Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

| By | | 202 Comments

How To Make Wall Decals

If Teddy ever forgets what letter his name starts with, he now has a whole wall to remind him. That’s right, it’s always “T” time in there. Har-har. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Sherry and I settled on a plan for a subtle accent pattern on the wall between the built-ins. Our original plan was to paint the Ts, like Sherry did for Clara’s raindrops. But after some of you suggested things like vinyl decals in the comments, we decided to give that a whirl instead. Vinyl has become a pretty mainstream option these days, especially for kids’ rooms. It’s removable and affordable, so we see the appeal. This tube – which is

[ Read More ]

| By | | 423 Comments

A Full Tour Of Our Showhouse On Video

Here we are, folks. After over a year of planning, second guessing ourselves, more planning, sweating, and filling our car with vases and egg chairs, we’ve reached the end of the Homearama Showhouse tour. So in celebration of completing this whole-house marathon of sorts, we’re kicking off this post with a whole-house video tour. Nothing too high tech. Just me stumbling through the house: Photo-wise, there are few rooms on each floor that we still haven’t shared/sourced for you. So let’s slide through the dining room, powder room, mudroom, guest room, guest bathroom, and the laundry room. We love dark wall colors in a dining space, so for this room we chose Kendall Charcoal, which

[ Read More ]

| By | | 41 Comments

Fab Freebie: Artfully Yours

Gallery walls just got easier. This week’s prize (for anyone in the world!) is $500 to Artfully Walls. In addition to offering a wide portfolio of art prints, they’ve got built-in tools for designing your own gallery wall arrangement. So selecting pieces, sizing and arranging them, framing them, and even testing out real paint colors in the background is nice and simple. Or you can browse their suggested walls, which are arrangements that their design professionals have already curated. They even come with recommended paint colors and hanging templates to keep it all frustration-free. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up below

[ Read More ]

| By | | 313 Comments

One Of Our Favorite Bedroom Paint Colors

We finally painted the guest room! And Burger, as you can see, is THRILLED. No more over-spray marks from door painting forming a lovely “accent wall” over the bed. Huzzah! The color? Sparrow by Benjamin Moore. It’s a color we’ve loved for a while now (it was one of our whole-house-color-palette guesses from last year) and we thought the guest room was the perfect place to try it out since it gets a lot of natural light from that giant triple window along the back wall. Since it’s a deep color we used a tinted primer first, and as usual I did the cutting in while John did the rolling. Oh and we painted the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 313 Comments

How To Paint Your Garage Door & Utility Box

Do you guys ever get those irrational worries about how your house looks right before hosting a party? Leading up to Clara’s birthday on Saturday I was thinking random stuff like “I really should touch up some of the caulk in the sunroom before everyone comes over” like anyone would notice. And Sherry said “the patio table could use a fresh coat of paint” was running through her head when we were using a tablecloth anyway. But one thing that never crossed our minds was: “The back door is in pretty rough shape. Maybe we should do something about it before IT BECOMES THE PLACE WHERE KIDS PLAY WITH BUBBLES FOR HOURS.” Oh well. The

[ Read More ]

| By | | 97 Comments

Fab Freebie: Oh Baby Baby

We’ve got $500 towards a trio of shops where we got some of our favorite Teddy-items up for grabs this week. First is $200 to Bella Tunno, who makes the cozy striped stroller blanket you may have seen wrapped around him (we got ours as a gift from our friend Christi and have been loving it ever since). They also have bibs, paci clips, lovies, and fun things like a roll-out travel chalkboard set. And they’re running a pretty sweet buy one, give one initiative to fight childhood hunger. Next up is $150 to ModFox, the Etsy shop where we bought our changing pad cover in gray arrow fabric. It’s the perfect shop if there’s

[ Read More ]

| By | | 317 Comments

Playing (Show)House

Before the Homearama show concluded this weekend, we slipped through on Friday with Teddy strapped into our baby carrier (Clara was with the grandparents) so we could check out the homes with visitors in them. It was fun to chat with show-goers, see our pantry getting filled up with food donations, and we even spotted a note someone left us on a notepad in the girl’s room of our house. But perhaps the most exciting thing we got to see in person was the People’s Choice Award that our house won! The votes were very close, and all of the other homes were so well done. It’s hard to put into words how much we’ve

[ Read More ]

| By | | 284 Comments

A “Pink & Gold Everything” Kids Party

This weekend our deck was full of people we love, gathered to celebrate this four year old bean of ours. It was pretty awesome to have so much connected outdoor space to party on (the sunroom-turned-veranda and our big deck that overlooks the grassy backyard felt less chopped up than having some people in the last house’s sunroom while others were on our two-tiered patio). And since our previous house is where we’ve hosted every other Clara-birthday since she was born (here’s the post about her first birthday, the one about her second one, and the one about her third) it felt both weird and wonderful to have our first big birthday gathering here. Most

[ Read More ]

| By | | 229 Comments

How To Make Wooden Play Pastries & Treats For A Kids Tea Party

Remember when Clara was queen of the jellyfish? Good times. The girl definitely has fun with pretend play, and we like to make things for her, especially on occasions like birthdays and Christmas (like this play kitchen, this dollhouse, this latch board, this figurine cubby, this patterned doll cradle, this colorful quilt, this cuckoo clock and this beanbag pouf) so with yesterday being her fourth birthday (HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!?!) I thought some pretend pastries would be fun. I know, it sounds like a cruel joke. “Happy birthday! Here are delicious sugary things you can’t eat because – surprise! – they’re made of wood!” But lately she has been loving tea parties (here she is

[ Read More ]

| By | | 220 Comments

Fab Freebie: Showhaus To Your House

As John mentioned in yesterday’s post, we somehow convinced Arhaus to hook one of you up with the entire Wyatt Outdoor Collection, valued at $4,500! It includes the matching sofa, ottoman, and swivel chair (as shown below) that we used to deck out the front porch of our showhouse. It definitely passes the comfort test, each piece is hand painted to look like weathered wicker, it has a sturdy (but lightweight) aluminum frame, and there’s durable Sunbrella fabric to keep it looking good for the long haul. 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

[ Read More ]

| By | | 268 Comments

Beautiful Outdoor Spaces At The Showhouse

There are a few outdoor showhouse spaces that we haven’t shown at all in this entire yearlong process. Each of the seven showhouses were encouraged to include some fun outdoor spaces as well as indoor ones, so aside from the stuff you can see from the curb, there’s also a back porch and a back patio complete with a stone fireplace. The cool thing about these outdoor spaces is that they’re the places that we got to put our heads together with the builder and the architect the most – and they ended up being some of our favorites. The craziest thing is that our house won 1st place (i.e. the “Gold Award”) for both

[ Read More ]

| By | | 220 Comments

How To Make Planting Beds With Mulch

Let’s talk about planning planting beds, digging them out to crisp up the edges, spreading a truckload of mulch, and other fun curb appeal delights. Yes, with Clara’s birthday party coming up this weekend (more on that another day) we’ve been trying to give our landscaping a little attention. Mother Nature has done her job by cranking the greenery to eleven, so we’ve done some work to further improve the view from our front porch. And from this post title, you can probably guess what I’m talking about. Let’s hot tub time machine our way back to last summer (after all, there is no classier way to time travel) when most of our plant beds

[ Read More ]