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.

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Priming & Painting The Bathroom

When we last shared our hall bathroom adventures, we had removed the old wallpaper and were left with this: Not only were the yellowed walls crying out for a fresh coat of paint, the mirror had some functional deficiencies. As in, John couldn’t see his whole face when he looked into it. Just about anything from the nose up was cut off, so while he could still perform is-there-something-in-my-teeth checks, if he was having a Something About Mary hair moment (uh, but not for that reason) he wouldn’t have even known. Beyond having a too-small mirror, the other issue was that the light fixture drooped about 8″ from the area that it connected to the

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How To Pick A Color And Paint Your Front Door

“The door is the smile of the house.” John likes to make strange declarations like that. For example, after talking about how both bacon and mustaches were trending, he once proclaimed that “the mustache is the bacon of the face, and bacon is the mustache of breakfast.” But back to the front door. Our first house had a red door. Our second house had a yellow door. And our new house has a…. Yup, it’s a happy little blue door. It’s sort of a peacock meets teal with enough gray to keep it from going neon when the sun hits it. When it came to picking the shade, first we taped up a bunch of

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How To Add Shine To Dull Old Hardwood Floors

Whoops, I almost forgot to tell you about how I scrubbed and re-sealed the existing hardwoods right before we moved in (literally, like 26 hours before we moved in). The new hardwoods upstairs were looking so flossy and glossy, I didn’t want the ones in the office, living room, and dining room to feel so 2000 and late. So I gave them some love. Wax on, wax off, baby. First I swept up the random dust and old faux Christmas tree leaves and all the other stuff that was left behind. Not a bad pile for an empty looking room, eh? Then I bought this Bona stuff at Home Depot because I had heard good

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Picking A New Siding Color & Updating Our Exterior Trim

As if all the blue and mauve trim on the inside of the house isn’t enough, we had some outside trim that needed some attention. When we bought this house we knew we had four major things to deal with: the roof and the furnace, a few bad trees, and this last bear: some rotting areas of siding and trim that needed to be replaced along with a fresh paint job for the whole house. But at least we knew about all of them going into the house purchase (and the first two didn’t end up draining our wallets) – so maybe that softened the blow a little? Speaking of soft, I give you… our

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One Month In

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been here a month! And let’s not sugar coat things… this house is looking pretty crazy right now. Blue trim out the wazoo, wallpaper at every turn, bright salmon living room walls, old carpeting that still covers the stairs & our closet, and a whole lot of furniture that we just plopped down on moving day (so it’s safe to assume that nothing is staying where it is for the long haul, this is just where it landed). On one hand it’s like “moving day literally feels like yesterday” but on the other hand, in a few rooms (especially the ones upstairs), we’re like “wow, it’s hard to remember

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So, There’s A Big Tree That’s Way Too Close To The House

In the words of Cher… “If I could tuuuuuuuuurn back tiiiiiiiime. If I could fiiiiiiiiiind a waaaaaaaay. I’d plant this pretty oak tree not on top of the house.” No doubt it started out a lot smaller, but it grew, and with it grew the danger of it messing with our house. So when the home inspector crawled out from having assessed the roots and their proximity to the foundation, we were sad (but not surprised) to hear him say “this tree has got to go.” Even if we could somehow do a root-growth-suppression-rain-dance to get them to avoid the house’s foundation, we couldn’t deny that about 50% of the tree’s canopy was precariously suspended

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Using Hot Water To Strip Wallpaper

Send out the ravens! (yes, that’s a Game of Thrones reference). Wallpaper stripping has commenced. I was actually really excited to tackle the half bathroom’s wallpaper removal project, because I am a strange breed of human and that’s my idea of a good time. And since we have five rooms full of wallpaper (the foyer, the half bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, and our bathroom), I decided that I would try a different removal method for each one and report back with the pros/cons about each approach as I went, all in the hopes of sussing out which ones bite the big one and which ones seem to work the best. I’m telling you

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Ripping Up A Rug & Removing The Rug Pad & Tack Strips

We named the rug in the sunroom Stinky. We were feeling literal, and it was damp in the corners from moisture seeping into the sunroom from bad seals in the old sliders and some wood rot. The previous owners knew there was a moisture issue (along with a serious smell issue) in there, which definitely came into play when they set the low-enough-to-be-in-our-range listing price, so although this rug sounds like a curse, we actually consider it to be a blessing (heck, if we can take care of something that might turn off other buyers and it helps us afford a house that we LOVE, we’re all about it). So here’s how we got that

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Replacing An Old Furnace & Getting A New Roof

When we bought our house, there were two big issues we knew that we needed to deal with right away: the ancient furnace for the first floor was so poorly maintained we weren’t sure it would run the 32 year old roof was at the end of it’s life and there was a hole in it (it was actively leaking into the attic every time it rained) Thankfully we knew about both of these issues when we bid on the house, and we were able to negotiate thousands of dollars back at closing to go towards those updates (since a new roof and a new furnace are hardly cheap fixes). Then it was just a

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How To Remove An Old Sliding Shower Door

Don’t eat while you read this. Seriously, don’t. This is the story of removing the sliding shower doors in our bathroom. It was one of those can’t-do-this-soon-enough tasks that was at the top of our list. Not only did they enclose the tub in a way that a soft white fabric curtain wouldn’t, they had seen better days. So there were lines of rust around them… … and pretty impressive amounts of caulk that seemed to be holding them together. Plus their height was oddly low, so John hit his head (not once but twice) while climbing in. Fool him once, shame on the shower doors – fool him twice, shame on John. Here’s a

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How To Add Some Office Organization

Our office looked like this when we first laid eyes on the house. Then it looked like this on moving day.  And here’s what it looks like about a week and a half into living here. On one hand, it doesn’t look THAT crazy. I mean there could be a llama standing in the middle of the rug eating popcorn. But on the other hand, this room has a LONG way to go before it’s functional for two working adults (yup, we currently only have one desk going on). And the whole all-furniture-against-the-wall-with-a-little-round-rug-in-the-middle thing is a little weird. As for what we’re envisioning down the line, we’d love to have some sort of double desk

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Our House Hunting Must-Have List

Since we shared our house wish list back in the fall of 2010, we wanted to document what was on the list now (I just found it scrunched up in a vase that was sitting on the bedroom floor, naturally). It’s actually the same list  – we just scribbled things out as they changed and added new things as time passed (even when we weren’t house hunting, if we thought of something for our “someday house” we jotted it down whenever we came across the list). Not surprisingly, many things were the same – although it does seem that after 7 years of home-ownership our nice-to-have list grew a lot (I guess since we keep

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