Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Lovely Lulu

Lulu & Georgia is an online decor boutique that recently marked their first anniversary – and to celebrate, someone’s getting $500 to spend on their stylish assortment of rugs, pillows, and other home decor. The site’s name is a feminine spin on the founder’s grandfathers (Lou and George) and that angle continues to products they carry, which cover the gamut from fresh and girly to rustic and industrial (there’s enough ceramic and gold to keep Sherry happy for a very long time – especially in their gifts section). Oh and they’re giving everyone 20% off now through November 7th with the code YOUNGHOUSELOVE20. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a

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How To Take Down Kitchen Cabinets & Rehang One

Well, that can of worms is officially open. We’ve started making some changes in the kitchen. I realize this isn’t totally new news, since we removed the wallpaper in there a few weeks ago, but towards the end of last week we used that little jolt of momentum to start down the path of some more serious changes. We still want to live in this house for a nice long time (and save up some money) before we take on our full kitchen reno – we’re still changing our minds daily about what configurations and countertop materials we’d like for the long haul – but this is officially the beginning of a series of what

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How To Test For Lead

We’ve had a few moments lately where I’ve thought to myself, “self, this is not ideal.” And you know we like sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly around here, so here are three things that fall into the latter two categories. First we have this page I saw in Domino magazine with a mixture of black and white frames, which inspired me to add some black frames to the grouping over our TV in the living room (initially I was leaning towards a few black mats and some darker art). So I thought I’d be clever and use black electrical tape on the front of a few of our frames to “get the

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How To Make Vacation Keepsake Globes

The last few weeks have been deliciously random and so productive for us! I think we should bounce around from room to room all the time like this… at least until we dive into a big renovation that demands all of our attention. So far this week we’ve painted raindrops & a pink door in Clara’s room, had some fun with Shannon’s design dilemma, finally finished our big sunroom floor project, and we’re actually starting to work on something in the kitchen for Monday (ahhh! that room needs more help than I did in Calculus class). And this week’s little crafty project didn’t bomb, which is a huge relief because there were definitely a few

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A Mid Century Modern Kitchen Renovation

Ruthy’s kitchen makeover immediately got our attention, since it’s a style of house (and therefore kitchen) that we don’t often come across here in Richmond. So we were totally digging the dose of Pacific Northwest that she and her husband Andy sent us (via Tacoma, WA) along with a stylish shot of mid-century modernness. We love sharing kitchen diversity whenever we can, so we thought it was really interesting to see their choice of dark cabinetry without any upper cabinets at all. Here’s her story: Hi John and Sherry! I wanted to send over some info about our newly remodeled kitchen. We absolutely loved the open floor plan of this mid century modern home… …

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How To Tile And Grout An Outdoor Area

Remember when we tiled the floor out back earlier this month? Oh yeah, we barely do either. It has been such a drawn out process thanks to various battles with cold and rain that I can’t believe it’s taken this long to finally get to this: a (mostly) finished floor! Don’t mind that light looking grout (it’s actually charcoal gray – but we’ll get to that in a minute). We’re really happy with how it turned out – especially compared to the stained cement floor that we started with (you can read more about why we opted to tile rather than just paint or stain the existing cement floor, and how we picked our tile

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Shannon’s Dilemma: Ideas Anyone?

After weeks of waiting for three dry days in a row to grout, Mother Nature is finally on our side and John’s finishing up the tile in the sunroom as I type this (while singing “grout, grout, let it all out”). He’ll give you the full tiling rundown tomorrow, and in the meantime, I’m more excited than Jessie Spano about this post (and she’s SO EXCITED). As we mentioned on Facebook this weekend, thanks to your suggestions during our Blogiversary, we thought it would be fun to share some ideas for folks out there who are stuck with decorating dilemmas. We also knew you guys would have a ton of suggestions to add to the

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Painting A Closet Door Pink & Raindrops On The Wall

Let’s all join hands and sing “Raindrops & Rose Paint.” Yes, that’s a bad Sound of Music pun. Please forgive me, Julie Andrews. But just look at how festive Clara’s room is thanks to the addition of some bright raindrops that we painted on the wall and a watermelon pink closet door. Remember when it used to look like this? Well, it’s definitely looking pretty happy these days. Although the door color is actually more true to life in this Instragram sneak peek that we shared yesterday (iPhone for the win). And the pink drops are easier to see in real life (they seem to hide in these pics for some reason). How did we get

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How To Make A Jellyfish Costume With Lights

Happy Friday, guys! As is the annual tradition, we thought we’d share what Clara and Burger are going to be for Halloween this year, especially since I DIYed Clara’s costume for the second year in a row (without crying or cursing!) and I love how it came out. At first when we asked her what she wanted to be for Halloween she said “a lawyer!” True story. And we laughed and pictured her walking down the street with a little briefcase. Then a few days later she said “I want to be a jellyfish!” So asked her a few questions like “what color jellyfish do you want to be?” and that’s when she came out

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Those Times We Made Bad Painting Decisions

Once again it’s one of those weeks where we’ll all over the place. After stenciling the floor in our bath and closet, eking out some seasonal craftiness, and hanging extra thick crown in Clara’s room we’re now in the midst of sealing the stenciled floors, completing the canopy wall in Clara’s room, ripping up the old carpeting on our stairs, and not-so-patiently waiting to grout the sunroom tile floor as soon as things dry up out there (Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on us with all of this rain). And in the middle of it all, we got this question that I thought would be interesting to think about. So here we go.

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A Big Boy Bedroom With Orange & Navy

This time last year we had just wrapped up our first book tour stop in Cincinnati, where we learned how much fun it was to put faces to some of the names that we knew from comments and the blogosphere at large. And now, we’re actually able to put a room makeover to one of those faces & names, so check out Sarah’s redesign of her son Carson’s room, both of whom we crossed paths with back in Ohio last October. Hi John & Sherry! I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at your first book signing here in Cincinnati, and my boys were the ones who scribbled all over your signing

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How To Install Extra Thick Crown Molding

Sherry is officially half-done with Clara’s canopy wall update, so thanks so much to all 900+ of you who commented with votes and additional suggestions! We shared tons of photoshopped images with Clara and she decided we should combine a few ideas, and well, the kid’s a genius and we can’t wait to share the photos. We might just let her decide what we should do in every room. But I, ever the party pooper, was determined to check a certain project off of my list that was over a month old before Sherry got to work on that wall: adding chunky double-wide crown molding in there. So yes, feel free to boo me because

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