Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Posts By John Petersik

John Petersik is one half of the duo behind the award-winning home improvement and do-it-yourself design blog, Young House Love. Together, he and his wife Sherry have renovated seven homes, published two New York Times Bestselling books, and designed products sold in Target and Home Depot. They are currently enjoying their downsized home on Florida's Gulf Coast with their two kids and their dog, Penny.

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How To Seal Ardex Concrete Counters

Thanks for all the kind words on Teddy’s arrival last week. We’re home now and settling into life as parents to a newborn again (anyone have tips for getting one to sleep between the hours of 10pm and 4am?), so we’ll definitely be on a lighter schedule, but one project that we rushed to check off the to-do list around 48 hours before Teddy was born was finally sealing our kitchen’s recently Ardexed counters. We’ve shared a few other “how to seal” tutorials (like this one about de-hazing & sealing tile, this one about sealing grout, and this one about sealing cork) so here’s what we settled on for protecting our Ardex counters. We read

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Fab Freebie: The Hook Up

HEADS UP! Since baby boy is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, we’re spending some special family time with Clara today. So we’re posting this week’s giveaway early, and hope to stop in later this week (maybe on Thursday?) to officially introduce our little man. But back to the freebie. This week we’re hooking three people from anywhere in the world up with a $500 Target gift card along with a complete set of our hooks (you can see them all here) in the finish of their choosing. I feel like this is the part where I should bust out an Oprah-esque “You get an octopus! You get an octopus!” but it just doesn’t have the same

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A Tour Of The Showhouse Bathroom & Closet

Continuing our showhouse-heavy week of reveals, we’re bringing you a bunch of after photos from three more spaces – the main bedroom’s en-suite bathroom, its attached closet, and cool little atrium space. We showed you the main bedroom on Tuesday (along with the office and the butler’s pantry) so it only felt natural to continue our virtual tour where we left off. The attached bath and closet sit off a corner of the main bedroom and are separated by a space that we’ve been lovingly calling the “atrium” (it’s really more of a vestibule) which you can see above on the right side. Here’s the floor plan for a clearer map of how that area

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Our Line Of Hooks & Rails At TARGET!

To everyone who has said “go rest!” or “we understand if you have to catch your breath after this showhouse marathon and before this baby comes” we are SO APPRECIATIVE of the encouragement. We’re still over there every day shooting each remaining room for afters/source lists and are also hoping to record a video tour for you guys, but we fully intend to cash in on that whole sit-down-and-breathe-for-a-second thing as soon as we finish documenting everything. But amongst the last crazy week of showhouse stuff, another crazy thing happened that we just had to talk about for a second. We can’t begin to tell you how awesomely surreal it has been to see our

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Showhouse Home Office, Butler’s Pantry, and Bedroom

As of 5:30pm yesterday, our second big Homearama Showhouse deadline was hit. Phew. The builder was throwing a preview party at the house so everything had to be done, cleaned, and ready to be shown off to a whole slew of people (realtors, prospective buyers, generous local companies who donated furnishings/accessories to this cause, etc). Heck, the weather even cooperated in the final seconds and gave us this nice photo op. It was kinda weird yet exciting to have the place alive with people, music, and food. They brought in caterers to show off the kitchen/appliances, and Sherry and I pretty much gorged since we had been running around in hyper-drive all day. There were

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The Process Of Decorating A Showhouse

For the last few weeks we have eaten, slept, and breathed all things showhouse. We knew it was going to be a lot of work, but I’ll be the first to admit that we completely underestimated how much time, effort, and – well, shopping – it would take to turn a 3,500 square foot blank-ish slate into a lived-in-ish looking home. In two weeks, no less. So as you can imagine we’ve pretty much been camped out there. Or driving back and forth with a car full of stuff, unloading it, placing it on various surfaces, and repeating. We thought most of the major hurdles had been cleared after choosing fixtures and finishes over the

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Messy House Tour 2014

Since you guys have enjoyed the past messy house tour videos that we’ve shared (like this one from our last house in 2011), we seized the opportunity to remind everyone that we’re not all carefully folded towels and meticulously placed pillows 24/7 (not even close). With our attention focused mostly on the showhouse & some last minute nursery updates, many of our other house projects have been put on hold (some are literally halfway done) and a handful of rooms have quickly devolved into chaos. And when your house is a mess, why not video tape it for the whole internet to see? A few notes: There is no rapping in this video. I am

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And Now For A Household Crafting Challenge

The other night Sherry and I came up with the idea to challenge each other to craft something using objects around our house – the catch being that the OTHER person gets to choose the objects. It wasn’t necessarily a competition, but we still came up with some ground rules: You can use anything to make the craft, but the three chosen items must be incorporated in some way. The “challengee” may choose one of the items before seeing the other two chosen by the “challenger.” No money can be spent. The project will be shared on the blog, no matter how awful it turns out. We rock-paper-scissored and I lost, so I was up

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Furnishing The Showhouse

At first I had typed the original “I like to move it, move it” lyrics but then I realized that I don’t really enjoy the moving process at all, so it was sort of an unpleasant deja vu moment when we started unloading furniture into the Homearama showhouse on Monday. But my glass half-full version of the situation is: we’re finally getting to the furnish the showhouse! Note: for anyone wondering what the heck this showhouse is, and how it benefits Habitat for Humanity, click here and here for more info. With almost everything done construction-wise in the house, we greeted a truck from Green Front Furniture (the local place loaning pieces to many of

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How To Hang New Lights In The Hallway

From moment one of seeing this house, something about the view of a series of three lights all in a row(ish) in the upstairs hallway made us inexplicably excited. Just call it “the tri-light zone” effect. We just knew that arrangement had serious potential. You know, once we looked past the old carpeting and the blue trim. The existing lights were a little undersized for us (pictures don’t do it justice, but this is a 33 foot long hallway!), so although we considered spray painting them another color (oil-rubbed bronze? red? navy?), I worried it’d make them look a bit more gothic cathedral than we wanted. Plus, all three of them were crooked, one of

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Fab Freebie: Stealing Home

The thrill of the hunt is one thing, but what about the thrill of the steal? Decor Steals serves ’em up daily in the form of sales events that promise vintage-inspired and industrial chic home accessories, lighting, and furniture at up to 80% off retail (you can be first in line thanks to their daily deal announcement). And this week someone will score $500 to spend there. 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. Click To View Rafflecopter Widget

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How To DIY Ardex Concrete Counters

So we did it. We concrete’d our kitchen’s laminate counters. Sherry shared this quick peek at our first coat in Friday’s post, and we’re back with the final results, the details of how we got there, and an in-action video to hopefully help explain the process. We’re really happy with how they turned out. Pictures don’t do it justice, but the whole room feels a lot more updated and less laminate-y. It’s giving off kind of a stark/cold vibe in these photos, but after we add some colorful window treatments, stuff on the shelves/counters, and remedy that bad faux brick flooring (and that almond stove) we think it’ll feel like a whole new room.  I’m

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