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Holiday Gift Guides For Everyone On Your List (With Stuff Under $15, and even $9)

This year we got our gift guide post up a lot sooner than usual, because we’re highlighting tons of small makers and Black-owned businesses that we love, and we want to give those shops as much lead time as possible (heck, large stores seem to need more lead time than ever these days too). We also included a handful of tried & true items from larger companies that we’ve bought and loved (like a favorite tool or family game). There’s stuff for grown-ups, kids, and a ton of budget-friendly ideas that are under $20, and even under $10 that would be great for teachers, neighbors, coworkers, or white elephant exchanges! Gifts For Grown-Ups Here’s what

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How We Added Some Much-Needed Storage To Our Smaller Home

Downsizing from 3200 square feet to 1400 means storage is a big deal to us these days, and a couple of weeks ago we got two major upgrades in that department. We still have some “hacking” to do to the simple Ikea cabinets that we bought, but we’re stupidly giddy over just having them assembled and installed. They basically add up to 8 more large cabinets worth of storage – and our kitchen only has 7 cabinets, so the excitement was palpable when those flat-packed boxes arrived (they had about a 4 week wait time, but otherwise delivery was smooth and uneventful for those wondering how the ordering experience was during this time period). They

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Our Front Porch: Big Plans & Even Bigger Plants

It has been about five months since we first introduced you to the outside of our house. That was our very first week of living here, and our outdoor spaces have been getting a lot of use ever since. You’ve already seen how our second-story deck has come together, so today we wanted to update you on our front porch as well as the covered area that we call the side porch and some new landscaping that we’ve added too. We’ve made some functional and organizational improvements, some strictly aesthetic enhancements, and have some other upgrades that are still in the works. So won’t you join us on the front porch? Here’s how it’s looking

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How We Installed A Stair Runner

Sherry recently hinted on Instagram Stories that we were up to our old staple-coloring antics. And by that I mean we were installing another stair runner (admittedly one of the less popular definitions of “antics”). But after installing one in our old house 7 years ago it has become one of our favorite projects – just because we truly believe anyone can do it, and whatever runner you choose can give you a totally different look (and a nice grip underfoot, but more on that functional upgrade in a minute). Why We Wanted A Stair Runner Before we get into the “how” of adding this runner, let’s talk about the “why.” We’re not people who

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A Colorful Planked Wall Treatment For Our Son’s Room

Hoo boy, today’s post has all the good stuff: murder, mystery, INTRIGUE! Just kidding it actually has none of that. But it does have a riveting step-by-step tutorial that involves ten test pots of paint and a whole lot of lattice. So let’s get right into how we created this colorful wood wall treatment in our son’s room. Last time you saw this room in July, we had installed this easy upholstered headboard and built-in bookshelf. It made his room so much more functional (and extra cozy), but we mentioned that we were all looking forward to adding some more color & personality in there for him over time – especially on that wall at

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Our Low-Maintenance, Multi-Function Deck Space

In addition to our 1400 square feet of indoor space, we’re lucky that our house also has some pretty great outdoor spaces – including a large second-story deck off of our family room. Having all of this bonus living space up in the trees has quickly become one of the “rooms” we’re most thankful for, and you’ll see why in this post. It was raining when we bought the house back in February so we didn’t spend much time out here, but you may remember this before photo that we shared along with all of the exterior before & afters back in May. You know, before we painted the house and replaced all of the

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We’re Finally Taking Advantage Of Our Tall Ceilings!

While putting together our house’s before & after page and paint color/source page last week, we realized that the photos for a couple of rooms were already looking out of date. One notable example was our upstairs family room, which has gotten a few important additions since we first shared it back in July. Can you spot them? Probably the most prominent update is the addition of this oversized capiz globe light that has literally been in Sherry’s mood boards and Pinterest pages for years. It’s probably one of Serena & Lily’s most well-known designs, but we’ve never had a spot where it made sense (or could fit!). That is until we found ourselves owning

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Befores, Afters, and Sources For Our Current House… So Far, At Least

We had other plans for this week’s post, but then Hurricane Sally made her way ever-so-slowly through the gulf and gave us a few solid days of rain, rain, and more rain. Thankfully it was nothing more than that (no power lost, and no flooding for us), which has us feeling incredibly grateful – and we hope everyone who was more directly affected is safe and their homes are ok. Since we couldn’t take the outdoor photos we had planned for an exterior update this week, we realized we should build two blog pages that had been sorely missing for the last, oh, four months. So to everyone who has been asking for those, we

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How Our Fireplace Makeover Plan Got Squashed (And How We Pivoted)

If you’ve followed along for a while you’ve seen our bedroom fireplace get a few updates over on Instagram Stories, but today we’re telling the whole sordid tale of how our update ideas recently veered off-course (and how we ended up at Plan B when Plan A went bust). Last time you saw it on the blog, it looked a little something like this: But we should rewind for a second. It was pretty bleak looking when we first started Operation Revive The Fireplace. There was a bunch of dried glue and gunk leftover from some tiles that had once covered the surround (not to mention a rusty screen and general grime). But Sherry had

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How We Store Everything In Our Much Smaller Kitchen

Last week we shared how we painted our cabinets, and today we’re taking you through the whole shebang of how they’re organized. This kitchen has around one 25% of the cabinetry/storage of our last one – and even we were a little nervous about how we’d adapt to significantly less countertop & cabinetry – but the spoiler alert is that it has been great! We can store everything we need and use – and things are pretty easy to grab (no digging behind a bunch of items to find something). So if you’ve been curious about this particular aspect of downsizing – or just like peeking inside other people’s cabinets – this post is for

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