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 Build A Bookshelf

Today we’re going to show you how we built the bookshelves in our son’s room. It’s an easy project that we’ve since used to create custom shelving everywhere from our living room to our beach house pantry. But these bedroom shelves were our very first attempt at them and we absolutely loved how they turned out. This tutorial specifically focuses on building the actual shelves, aka the top portion of these built-ins. You can separately read about how we first built-in the cabinet bases (it’s an Ikea hack!) and later finished them off with crown molding. But since not every bookshelf needs those features, we’re talking just about the shelving today. You also can take

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Fab Freebie: Seeing Red

A few years ago, our cousins took us into a fun home shop during a visit with them in Old Town Alexandria, VA called Red Barn Mercantile. The store had such a collected feeling of rustic weathered wares mixed with modern, often quirky, accessories and gifts – including a great selection of Dash & Albert rugs, which we’re always drawn to. So when they recently approached us to offer up a $500 gift card to anyone in the world, we couldn’t say yes fast enough. And they’re also giving 20% off to everyone with the code HOUSELOVE at checkout. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but

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How To Turn Ikea Dressers Into Built-In Bookshelves

It’s been a busy but productive week in the nursery built-in department, so I’m going to cover a lot in this post. Hang on to your hats, crank up your favorite Swedish electropop, and be prepared for some nitty-gritty detail on how we began the transformation from free-standing Ikea dresser to built-in dresser/bookshelf combo (that’s not a finished result on the right, by the way, it’s just photoshop). As you might recall, we bought two FJELL dressers because they were the size we needed and they were made of solid wood. But they did need a little additional help when it came to giving them a built-in look: None of these issues were insurmountable, but

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Our Toilet Leaked Through The Ceiling Below

Lemme tell you, our bathroom’s wallpaper wasn’t its only problem-to-be-remedied recently. So brace yourself while we weave a little plumbing tale that spanned over the last few weeks (in fact it just wrapped up a few days ago). You know how we solemnly swear to share the good, the bad, and the ugly? Well, this one can be filed under “the bad” and “the ugly” with a side of “the gross.” So for everyone’s sake, we’ll leave out the graphic pictures. During the process of buying this house we noticed a very small, dried out water stain on the ceiling in the living room, right below where the bathroom was. We and the inspector concluded

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Picking Art For The Kitchen

The other day I was working away in the office and Sherry breezed in and stole some paper from the printer. I didn’t think much of it… until a few minutes later when I walked into the kitchen to find this. Well, this and Sherry grinning at me and batting her eyelashes. I soon learned that these large succulent photographs that she’d been eying for some time from West Elm had gone on sale (boo, but it looks like they’re back to full price now). It’s more than we typically spend on art, but they’re very large (almost 30″ wide and tall) and the price included the big glass frame – so Sherry took the

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Fab Freebie: Add To Your Collection

“At last, I have all of the furniture, accessories, and items for my home that I’ll ever need” said no one ever. Okay, maybe just said Sherry never. But if you’re like her, then we’re sure you’d find some worthy way to spend the $500 that Home Decorators Collection is giving away this week. Whether you shop in one of their stores, online, or by catalog, they cover just about every nook of your home – from furniture and bedding to lighting and rugs – they even have stuff like bathroom vanities. And they like to run deals too (today lots of stuff is 10% off with free shipping). Please use the Rafflecopter widget below

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The 5 Best Power Tools For Home DIY Projects

You guys often ask about our must have tools for DIY projects, and the truth is that it still catches me off guard that I’m The Guy People Ask About Tools. Growing up I remember taking trips to Hechinger (anyone remember those?) thinking “who would ever willingly go to a home improvement store?!?” And when my dad gifted me a set of screwdrivers in high school I wondered what the heck I’d use them for. But here I am today – 32 and the proud owner of more tools than I can count (and still fewer than I’d like) – including some of those same screwdrivers from my dad so many years ago. Home ownership

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Built-In(security)

We have a nursery update for you guys in the form of two new purchases that we brought home, assembled, and will now attempt to customize. After this planning post we pictured ourselves diving right into constructing our two custom built-ins to flank the crib, but then we realized that before we could actually start on those, we needed to make some decisions about what we wanted them to look like (base cabinets with doors and a bookcase top? lower cabinets with drawers instead? dressers that we could top with shelves and molding? tall armoire-ish things for each side of that wall?). So after a lot of inspiration-room browsing and comparing measurements/product choices on a

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Fab Freebie: Finger Lookin’ Good

This week’s giveaway is not only available worldwide, but it actually comes from the other side of the globe! Two sisters from Singapore founded Fictive Fingers, where they combine original illustrations, traditional art techniques, and simple construction methods to produce small edition fabric goods. From bold pillows to simple sling bags, they used water-based and eco-friendly inks to print their designs on a variety of items (many of which you can shop for by supporting their Pozible Project). So this week, someone’s gonna score a $250 gift card to get their fingers on these beauties. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop

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Painting A Bathroom Ceiling And Adding Trim

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, guys. We’re back with a fully finished bathroom paint & trim project (we mentioned our plan here last week, and you saw a sneak half-done peek of it in the house tour video on Friday). So here’s what it’s looking like now: Which is a pretty stark contrast to what we started with. You might remember that we removed the glass shower doors pretty early on, but then we didn’t touch the room again until recently waging war on the wallpaper. It’s a tough room to photograph due to all the doorways and nooks – especially when trying to get the ceiling and the floor in one shot. So forgive

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House Tour: Winter 2014

Something about filming the video tour of our showhouse progress made us realize that we were overdue for one of our own house (that and the fact that so many of you have been asking for one). And considering the last one we made was the “before” of this house, overdue is actually an understatement. So please forgive our delay and enjoy this little jaunt around our very much in-progress pad: In the video you might notice a few things… There are several “disaster zones” in the house (the dining room, the guest room, and the unfinished storage room) which are basically a catch-all dumping ground for things that we haven’t figured out a place

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Planning The Showhouse

The past couple of months have seen quite the flurry of activity in the Homearama showhouse department, which you might remember as the house that we’re helping to design and decorate (along with an amazing team of builders, architects, and other pros) to benefit Habitat For Humanity. You can read some background on it here and check out a floor planning post about it here, but the exciting news is that in a matter of weeks the lot has gone from a patch of dirt to an almost fully constructed home. It has been amazing to witness, so here’s two months of progress boiled down into six pictures: A couple of weeks ago we even

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