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 Easy Laundry Shelves

Storage is useful in any laundry room, but it’s especially important in small ones like our laundry closet. That’s why we built some suuuuuuper simple floating laundry shelves right as soon as we moved in. It’s an easy DIY that anyone can tackle! They require very few materials, take only a few hours, and can be customized to fit your space and needs. And as a bonus, we’ll even show you how to build a 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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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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5 Ways To Prevent Frozen Pipes

We thought frozen pipes were a worry we’d left behind by moving to Florida, but last month’s arctic blast sent our temperatures plummeting into the low 20s for three nights in a row (with an all-time low of 18 degrees, which they’re calling a once-in-a-century event here in Northwest, FL). This was especially concerning because Florida homes in our area aren’t always constructed with this weather in mind. Frozen pipes are bad news because water expands when it freezes, potentially causing pipes to burst or crack, leading to leaking or flooding. Luckily, with a few easy prevention steps we successfully kept our pipes from freezing! Which, sadly, isn’t something a lot of our neighbors can

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The Rooms We Don’t Miss After Downsizing

Sherry’s post a few months ago about what furniture & decor we still own after downsizing was the first time I’d looked back at photos of our previous house in a while. It was a fun walk down memory lane (how has it been 2.5 years since we moved?!). It also jogged my memory about how much “extra house” we used to have. As in, full rooms that were so under-utilized that I’d almost forgotten about them! Don’t get me wrong: we loved that house. But, as you know, it was a much bigger house than we realized we needed (spending an entire summer in our smaller pink beach house really clarified that for us

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Ikea Besta Hack: Turn Them Into Built-Ins

Want to turn Ikea Besta cabinets into custom built-ins? We made 3 simple “hacks” to make our Betas look like higher-end custom storage with a high-end price tag. So now we’ve got extra storage and bonus architectural detail in our bedroom. Built-in storage is helpful anywhere, but especially in a smaller home like ours. We’ve added built-in Pax closets in our bedroom, a custom desk & bookcase to our son’s room, and the wall-to-wall media cabinet in our family room. So when we needed a solution to the empty spots next to our fireplace, we knew more built-ins were in order. Why Choose Ikea Bestas? The fireplace you see above is directly across from our

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Are Robot Vacuums Worth It?

We owned a Roomba robot vacuum almost a decade ago because it sounded so good in theory. But in reality, we had SO MANY ISSUES with it. It was extremely loud, frequently got stuck, and didn’t cover much ground before the battery died. It required so much babysitting someone that our time was better spent just vacuuming ourselves. We finally ended up selling it on Craigslist. So imagine our surprise to now be declaring that we actually LOVE having a robot vacuum and the technology has come SO FAR. It feels lightyears ahead of the one we owned before – and it was much less expensive! In fact, we’ve owned our new robot vacuum for

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How To Install A Stair Runner

It may seem intimidating to install a stair runner yourself, but it’s so darn easy that we’ve done it twice! Thrice if you count demonstrating it on live TV (more on that later). Just follow the steps in our tutorial below, including our trick for making sure your rug is the perfect size for the project. Adding a rug or runner to your stairs isn’t just a stylish decor choice that can add color, personality, or pattern. It’s also a safety feature! We find that adding a stair runner cuts down on slips, falls, and even makes it easier for our dog to traverse them. They also absorb sound, meaning your less likely to hear

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Adding Outdoor Storage

I’ll start this post with a confession: I resented our kitchen porch when we finished it last fall. Resent is a strong and, admittedly, strange word to use for a porch. But I’ll explain it later on in this post. The good news is that I no longer harbor any ill will toward it. In fact, it has become one of the spaces I’m most grateful to have in our smaller home. Especially after some functional additions that we’ve made to it over the last year since you saw it. I love this space so much, that I’m actually writing this post from it right now. Call it Method Blogging. I’m fully immersed in my

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DIY Built-In Bookshelves

Today’s tutorial for adding built-in bookshelves is a lot simpler than it looks. That means getting this classic look of floor-to-ceiling shelving around a doorway is something anyone can do. We planned these bookcases as part of our big kitchen remodel, and they may be my secret favorite part of the whole renovation. This wall did have a bookcase on it originally, as you can see in this before photo. But we demo’d and reframed it to be more open to the kitchen. In addition to the DIY building tutorial, we’ll also share all of the measurements so you can make sure to create the best shelf height and depth for books and decor. Tools

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