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 Privacy Trellis

BRB, just changing the name of this blog to “Solving Problems With Plants.” And I know we promised a huge pool post, but the pool is still very much in progress. Hopefully it’ll be done next month and we can write one big breakdown with approximately 473 photos. But back to how plants can not only hide ugly stuff, they can also offer some pretty great privacy, as we’re about to demonstrate below. One of the things that contributes to our house being extra walkable to shops, parks, the beach, and restaurants is that it’s less like a sprawling suburban neighborhood due to the lots being a good deal smaller (you can read more about

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Hiding Ugly Utility Boxes With A DIY Shelf

When we shared pictures of our front porch last fall, we said that our decorating strategy out here was basically “plants and more plants.” It helps visually connect the porch to all of the greenery surrounding our house and – as we’ll show you today – it’s also helping us hide some less-than-pretty parts of this outdoor area. Let’s call them wall warts. Three large rectangular wall warts. But more on that in a second. First let’s travel back in time to what this all looked like last February when we put an offer in on this house (that’s our realtor in the photo below) As you can see, we’ve already come quite a long

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How To Strip A Deck For Stain

When we bought our house, the deck was in ROUGH shape. Before we could revive it with a fresh coat of stain, we had to strip off the old stain first. It definitely took some time and effort – our deck is nearly 700 sq. ft! But it was totally a doable weekend project for even a first-time stripper. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. That’s the before-and-after of the stripping process, but if you’d like to see how it turned out with the new stain, check out our How To Stain & Seal A Deck tutorial. And ignore the patch of new wood. We had to repair a section where a tree had been growing

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10 Easy Shed Storage Ideas

We recently added several DIY organization solutions in our new shed – all of which we completed in just one weekend! So today we’re going to show you all of the shed storage ideas we implemented in here, along with a few favorites from other storage spaces we’ve organized. Here’s what we’ll cover in this post: Planning Your Shed Organization Organizing a shed can be overwhelming, especially when you want to cram a lot of different functions into the space. Even though our new shed is pretty large (12×16′), we still had to be thoughtful about the best use of each wall. Ultimately we decided to write a list of: This helped us prioritize the

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How To Make Built-In Cabinets

There’s no better kind of storage than built-in storage, especially when you can integrate it with the architecture of a space. So when we finished our attic into a bonus room, we were excited to make use of the recessed niche around the window. Today we’re going to show you how we designed and installed built-in cabinets using stock cabinets. Spoiler: it’s actually an Ikea hack! This post covers the wall-to-wall, built-in cabinets, but you can also read about how we built the DIY floating shelves too. The two features work together to make a functional feature wall, but it’s a bit much to cover in one tutorial! Step 1: Plan Your Built-Ins Because this

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How To Make DIY Floating Shelves

We’ve done tons of DIY shelving projects in our homes, but these simple floating shelves in our bonus room are some of our favorites. We love this tutorial because the shelves turn out modern & thin, unlike most DIY floating shelves that are super chunky. Although if these are too narrow for your taste, you can see how we adapted this tutorial for some thicker floating kitchen shelves. You can also read about how we built in the cabinets under the shelves too, since they were another key part of building out this niche. In that post, we also cover how we planned the layout using Ikea’s online kitchen planning tool. You can also see

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How To Hang An Outdoor Daybed (On Video!)

Last week we shared how we built the DIY outdoor hanging daybed that we installed on our front porch. And as promised, I’m back to share how we hung it since, if you’re like me, hanging things that are meant to support the full weight of a human body (or two!) can make you a little nervous. It was actually extremely easy to do. So easy that we did it more than once (ha!) so that it resulted in the smoothest and most non-tipsy sway possible (our first hanging attempt made it tip forward and backwards a bit, which wasn’t ideal). Thankfully the second attempt worked like a charm. Plus it meant we could document

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How To Build A Hanging Daybed

Back in October we mentioned our plans to add a hanging daybed to the covered portion of our front porch and our entire family couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally done. Hanging daybeds like this are super popular in our area, and we’ve always had a soft spot for them. Is there anything better than reading/napping outside on a lazy Saturday afternoon? One of the Airbnbs that we stayed at in Costa Rica last January had one that pretty much cemented our feeling that they’re just about the perfect outdoor lounge spot. Sherry and our daughter spent hours there, each leaning up against a side arm with their legs extended towards each other, reading

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How To Build A Modern Fireplace Mantel

We mentioned in this year’s holiday decorating post that we wanted to get some sort of fireplace mantel built this month and, well, Santa delivered! ::pats self on back:: Yes, setting a goal to have a place for hanging our kids’ stockings is a little random, but we were happy to have the motivation to check this project off our list sooner rather than later. If you recall, our fireplace looked like this when we moved in: Here’s a wider shot of that area right after we got here, just for kicks. Ah, those packing blankets as curtains are #MEMORIES. So yeah… it feels good to be here: Sherry did some work to freshen it

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What’s It Like To Downsize?

Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way. This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you

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Making A Media Cabinet With Ikea Besta Cabinets

Downsizing from 3200 square feet to 1400 means storage is a big deal to us these days, and a couple of weeks ago we got two major upgrades in that department. We still have some “hacking” to do to the simple Ikea cabinets that we bought, but we’re stupidly giddy over just having them assembled and installed. They basically add up to 8 more large cabinets worth of storage – and our kitchen only has 7 cabinets, so the excitement was palpable when those flat-packed boxes arrived (they had about a 4 week wait time, but otherwise delivery was smooth and uneventful for those wondering how the ordering experience was during this time period). They

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