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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9 Blog Coding & Site Design Tips

Since a bunch of you have requested it, I’m going to attempt to dole out some technical blogging / coding advice. I’ll admit I’ve been very hesitant to write this because I am very much an amateur myself. Asking me for web design advice feels a bit like asking your waiter to teach you how to cook. I can tell you the basic ingredients of what we’re serving, but things might get hairy if I’m asked to put together a menu. It’s really all just trial and error and a decent amount of googling around for answers. Note: yes, the following visual is a coding joke, hence the brackets. Now that I’ve let my insecurities

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Blogiversary IV: A Few Fun (& Crazy) Blog Stats

As if this morning’s pie charts weren’t enough, we’re back to get all numerical and statistical on you. Each year we like to break down what YHL looks like by the numbers. Some are crazy. Some are surprising. Some are serious. Some are, well, just for fun. We’ve included some of last year’s numbers just for comparison’s sake, but you can also look back at our past by-the-numbers posts for our last three blogiversaries to see how things have changed: 2010, 2009 and 2008. 2,014 – The number of published posts to date on Young House Love (Last year: 1,527) 16 – The number of published posts to date on Young House Life (clearly someone’s

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How Do Bloggers Make Money?

Like previous blogiversaries, we’re gonna use this week as an excuse to take a look at the business side of blogging (at least as we know it). As you’ve probably gathered by now, we never intended to start a business when we wrote our first post back in Sept 2007, nor did we ever construct a formal business plan. So this whole adventure has been a learn as we go / roll with the punches / adjust along the way / insert more cliches here kind of deal. And just like we don’t claim to be DIY experts or trained interior designers (we’re just two people with a chihuahua and a baby), we’re not about

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Fab Freebie: West In Show (Continued)

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Well, after a blog-busting (literally) 18,018 entries across two posts (the first one got overloaded after reaching 10,680 entries so we had to start a second one) we finally have one lucky winner in what has become our biggest giveaway to date. In case anyone was worried about how this would all be tallied, we used random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 18,018 and located the comment that correlated with that number across both posts (although you guys can no longer access the comments on the first post, they’re all visible to us in our WordPress dashboard, so we were

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Fab Freebie: West In Show

***Uh oh – looks like we like we hit capacity on this post with over 10,000 comments! But this giveaway is closed anyways, so I guess it’s okay.*** It’s no secret that we love West Elm (we own two daybeds and a desk among other things from their store). So let’s just say that we’ll be mighty jealous of the person who wins this week’s FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR gift card there (four year blogiversaries are for big prizes, after all). And not that you asked, but if you need any help picking out what to buy – might we suggest some of these lurvely items below (Sherry had trouble picking just six things, so we

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The House My Parents Downsized To

I don’t usually write these House Crashing posts, but this home in particular is very special to me. Well, at least it will be over time – it’s my parents’ new house here in Richmond. Since we literally crashed their pad for a few days post-Hurricane Irene (when our house had no power) and have spent many an evening hanging out over there, we figured it was high time we snapped some pics to share with you guys. That’s Dad and Mom right after moving day back in May (they’ve since painted the lavender door bright red). I’ve mentioned before how they sold their house of 32 years in Northern Virginia (aka, my childhood home)

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Our Chihuahua’s First Teeth Cleaning

Burger had his first dentist appointment today. We had to leave him there all day since the “procedure” required putting him under. I guess it’s easier to clean a dog’s teeth when they’re not biting you every five seconds. Go figure. Although Burger just turns into a big puddle of wimp at the vet. Here he is whining at the door as we waited for the technician to take him away. We were sad all around. But healthy teeth = healthy dog. And we want Burger around for a nice long time. Happily, the cleaning was a success. We learned that chihuahuas have notoriously bad teeth, but Burger seems to be an exception. It was

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Upgrading An Old Chandelier With Paint & A New Shade

Alternate punny post title: The Updated Light Fixture Blues. That’s right, we’ve got the blues, but we’re far from sad about our “new” light fixture in the office. We just opted for indigo blue spray paint and added a giant drum shade to our old brass friend. Hence the blues joke. But you’ll get a closer look in a minute. Patience, grasshopper. As a refresher, here’s what was there before (remember to ignore the lack of height due to the too-small frames leaning against the wall instead of proper hanging art and those we-probably-won’t-keep-them lamps on either side of our new desk). Our office was originally our house’s formal dining room, hence the whole formal

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Fab Freebie: Lowe-ded With Ideas

***This giveaway is no longer expecting entries – see who won below!*** Random.org once again spun its wonderful wheel of randomness and selected our two winners as… Amy @ Larryspearslive.com and Amanda Deerr. Congrats ladies! Raise your hand if you want a $50 Lowe’s gift card. Or better yet, give me a “hootie hoo.” And if the thought of being one of two lucky winners doesn’t instantly get your brain spinning with all of the potential projects that you could tackle, Lowe’s Creative Ideas will happily fill your head with… wait for it… creative ideas. You may already know of the free Lowe’s Creative Ideas magazines (if not, you can subscribe to ’em here), but

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Thrift Shopping In Delaware

Just as we did over Memorial Day, we used the long Labor Day weekend to squeeze in a few days at my parents’ beach house near Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was another trip full of family, food, and fun-slash-weird finds. And you know we love a good vacation/what-we-saw/what-we-bought post. And we actually bought two pretty big items that we’ve been trying to find for a while. Our weekend adventure actually began in Maryland. Specifically, here: It’s the Ole Sale Barn in Denton, MD. We’ve passed it countless times on our treks to the beach and have always been fascinated by it. The stars finally aligned on this trip (i.e. weather, holiday schedules, baby nap schedule)

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Framing Out A Mirror That’s Mounted On A Door

Let’s talk about a mini makeover that involved a whole lot of hiccups. It was alllllll the way back in January that we decided that this mirror on our master bathroom door could stay (unlike the one on our guest bathroom door, which got the heave-ho since the person on the toilet could see THEIR ENTIRE BODY in it). But we figured the bedroom mirror could stay (since it doesn’t force you to stare at your reflection while on the porcelain throne) on the condition that we’d create a thicker frame around it to give it more presence so it looked less like one of those big flimsy $5 mirrors that you bring to college.

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Removing Weeds From Our Paver Driveway

Perhaps this screenshot of our old header will give you a hint as to what we tackled in this outdoor update (which is most likely number 7 of 582, since we like to tackle outdoor stuff in bite-sized stages so we don’t get too sore/overwhelmed or blow the budget)… Yup, that’s the Camellia tree that we first mentioned back in March (you guys actually helped us identify it). It’s a beautiful tree, but we’ve always bemoaned the fact that it was growing just inches (maybe even just one inch?) from our foundation… which made us tres nervous about permanent damage if we allowed it to stay. After showing it to a few plant expert friends

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