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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Adding Poured Concrete Walkways & A Driveway

As we mentioned in our post about making a bigger backyard pool area, we’ve also made some big changes out front. Namely, we now have a legit front walkway and driveway! Break out the champagne! Release the doves! Rewatch the #Scandoval episode of Vanderpump Rules (or whatever else people like Sherry do to celebrate). I know this may seem unworthy of celebration – a driveway? cool story, bro – but when you live without one for THREE YEARS, it feels like a major win. Why We Needed Parking & Pathways I know most houses come with a place to park your car and some sort of path to the front door. Every other house we’ve

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How We Doubled The Size (And Function!) Of Our Backyard Pool Area

For nearly a year, we’ve been in the process of reimagining our pool area as a bigger, more multi-functional space. You first saw it two years ago when we posted this behind-the-scenes of putting in a pool, along with lots of before & afters. We LOVE our pool and this area quickly became our go-to outdoor family hang-out spot. So back in Spring of 2022, we realized we could make it work even harder for us if we did one somewhat simple thing… moved one section of fencing back (thereby doubling the size!). It ended up being a bit more than just that, so I’ll take you through the various steps we took to maximize

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A Weekend In Charleston, SC With Kids

Last week our family took a last-minute, 2-day-3-night trip to Charleston, South Carolina and it was *chef’s kiss*. It was our first time there, and we arrived having done zero planning and no itinerary with the goal of exploring, enjoying the sights, and eating some good stuff along the way (spoiler: we achieved all three!). Honestly, it might have been our favorite weekend trip yet (tied with New Orleans). So here are all the places, activities, and meals that made our trip so great. Why We Vacationed In Charleston Ever since we moved to Florida three years ago, our family vacations have changed a bit. We used to almost always pick places with a beach

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Free Summer Reading Printable

With our kids’ summer break kicking off this weekend, we came up with a fun twist on our usual summer reading goals. We had the idea while playing “would you rather” on a family walk this morning, came home and whipped up a paper template, and an hour later Sherry mentioned it in passing on Instagram. Then Sherry’s DMs filled up with people asking her to share a copy of the bracket or tell them where we got it (we whipped it up in Photoshop), so we decided to drop two free printable options of it here in this post. I even had some fun myself, as a 41-year-old man, making this filled-out sample above

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Adding Ikea Floating Shelves In Our Bedroom

For over a decade, one of our renovating mantras has been “the middle makes no sense.” Basically, don’t fret if your house is mid-reno, not fully furnished, or otherwise in limbo. Take your time, try something out, and just course correct as you go. See what you like and what you use. Live with something for a little while (or a long while). Take the expectation of having a finished perfect house right away and throw it in the trash (it always takes us years to get to that point!). Just keep letting spaces evolve in ways that work for your family and make you happy. And eventually, you’re very likely to end up with

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How To Build Easy Closet Shelves

Storage is useful in any closet, but it’s especially important in small ones like our laundry closet. That’s why we built some suuuuuuper simple DIY closet shelves as soon as we moved in. It’s an easy project that anyone can tackle! They require very few materials, take only a few hours, and can be customized to fit your closet and storage needs. And as a bonus, we’ll even show you how to build a laundry counter that matches your shelves. It’s even removable so you can easily access your washer and dryer when they need servicing. Our shelves have been going strong for nearly 4 years now and they look & function just as well

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4 People Sharing A Bathroom: How & Why It Works For Us

Any time we mention having only one bathroom it spawns a flurry of interest in our Instagram DMs about how we manage that with our four-person family. Although we’re definitely not intrepid for having this setup in any way (so many families in the US & abroad live a wonderful life in a smaller home with one bathroom), and we also have an outdoor shower that we can use almost year-round (which definitely takes the pressure off of our single indoor bathroom), there’s a surprising amount of curiosity around the topic. So we’re here to break down why it has worked so well for our family and what we’ve done to make it extra efficient

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How To Make An Ikea Pax Wardrobe Look Built-In

Raise your hand if you remember how much closet space our bedroom used to have. The answer is zero. We used dressers for a while and eventually added some floor-to-ceiling Ikea Pax wardrobes. And – big news! – we’ve added another Ikea wardrobe, which means we have just as much storage in our current bedroom as we had in our last house’s FANCY WALK-IN CLOSET! I know. It’s downright mind-blowing. For comparison, this is our last house’s walk-in closet (it was an 8′ x 6′ room). Each side had one 29″ cabinet in the middle and two 19″ cabinets (one flanking each side of the larger cabinet). That’s 67″ of linear closet space on each

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How To Fit A King-Size Bed Into A Small Bedroom

This is a meandering journey of a post, so make yourself comfortable. We mentioned in this side table post that we traded our queen-size bed for a bigger king-size one. The reason might seem obvious – because it’s bigger, duh! But we happily sailed through over 17 years together without ever wanting one. So why the sudden about-face last fall? Well, it essentially boiled down to: “the things we do for our dog” (more on that in a second). We also had to carefully plan how we’d squeeze the biggest bed we’ve ever owned into our smaller bedroom. And we had a big realization about larger furniture in a smaller house in the process (it’s

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The Best Grout – And How To Pick The Right Color

If you’ve got a tiling project in your future, remember, bookmark, voice memo, tattoo, or do whatever you need to do to remember Mapei Flexcolor grout. I know this sounds like I’m overreacting, but take it from people who have grouted 7 bathroom floors, 3 showers, 3 mudrooms, and 2 backsplashes in the last two years: this grout has been life-changing. And no, this is not sponsored by either Mapei or Floor & Decor, which is where we typically buy ours (sorry, necessary disclaimer because this post is going to sound pretty gushy). Why We Love Mapei Grout I’ll explain WHY we love Mapai grout so much AND toss in some tips for picking the

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How To Protect Plants From Freezing

Last month’s arctic blast brought surprisingly frigid temperatures to Florida. We had three consecutive nights with temperatures in the low 20s – and an ultimate low of around 18 degrees! A lot of our outdoor plants aren’t built for that kind of freezing weather (in the 3 winters we’ve spent here we can remember one other low of about 32-degrees, but things went right back up to our more normal lows of around 45 degrees within a few hours). They’re calling our recent deep freeze a “once-in-a-century event” here in Florida. In other words: the ultimate test. So here are the steps we took to protect our plants, including a few things that worked better

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