Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Archives for December 2010

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How To Hang Your Shower Curtain Higher

By the time we unpacked our shower curtain last week, it had been 48 hours since either of us had showered. And those two days were filled with lifting heavy objects, if you catch our whiff drift. So hanging the shower curtain was a welcome step in our moving process. What was not so welcome? This result: You know we love hanging an extra long shower curtain all the way to the ceiling to add height to the room (the 95″ waffle curtain is from amazon.com and the 86″ fabric liner is from Bed Bath & Beyond by the way). But the trick doesn’t work so well when the tension rod you inherit is too

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How To Remove Bi-Fold Doors

Our new place sure has its share of bi-fold doors. Like this pair sectioning off the future dining room and the main hallway (see a floor plan here to get your bearings): And this nearby set that closes off the hallway that leads to most of the bedrooms (we removed one door to get the daybed through on moving day): Then in our bedroom we’ve got another big set closing off the bathroom sink area… …and a single bi-fold door right next to it closing off the walk-in closet. That doesn’t even include all of the bi-folds that close off the other three bedroom closets. So basically… yeah, there’s a lot of ’em. And unfortunately

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The Best Light Pink Paint Color For Nursery Walls

Alternate title: Breaking Out John’s Painting Belt It was like old times. For those who don’t get the painting belt reference, check this out for further explanation. Anyway, as we mentioned yesterday, we painted Clara’s nursery. And instead of cloning the exact space that she enjoyed in our old house, we took the move as an opportunity to switch up the wall color. We figure since we’re working with the same furniture and even the same light fixture and curtains (since I was too sentimental to leave them behind) we thought a new wall color would make things feel a little fresher- like the room is subtly evolving over time as opposed to being totally

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Fab Freebie: Skil-ly Weather

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** I won’t lie. When the folks at Skil wanted to offer up one of their tools this holiday season, we had trouble picking out the perfect prize for you guys. Then they offered to give away a four-tool-tastic combo pack so we didn’t have to make that call. Nice, right? So this week’s winner will be scoring all four tools pictured above, which are officially dubbed the 18V Lithium Ion Cordless 4-Tool Combo Pack. Which means the drill, circular saw, reciprocating saw, and flashlight all work off of the same rechargeable battery. So here’s how you can snag this last minute

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Decorating A New House For Christmas

We actually got our tree back up a few days ago amidst boxes and general chaos (here it is the first time when we set it up in the old house). We figured we’d never be 100% organized and unpacked before the holidays hit, but taking an hour to get into the spirit in our brand new house for our bean’s first Christmas was just what the doctor ordered. We found the perfect spot for our tree in the corner of the living room (right near the sliders that lead out into the sunroom and the doorway that connects to the kitchen). We also hung my beloved Pottery Barn wreath (a gift from John’s mom

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Inexpensive Holiday Gift Ideas

Here’s our last installment of our recent gift sleuthing spree (see part one here and part two here) and this time we paid Urban Outfitters a visit. It’s always full of cute, quirky, and downright hilarious gift ideas that are usually pretty affordable. Here’s what we found: These sparkly pillows were pretty luxe looking (and around $30, as opposed to something similar that we saw at Crate & Barrel for $99). This $22 book of “Other People’s Love Letters” reminded us of those Post Secret books (we love them, and actually own two volumes of ’em- they’re great for leaving in a guest room so visitors can entertain themselves). For the techie in your life,

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More Virtual Gift Shopping

We’re back with part two of our virtual gift shopping roundup (see part one here) and this time we headed into Pottery Barn to see what we could find. Here’s what we loved. This charming $12.50 rubber stamp kit is so cute for anyone from a well traveled kid to a crafty adult (who might use them to whip up some custom stationery). In the can’t-get-much-cheaper-than-this category, these $3 vases would be perfect for this DIY reed diffuser project that we tackled last year. These $11 “His” and “Hers” knobs would be cute for any married couple who share a bathroom (which is pretty much all of our friends and relatives since we’re not of

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Christmas Gift Ideas For Everyone

As we continue to unpack, we thought we’d share this year’s virtual gift roundup (a la this one from last year). It’s a three-post-in-a-row thing (we couldn’t fit all the pics into one) so stay tuned for two more that’ll pop up today. First we hit up Crate & Barrel. Here’s what we found: These cute wine glasses were on sale for $1.50, and two of them along with a bottle of inexpensive vino could make a nice little gift for someone that doesn’t drain the ol’ bank account: This pretty ceramic serving tray was on sale for $5.95, and could be filled with anything from cookies to candy (I’d do an assortment of fancy

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The First Day In Our Second House

We’re running about a day behind since we didn’t have internet at home until late yesterday, but here’s how things looked on Tuesday (our first full day in the house) with all of our boxes littering every room. Goodbye clean blank slate. Hello chaos. Oh and it bears mentioning that nothing is necessarily staying where we put it (we just dropped furniture and boxes around the house, and will definitely be living with things a bit before committing to final placement for anything). But let’s rewind a bit for a moment. The last time we moved, we were going from NYC to Richmond in a minivan (well, I guess technically we moved one more time

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Monday The 13th

You don’t even know the half of our moving day adventure. We glossed over it because we knew you deserved empty shots of our old place and pics of the new house’s interior – but we couldn’t let this story go untold. So take a moment to pantomime the buckling of your seatbelt and get ready to enjoy the ride. As we mentioned earlier, the day started off with an unexpected surprise: a snowstorm. And even though it wasn’t a Friday, the thirteenth of this month (aka Monday) surely lived up to its less than lucky reputation. Which is so not a good thing when it’s closing/moving day. Sure the snow was pretty, but it

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Did We Make A Profit Selling Our First House?

Are you kidding? In this market? Of course not. We managed to sell it for around $5k more than we bought it for back in 2006 (in “the bubble”) and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we spent more than five grand on improvements (we estimate that we spent around $35K on new bathrooms, a new kitchen, new flooring, new windows, a new roof, a new patio, a paved driveway, and upgraded details like crown molding and wider doorways). This is where a “womp-womp” sound effect would come in handy. But we’re sleeping like babies and are downright giddy about the sale of our house and the purchase of our new one.

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The New Digs

Greetings again from Panera (there’s no internet at home yet – so we stop in, get hot chocolate, and slap together a post or two for you guys whenever we have a spare moment thanks to their free WiFi). We know you’re anxiously awaiting interior shots of our new house all empty and move in ready from yesterday (can’t believe it’s really ours!). So here they are. I ran around quickly, which resulted in some less than perfect shots (our friends and family were outside in the snow waiting to start bringing things in so I made it snappy and didn’t have a chance to record a video so that’ll have to come later). But

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