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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Weathering New England

Quick note: Tomorrow (Saturday, November 10th) we’ll be in Chicago at the West Elm on 1000 W North Avenue for cookies, cocoa, and a book signing at 1pm (arriving on the early side might help ya get a jump on the line). More info here. We’d love to see ya there! Who’s ready for our once-every-two-weeks recap of our book tour-y adventures (here’s the first one)? Just us? Okay. Here we go anyways! #warningitslong As most of you know, weather has been kinda crazy in the Northeastern part of the country lately. Between Hurricane Sandy two weeks ago and this spontaneous Nor’easter this week, well, things have been a little crazy. And it just so happens

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Staining A Dresser With A Decorative Flower Pattern

We just flew back from Boston (and boy are our arms tired, har-har) but since we shared our freshly painted bathroom with you guys this morning and we didn’t want to leave you hanging with just one post, we got this Reader Redesign together in the airport for ya (throughout all this travel, we’re doing out best to keep blogging as usual). I know we typically share full room makeovers, but this furniture upgrade had such a creative twist that we had to pass it along. We loved that Beth and Nick rescued this old to-be-trashed buffet with the help of some wood stain applied in an unexpected way. Here’s what Beth had to say

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Painting The Bathroom Elephant Gray By Benjamin Moore

We’re about to hop on a plane back from Boston (which is thankfully not canceled, despite the snowy weather), so this post is up a little early for ya but your comments might not pop up for a little while. Anyway, we’ve debated potential colors for the walls in this hall bathroom from almost the day that we moved in. For a while we were on the deep blue train, but after putting that in the adjacent guest bedroom, we’ve been going back and forth between several other options. Dark? Light? Colorful? Muted? We finally found our focus when we put that bright fish painting on our whitewashed shelf. Suddenly we had a direction. Toned-down-but-not-completely-neutral

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Fab Freebie: Book Worms Rejoice

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** So many book-hungry people out there! This giveaway hit its 10,000 cap within 24 hours, so we’re already back with a winner. The lucky worm is… Melissa (who keeps her favorite books in a bedside cabinet, a living room end table, and on a special display shelf in the family room. She believes “all good book nerds have them in all parts of the house!”). Congrats Melissa! Our book release is officially here! Woo hoo! And we’re celebrating by giving away books this week. But not just our book. Lots o’ books. In fact, some of them will even come signed by some pretty awesome

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How To Hide A Cracked Tile With A DIY Shelf

Aw yeah, it’s hall bathroom time, baby. We have about five phases of updates that we plan to share as we go, so here’s phase one. We’ve been hiding something in our hall bathroom. What? You thought that giant empty frame was just there because it looked good? Nah. To better understand this skeleton in the closet atop the toilet, might I refer you to this 20-month old post by Sherry entitled “Sometimes I Go Crazy.” It’s about how Sherry got a wild hair and busted out one of several extraneous towel bars that were un-centered/overkill/everywhere in our hall bathroom. Thankfully we were able to cover up the resulting tile scab with some new trim,

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25 Tips For Buying And Selling On Craigslist

After a bunch of you requested a post about this, we’re finally writing a loooong rundown about how we use Craiglist to score affordable secondhand finds as well as to sell things we no longer need. Sherry scratched the surface with a few tips on buying back in this post, but we wanted to share more info that was specific to interacting with sellers/buyers and writing up your listings, so here it goes. Craigslist can definitely be intimidating for first-timers. It doesn’t boast the glossy interface that makes using sites like Facebook feel so welcoming. Plus, some few-and-far-between but no-less scary crime stories are enough to make anyone wary of it. Even Sherry and I

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How To Organize Tools With A Pegboard

Quick note: For now we just have lots of rain and a few wind gusts thanks to Hurricane Sandy, but things are supposed to get a bit rougher later today and tomorrow so we expect to be without power for a while (although we’ll post remotely whenever we can). We hope everyone else is staying safe and dry! Since pegboards are my new favorite thing, you knew I was bound to write another basement organization post that mentions them (along with some other methods to contain/control things like screws and nails) right? Here’s how I brought some sexy back to the basement (which I recently started to clean up after a yard sale, a bagster

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3 Fun Pumpkin Projects To Do With Young Kids

Since Clara’s still a few years off from knife-wielding age, we still scratch our heads each year for a toddler-friendly way for her to be involved in the pumpkin decorating process. When she was 5 months old we borrowed the outline of her hand to inspire a lady-like Jack-o-Lantern (a Jill-o-Lantern perhaps?) Last year we took advantage of her new-found dexterity and let her finger paint some pumpkins that we had strategically taped off ahead of time to later reveal some designs. And since she had so much fun last year (and we loved how they turned out) we did a slight twist on that idea by making tissue paper “sticker” pumpkins this year. Anyone

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Nerding It Up In The Nasty ‘Nati

Sorry to take so long writing this post for you guys! We know lots of you were asking about it ever since we got back this weekend, but in true Petersik fashion we took way too many pics and had to figure out which ones to use and then felt like over-sharing about the whole thing… and thus this giant full-o-pics-and-words post was born. Anyway, the first tour stop for our book in Cincinnati this weekend was, well, kind of nuts. But the good kind of nuts. The kind where it’s like a whirlwind of awesome and can’t-believe-this-is-happening experiences all jammed packed into about 36 hours. We promise we won’t pour over the details of

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Fab Freebie: She’s Not Jenny From The Block

*** This giveaway is now closed –  see who won below!*** It was fun hearing all of your rap names, guys. That and seeing how many people entered “C.LO” instead of “L.CO.” That does roll of the tongue a bit more easily… Anyways, our random winner is… Rebecca (or should we say “Rebizzle” since that’s her high school nickname, which has stuck around for 15 years). Congrats! When Sherry and I were looking for some big, bold paintings to add some oomph to a few book photos back in January we turned to a local painter (and friend!) named Lindsay Cowles. And when she arrived at our house to loan us some gorgeous canvasses for

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How To Organize A Basement Workshop

Now that we’ve cleared out our backyard’s weed & liriope convention, let’s move on to another area that has been sorely lacking our attention. Yes, let’s spend some time in our basement, shall we? Oh wait – that sounds like an invitation to get murdered or something. Um, let’s just talk about our basement. You may recall that it recently went from a shameful deck-debris-filled no man’s land… …to a slightly more presentable space thanks to our Bagster rental a few weeks ago. Well, that Bagster purge and our recent yard sale were the kick in the butt that I’ve needed to finally put some energy into this room. Because honestly, we’ve put ZERO effort

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A Full Bathroom Reno For Under $2000

It’s not often that a before photo actually makes me laugh out loud. But I did so I’ll cop to it right now. Just check out the shower tile in Erin’s main bathroom for yourself. Thankfully the incredible overhaul that she and her husband did means that old tile is nothing but a (somewhat hilarious) memory. Here’s her letter: Hi John & Sherry, we’ve been working on remodeling our foreclosure mess for just over a year now, and so far we’ve completed three bathroom remodels! I’m still doing a happy dance from how this last one turned out. This room started out as bad as it could get with dirty white tile & brown grout,

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