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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Fab Freebie: Uncommon Areas

What fun is a house without a little weird in it? For those homes lacking some quirk, uniqueness, or “points of interest” then this week’s $250 gift card to UncommonGoods may do the trick. Their site is well stocked with home decor, servingware, organizing accessories and even kids stuff that has a hint of fun injected into it. Personalized family pillow? Check. Cardboard side table? Check. Terrarium-slash-table-lamp? Yeah buddy. Once again, we’re using Rafflecopter, so you should see a box load under this paragraph (might take a second) and that’s where you can leave your entry. This week the prize ships to the United States. a Rafflecopter giveaway  

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You Can’t Take It With You… Or Can You?

As exciting as it has been to move into this new house, it was certainly sad to say goodbye to our old house and leave behind all of the parts (and projects!) that we couldn’t take with us. The penny tile backsplash. The deck. The fireplace. Wait, scratch that last one. Let’s zoom in a bit closer on that little item sitting on the mantel. Well, what do we have here? That, my friends, is an amazing miniature replica of our fireplace. Miniature as in completely portable and yes-it-totally-came-with-us-to-the-new-house. It’s the creation of Lisa Harrold, a recent fine arts graduate in the UK who specializes in miniatures. She emailed us to say that as a

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How To Paint Patterns Onto Rugs

They say inspiration can come from anywhere and Sheena’s story definitely had us smiling. Here’s her letter: Hey John and Sherry (and Clara and Burger too!) I just wanted to write to thank you for some unintended inspiration you gave me recently. After reading about Clara’s dollhouse, I fell in love with the pattern on the fabric-sample-turned-rug in the tiny room and I just had to replicate it. So I did – with a plain rug, some foam insulation, paint, and a sponge brush. Think “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” in reverse and decor style!  :) I used a 3/4 inch thick piece of insulation styrofoam to make a stamp and stamped the design over

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How To Install New Interior Doorknobs

Alternate post title: Come And Knob On Our Door. Don’t you love a good forced pun on a Wednesday morning? Ever since we shared a bunch of doorknob options last week (and ordered the ones we liked the most), we’ve been waiting for them to arrive so that our upstairs doors could finally have some closure. Literally, we couldn’t close any of the doors. So when the box landed on our porch, we got right on installing them. Like many DIY projects, adding the new knobs was a bit more complicated than we anticipated. The latch assembly was bigger than the existing holes in our doors, so I had to use a drill to carve them

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Fab Freebie: Fix It

Happy (ever so slightly belated) Father’s Day everyone! To honor all those guys (and gals) out there who have that intrinsic need to fix things, we’re giving away some tools this week. And they’re coming from some folks who know a thing or two about fixing stuff: eReplacementParts.com. They’re a great resources for the parts, materials, and even the how-to when it comes to repairing your tools. So this week’s winner will get their choice of two of these three DeWALT tools: a circular saw, a jigsaw or a hammer drill.  That’s over $300 worth of DIY bounty! And since last week’s debut of Rafflecopter was so well received (thanks guys! It saved us just

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Twelve Steps For Installing Hardwood Floors

After excitedly declaring “the hardwood floors are done!” just in time to move in, we got a bunch of requests for a follow up post with details about the “tricky stuff” like how we handled transitions, cutting boards shorter, cutting them thinner, how we addressed the top of the stairs, and how long it all took. So let’s dive back into floor world for a second. The entire floor-laying process took us about 6 days from the placing of the first board to the nailing of the final strip of quarter round. Sherry was able to help me for some of those days, but other days were just me myself and I while Sherry was

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New Pad, Still Glad

Amidst all the moving madness, we’re still taking our once-a-month pause to show how grateful we are to the sponsors who help make all of our other posts possible. So feel free to check out some things that caught our eye this month, and peruse our usual round-up of discounts at the bottom of the post: Fun finds on discount site Fab.com, like this Bongo side table / basket storage. Royal Design Studio‘s new Khanjali Ikat stencil. You know we love a good ikat… Boutique decal collections at WallQuotes, like their selection of monograms. Shades of Light‘s summery striped rugs like this large scale aqua chevron. Lots of stuff in the Bright & Bold sale

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Fab Freebie: Office Space

UPDATE: We’ve selected a winner below (Congrats Bridget!) but we also wanted to share that Kacy has another prize for everyone – a $5 coupon code (5OFFYHL)to use towards a purchase of The Inspired Office Poster. Enjoy! Moving is just about the antithesis of feeling organized. Which is why we’ve lined up this giveaway from Kacy at The Inspired Office. She’s a professional organizer who specializes in turning your space into a functional, productive, and (dare we say it) pretty place as part of her virtual video consultation called The Blueprint. And speaking of pretty, she has taken nuggets of organizing wisdom from over 12 years of doing this and put them on a stylin’

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Our Landscaping Makeover

In honor of moving week, we’re going to share a post full of empty house pics (and a list of what stayed with the house) in a day or two, but we also wanted to take a look back at our exterior progress one last time. We’ve done outdoor video tours in both 2011 and 2012, so this video that we shot a few weeks back (right before we started packing) makes it our third and final installment. *Before you press play, I’m intensely awkward when I’m the one holding the camera and talking, so be warned that I hit on the deck. And it doesn’t respond. Now that we have that out of the

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Did We Make A Profit Selling Our Second House?

We answered this question after the sale of our first house (spoiler: we bought in the bubble and sold in the recession), so now we’re back to do it again – but this time the coins stacked a bit more favorably, thanks both to selling in a slightly better market and by not sinking as much into this house’s improvements (it helped that we didn’t need expensive upgrades like a new roof and windows this time around). We managed to sell this latest house for $23,000 more than we bought it for back in 2010. And our best estimate is that we put around $14,500 into improvements that stay with the house (i.e. not furniture

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Fab Freebie: Arhaus To Your House

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** And our randomly selected winner is… Alyson (who says they use their sofa for “cuddling with our dog while watching tv or reading. My day doesn’t feel complete without cuddle time!”) Congrats! Sit back. Put your feet up. Take a load off. Because someone’s winning a new couch this week, courtesy of Arhaus – up to over $2,500 in value! Arhaus covers a wide range of rooms (from dining to bedroom) in a wide range of worldly styles (from traditional to unique). So to showcase that spectrum, this week’s winner will get to pick one of three sofas: the curvy and tufted Club sofa, the

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How To Install Oak Hardwood Floors

Get on the floor. Seriously, wood, get out of those boxes and do your thing. Oh how I wish it were that easy. Turns out laying oak flooring takes some serious time. But man oh man is it gorgeous when it’s down. So it turns out wood-floor-laying, my friends, is time well spent (picture me saying that as confidently as Ron Swanson says “turkey can never beat cow”). Don’t mind the dusty little path emerging from Clara’s room. We still have a few more spots to sweep… As we mentioned here, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs (plus the stairs) have nice

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