Young House Love

DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

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Decking The Halls… With “Fancy” Molding

Our upstairs hallway recently got the wainscot treatment, and it’s kind of like the debonair older cousin to the DIY board & batten from our last house. Let’s just say, if our hallways were the Lindsay Lohans from The Parent Trap, this one would be the fancier-sounding English one (who I sometimes imagine grew up to live a less chaotic life than the American one). I use the term “recently” loosely because we actually started this project a couple of months ago and slowly kept adding to it all the way up until after Thanksgiving. It began as one of those no brainer tasks that we didn’t expect to spread much beyond the confines of a weekend. We’ve always loved how

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How We Added Landscape Lighting

This is a project we did over the summer and kept meaning to Instagram, but it refused to be contained by the limits of one shot just like the writers of The Walking Dead refuse to care about our VERY REAL FEELINGS about very fictional characters. But I digress. So here we are, swinging by like we mentioned we might randomly do in our update post/podcast. We had filed this idea away for waaaay down the line (thinking it would be cost and time intensive), but turns out it was actually neither. In fact, as the sun set on the very same day that we started, we got to enjoy the finished product. We’ve always gawked lustily at

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Hello? Is This Thing On?

Well, last week marked a year since we took our big blog break. We didn’t really know what to expect would happen after stepping away from the blog last fall, and we certainly didn’t expect all of the love, support, and interest you guys have continued to show us over the last year. So before anything else, let us just say thank you and bow down and do the “not worthy” hand motions. Truly, you guys are the best. There have been so many questions about what we’ve been doing these days, and we’ve been mulling over the best way to share one big what-the-heck-we’ve-been-up-to update. Sherry suggested a Real Housewives-style freeze frame with update text next to

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The Time Of Our Lives

Update: Aaaand less than 12 hours later we’re back with an update on the bottom of the post for ya. Smooth, right? Hey there! Long time no see. The break has been great. Admittedly a little weird, but really reinvigorating. So we’re immensely thankful not only for your support and kind comments, but also for helping put words to some of the things that we had been feeling for some time. And while the last month hasn’t been enough time to fill in all of the blanks about our future (heck, when are life’s blanks ever clearly filled in?) it has made one thing pretty obvious to us: after seven awesome years of sharing our

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Feeeeeelings

This post was 3,000 words long. They all felt overly complicated and heavy and weird. I clicked delete. Then I just typed what we’re really feeling, complete with things we’ve never said out loud and even a few things we’ve never fully admitted to ourselves before. The truth is that we love you guys. Like for real. Even for the tough love. We know you say it because you care (or hopefully you did at some point), and we want you to know we care right back. We want to do a good job. We want to do this with joy and excitement. We want to inspire you. We know this is an incredible way

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Woot! Our Big Laundry Room Renovation Is Done!

The laundry room’s finished! And we could kiss Lesley for her idea of carving out a new dedicated laundry room. It’s like it was always there! (Plus a new glass door at the end of a formerly dark hallway with light streaming in = angels singing sound effect to us). When we last checked in, things were looking a little unfinished, but it’s amazing what that last 10% can do for a room. Our first steps were to add the missing filler, baseboard, toe kick, and crown that we had accounted for when we installed the cabinets (to bridge those gaps on the side, top, and bottom). Then it was on to adding the missing

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Fab Freebie: It’s Curtains For You

Update: We hoped to have a Thursday post for you guys but this week didn’t go as planned. So sorry! Update #2: We’d love your thoughts on this thread that popped up on this post. What are your opinions about smaller posts when we can’t write something juicy? Skip them and just own that we can’t post that day with a little update like this one, or would you rather see something small instead of nothing (like a quick organizing update, a Reader Redesign, a dilemma we’re debating, etc)? Thanks for the feedback! Curtains can make the room. And pillows, well, you can never have too many (at least according to my pillow obsessed wife).

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That’s My Jamb (aka: How To Hang A Door)

Hope you guys had an awesome Labor Day. We split time between family and house projects which is pretty much our sweet spot. This week is going to be especially hairy thanks to having book stuff nearly every day, but we did manage to eke out a few things to share and hope to be back to normal next week (might not be as on top of comments until then either). But back to my jamb. Or should I say my jambs? They don’t have casings yet, the leftover doorknobs will be upgraded to these backplated-versions, and one door still needs to be painted like whoa – but boy does it feel good to have

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Chasing Waterfalls (Our Homemade Laundry Room Counter)

That’s right. You can call me T-Boz. Let’s talk about our new shelf in the laundry room, which is sporting a sweet arm band waterfall edge and some light natural stain. It was a simple DIY project involving some wood and some stain/sealer for a butcher block like effect. We deviated from our usual mocha stain choice because we were inspired by a few rooms we’ve seen with light cabinets and tile mixed with with natural wood to add some texture and warmth. Here’s a wider shot for you. Ignore the missing filler/crown/toe kick/baseboard/hardware situation. We’re also chasing that stuff (you know, along with the waterfalls). But first we have to talk about installing our

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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 In The Laundry Room

“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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