Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Posts by Sherry Petersik

Sherry Petersik is one half of the duo behind the award-winning home improvement and do-it-yourself design blog, Young House Love. Together, she and her husband John 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.

| By | | 236 Comments

How To Convert A Lamp Into A Pendant Light

After over a year of living without one, another bedroom has been upgraded to have a ceiling light fixture – and this time it’s Teddy’s room. Woo to the hoo guys. It’s the best thing ever. I know that sounds like an overstatement, but you don’t know how convenient ceiling light fixtures are until you buy a house without any in all of the rooms upstairs except for the bathrooms. When I saw this stick light on Joss & Main I thought it was fun and beachy-yet-geometric. And call me crazy, but I immediately looked at it and saw a ceiling pendant. To make sure I wasn’t being weird, I ran the idea of converting

[ Read More ]

| By | | 205 Comments

Adding Overhead Lighting & Extra Outlets

Yes, that’s an electric slide reference. And I’d bet money that it’s cracking my mom up while my brother is rolling his eyes and vowing never to read this blog again. Let’s talk about electrical updates, like hanging a new capiz chandelier in the bedroom, and putting our heads together to gain a few bonus outlets and cut down on drywall holes while running electrical wiring. After last week’s post about our four new outdoor sconces, we mentioned we had some other wiring work done inside at the same time, so here’s the rundown on everything we added, where it went, and how much it all cost. We’ll start with the prettiest result so far

[ Read More ]

| By | | 295 Comments

How Our Ardex Concrete Counters Are Holding Up

You guys have been curious about everything from how our concrete counters are wearing and how our refinished foyer grout is holding up to how our new blogging schedule is working for us. And since we’re not always great at updating you guys (blogging tends to follow an “on to the next thing!” pattern), here’s a big ol’ rundown, which marks the third one in this series (here’s our first one and our second one so you can check out if we covered other topics you’ve wondered about there). Our Ardex-concrete counters: These guys have largely been awesome, and our sealer choice has made them even more durable than we expected. For example, we thought we’d

[ Read More ]

| By | | 314 Comments

Picking The Best Egg Chair For The Back Porch

Since I’m Genetically One-Quarter Egg Chair… (John described me that way in this post, and it made me laugh because let’s face it, it’s true). I’m also one-quarter dog fur (it’s always all over me) and one-quarter ceramic animal (no further explanation required). How quickly this post got off track. Anyway, now that we have a sofa and a coffee table on our back porch, the next thing on our list was a little more seating to round out that side of the room in the form of a comfy chair. Our first option was just to buy the $749 chair that matches our sofa. We liked that it would definitely tie into the color/look of

[ Read More ]

| By | | 133 Comments

Fab Freebie: Shine Bright Like A Diamond

How does $500 towards new lighting for anyone in the world sound? We’ve added four new additions to our lighting collection at Shades of Light, so we figured a giveaway was a fun way to introduce them to you guys. Nearly a year and a half ago when we launched our first collection with them (more on that here), we knew we wanted a cool flush mount light (you know, to fight the good fight against boob lights everywhere), which was solved with the Diamond Ceiling Light. And our yearning for a geometric table lamp was remedied with the Metal Strap Lamp Base. We also added another larger scale hanging option to the mix (these

[ Read More ]

| By | | 401 Comments

Our House’s Original Owners

One of our favorite posts in our entire archive is this one about hearing from our first house’s original owners. It was so much fun to see photos of their family in our house back in the 60’s, and we studied every inch of each picture and relished every detail that they shared in their letter. We were also friendly with the people who sold us our second house, so although we never heard from the original owners, it was really great to know the sellers who had lived there for 22 years! So we always hoped to hear from the original owners of our current house. For a while… nothing. And then it happened!

[ Read More ]

| By | | 214 Comments

Organizing Our Home Office

As promised, we’re back with the details of how we organized the six new shelves and eight new drawers in our office, along with the drawers in my floating desk and the filing/printer cabinet on the other side of the room. In other words: what went where. It’s awesome to have so much more storage space, both out in the open and behind closed doors, so let’s spin over to the left and face our new desk/bookcase wall first. Here are the animated GIFs that John mentioned on Monday. You were on the edge of your seat for these, right? Or were you excited about donuts? I can’t remember. Here’s the bookcase to the left

[ Read More ]

| By | | 266 Comments

How To Take Your Own Newborn Photos

You guys have asked some questions about taking our own newborn photos, making Teddy’s birth announcement, taking Clara’s four year photo & making her annual video, and what I got for Mother’s Day (spoiler alert: it’s a super sentimental photo book of kid quotes from Clara), so this post is a smorgasbord of all that documentation. As I wrote this I thought “maybe John and I are more ‘document-happy’ than most people” – you know, to take so many photos and make a yearly video, etc. But then I realized that most people with a blog probably lean towards a love of capturing things, and a ton of our non-blogging friends and relatives have phones

[ Read More ]

| By | | 221 Comments

Finding The Best Outdoor Sofa

The combination of all this nice weather and hosting Clara’s party outside have us back on The Outdoor Update Train. Chugga chugga, baby. Just picture me wearing spit-up-stained overalls with a striped hat to shade my mom-to-an-adorable-baby-who-wakes-up-all-night eyes. It’s particularly exciting because we worked for a few months last year to renovate the sunroom by ripping up the old carpet, removing the old broken doors, lofting the ceiling, getting some electrical work done, installing a plank ceiling, hanging two fans, and tiling the floor. There’s currently a daybed out there (an indoor daybed from West Elm, which has no long-term business being outside) along with an ancient Ikea coffee table. And two of our dining

[ Read More ]

| By | | 313 Comments

One Of Our Favorite Bedroom Paint Colors

We finally painted the guest room! And Burger, as you can see, is THRILLED. No more over-spray marks from door painting forming a lovely “accent wall” over the bed. Huzzah! The color? Sparrow by Benjamin Moore. It’s a color we’ve loved for a while now (it was one of our whole-house-color-palette guesses from last year) and we thought the guest room was the perfect place to try it out since it gets a lot of natural light from that giant triple window along the back wall. Since it’s a deep color we used a tinted primer first, and as usual I did the cutting in while John did the rolling. Oh and we painted the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 97 Comments

Fab Freebie: Oh Baby Baby

We’ve got $500 towards a trio of shops where we got some of our favorite Teddy-items up for grabs this week. First is $200 to Bella Tunno, who makes the cozy striped stroller blanket you may have seen wrapped around him (we got ours as a gift from our friend Christi and have been loving it ever since). They also have bibs, paci clips, lovies, and fun things like a roll-out travel chalkboard set. And they’re running a pretty sweet buy one, give one initiative to fight childhood hunger. Next up is $150 to ModFox, the Etsy shop where we bought our changing pad cover in gray arrow fabric. It’s the perfect shop if there’s

[ Read More ]

| By | | 284 Comments

A “Pink & Gold Everything” Kids Party

This weekend our deck was full of people we love, gathered to celebrate this four year old bean of ours. It was pretty awesome to have so much connected outdoor space to party on (the sunroom-turned-veranda and our big deck that overlooks the grassy backyard felt less chopped up than having some people in the last house’s sunroom while others were on our two-tiered patio). And since our previous house is where we’ve hosted every other Clara-birthday since she was born (here’s the post about her first birthday, the one about her second one, and the one about her third) it felt both weird and wonderful to have our first big birthday gathering here. Most

[ Read More ]