Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Wave Fair-well To Summer

I have mixed feelings about the back to school season, but at least it brings some good sales with it. In fact Wayfair is giving away a $500 gift card to one of you guys – so you can take advantage of their Back to School sale, stock-up on items for next summer season, or grab just about any other decor, furniture, tools, and accessories under the sun. Oh sun… how I will miss thee… Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up below this paragraph). This giveaway is available to residents of the United States, Canada, UK, Australia & Germany. Click To

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Teddy’s Birth Story

To everyone who has been asking about Teddy’s birth story, thanks for your patience. I like to let those things simmer a little while before I write about them (Clara’s took me almost a year thanks to all of the mixed emotions I had going on) but Teddy’s birth was a lot less scary and a lot more straightforward. Thank goodness! After going through such a traumatic first birth, nothing sounded better to me than a completely routine, scheduled, no-surprises-at-all delivery this time around – which it mostly was, for which I’m SO GRATEFUL. There were still a few surprises, but the primary challenge of this birth (and the whole pregnancy process) was fending off

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How To Install A Marble Herringbone Tile Backsplash

“It’s like a cable knit sweater on the wall!” That was my description after we installed the marble backsplash tile on the back wall of the laundry room. And under-cabinet sweaters are something I can get behind. It seems like just last week we were installing laundry room floor tile (oh yeah, because we were), but this time around we got to break out the tile we bought a while back for the wall behind our washer and dryer. Here’s a shot from the future, with the laundry room more completed, so you can see how it all came together in the end: Exciting, right? Ok, we’re back to the present again. Suddenly the room

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How To Hang Ikea Cabinets

This post was shaping up to be a weird one (well, weirder than our baseline weird). We were simultaneously trying to hang Ikea cabinets in our laundry room and re-hook up the washer & dryer, but as of yesterday morning we were sort of stuck half-way through both projects and this was the best progress shot we thought we’d have for you today: But thanks to some last minute pieces falling into place over the last 24 hours, we have working appliances that have been completely re-installed (picture Sherry dancing for no less than twenty minutes with an elated baby in her arms laughing at her) and doors on our all of our cabinets (more

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Things That Didn’t Work Like I Thought They Would

Cabinet hanging continues in the laundry room (details tomorrow!) so since yesterday’s post had a giveaway worked into it (we can’t believe over 25,000 of you took the poll, John is beside himself with infographic glee), I thought I’d share a quick post about three recent redos. Sometimes things get wonky when you least expect them to, and the second time ends up being the charm (at least you hope it is). Redo #1. Our cork bulletin board in the office. Back when we made this a few months ago, we used Loctite Spray Adhesive, since the back specifically said it worked for bonding cork to wood. Well… the cork squares slowly started to pop off

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Survey Says…?

***UPDATE: We’re sending out a giant thank you to the 30,000+ respondents to our survey! We’ve selected a random winner of the $500 West Elm gift card using random.org and the lucky person is… Sarah M from Birmingham, AL! Congrats Sarah – check your inbox!*** It’s no secret that I’m a card-carrying infographic geek (in case you’re wondering, the card has a pie chart on it). Here on our blog we’ve captured one year of living in this house, our book tour, and of course your responses to our annual blogiversary survey all infograph-tacularly, so with some sweet talking to my wifey and gentle nudging to our publisher, I’ve convinced them to let me put

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Installing Porcelain Tile In The Laundry Room

A newly tiled floor in a new room of the house is almost enough to give me jazz hands (a York peppermint patty is enough to give Sherry jazz hands, so clearly we have different thresholds). We’re completely enamored with this floor – and there’s a budding romance that involves a saw – so let’s cover the laundry room tile installation, from floor prep to grouting & sealing. Before any tile could get installed, the subfloor needed to be prepped with some cement board, which is a preferred surface for tile installation. They come in 3ft x 5ft sheets, so I was able to fit two full pieces plus a few strips in the room.

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More Tile, Room Plans, & A New Door

Back to THE ROOM THAT DIDN’T EXIST A FEW WEEKS AGO. Pardon my type-screaming, but it doesn’t get much more exciting than that in my world. (Sidenote: I had a dream last night that there was a column in the newspaper called Shellac This! – all about shellacking a different piece of furniture each day – and the world was so enamored with it that normal morning conversation was “did you see what they shellacked this morning in Shellac This?” and it was getting turned into a major motion picture). We left you with a primed-&-ready picture of our new laundry room in Monday’s post, so let’s start there (we used VOC-free Kilz Premium from

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Fab Freebie: Get The ‘Facts

If you’ve ever strolled through Carytown in Richmond, you’ve hopefully hit up Modern Artifacts – a cool corner shop stocked with handmade goods like art, decor, tableware, and jewelry. They even have a few special sections, like an area that’s just for kids and a gallery space with framed art and photography (many from local makers). And even if you’re not a local, this week they’re dishing up a $250 gift card!   On top of that prize, one of our favorite vendors to Modern Artifacts is throwing in another $100 to spend in their Etsy shop. GaugeNYC makes all sorts of cool typographic accessories in metal – from delicate jewelry to chunky decor accessories

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How To Pick The Best Curtain Color

As our laundry room adventures continue (priming, painting, and tile prep are in progress!) I thought it might be fun to share some virtual options that we tried on in the office (we tested out some wall ideas in Clara’s bedroom last fall and checked out a few looks for Teddy’s room about five months ago). Remember when I photoshopped some curtains and a rug into the last picture of this post about our new light and chairs? And I mentioned in the comments that West Elm had a rug sale (making the one we liked $100 off) so we pulled the trigger on it? Well, said rug has shipped and is on its way

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How To Tape, Mud, And Sand Drywall

Over the weekend we wrapped up our how to hang drywall adventures in the laundry room. It was a humbling experience, but we’re feeling nothing short of glorious about how it turned out. In fact Sherry and I spent a few minutes doing this in there on Sunday. Project Completion Euphoria. It’s a real thing. And it can make a grown man twirl. Doing Our Research We’re not ready to put “pro drywaller” on the ol’ resume quite yet, but I do think we’ll go into our next drywallstravaganza with a lot more confidence. We devoured YouTube videos and online tutorials for about an hour one morning, and quickly learned that there seem to be

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How To Insulate Walls

Drywall mudding and taping in the laundry room is going (I think) well.  We’re two coats in and past our first bout of sanding (we tried wet sanding so I’m excited to share how that went) but I’m still holding my breath a bit to get through the third (and hopefully last) coat and onto primer to be sure it looks as good as we think it does, since it’s that last step that tends to be the real test. So rather than split up our mudding and taping tutorial into two posts, I’m holding off until Monday to cover the process from start to finish (with video). So today we’re talking about money and

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