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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July Superlatives

We’ve been getting requests for some sort of monthly roundup or recap when it comes to all of our undertakings (just so it’s easier to hunt posts down and see what we’ve recently conquered at a glance). And because we wanted to put our own weird little spin on it, while we were out to dinner alone (for the first time since Clara was born, mind you) we started chatting about how cheeky little nominations and titles for certain projects might be funny (or not, you decide)… and so the idea of monthly superlatives was born! As was the conviction that we have to get a life and stop talking about the blog while on

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A Quick DIY Bouquet

Oops, we totally fell off with the whole used-to-be-monthly budget blooms thing. But lookie what I found growing in the jungle that is our front lawn:   Allow me to put on my best Australian nature-show voice to set the scene for you: The air is still. Not a predator in sight. Something moves in the brush. A buzzard circles overhead. Somewhere in the distance a lion roars. No wait, that’s a baby crying. And just like that I’m out of character. I don’t know the real name for them (flower whisperer, I’m not), but I like the sound of Purple Ring Pops. So that’s how I’ve been referring to them. At first I just admired

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An Artsy And Eclectic House Tour

Who’s in the mood for some house crashing? This gorgeous old home is in the Forrest Hill area of Richmond, and we couldn’t wait to scope it out for you. Because, get this, Wendy’s house is used for commercials and photoshoots! As in, it’s such an amazing backdrop, the house is practically famous. Cool huh? And she’s a professional retail design and merchandising pro who just happens to design light fixtures when she’s not styling spaces. In other words, she’s got mad skillz (more on her here) so we couldn’t wait to snoop around. Oh look, here’s Wendy out on the porch to welcome us in: Her porch was super charming with everything from a

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Updating Yard Sale Frames With Spray Paint

We found these babies at a yard sale and haggled them down to $10 a pop. Let’s call them our twig & berries. We immediately thought the extra tall shape of the frames would be perfect for either side of our bed above the glass based lamps on the makeshift just-for-now side tables (they’re way too small and don’t have any drawers for storage) on this very unfinished side of our master bedroom: We definitely had plans to change out the art. They’re prints of the berries and wildflowers of Alaska (which is kind of fun and fitting since we honeymooned there) but they felt a bit too grandma for us. But we loved the

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Another Unsuccessful Attempt To Keep It Cool

Alert: Regardless of the fact that I say Pinterest ten million times (drinking game, anyone?) this wasn’t paid or perked by them or anyone else. We’re just eye-candy obsessed gals who love a good pin-fest. Sometimes while eating Oreos. You guys know my Pinterest addiction runs deep from this heartfelt post of yore. So when Katie called me to say that she thought we should challenge ourselves to make one thing each season that’s inspired by all the amazing stuff that we’ve pinned over there (and call it… wait for it… The Pinterest Challenge) I thought it sounded like fun. It’s a welcome slap of stop-pinning-and-start-doing. Because I’ve pinned 738 things. And I’ve done four

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How To Paint A Closet

Nothing like a little weekend chaos. Guess what we did this weekend? Here’s a hint: And another hint: And another hint: And one last hint: Um yeah, all that house insanity was for this: Specifically, to paint Clara’s closet. See, whilst standing on a chair in there hanging the little ribbon chandelier that I made last week (you know, right before John asked me how it was hanging), I decided it was high time we painted that little future-reading nook for the bean (we envision a big cushy beanbag and a ton of books in there for her to dive into). Isn’t it funny how one small project can snowball? One minute you’re standing on

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How To Make A Ribbon Chandelier

After admiring various ribbon chandeliers in baby stores, catalogs, magazines, and even over on Pintrest, I decided to try my hand at one for Clara’s closet. Her closet is actually big enough to become a little reading nook when she’s a little older (I have visions of making her a beanbag for chillaxing on the floor with a book). And I love that the closet has its own light but it’s one of those fugly bare bulb ones that you tug on a piece of string to turn on and off. So I thought a happy little ribbon chandy could pretty things up. So I spent $2 for an embroidery hoop (with a 10″ diameter

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Mood Board Making: En Fuego

I was inspired by a chipper yellow table runner and a fiery pendant light to make a warm-blooded dining room mood board just for fun. Whoop, here it is: 1. The wall color could be a soft olive-khaki tone, like the stripe in the background of the mood board (try Benjamin Moore’s Limestone 513) with browns, oranges, deeper olives, pops of yellow, and some crisp white in the furnishings/accessories. Maybe even a smidge of navy if you’re into that sort of thing. And now that I see that stripe of olive-khaki, big wide horizontal tone-on-tone stripes might be pretty fun for the walls if you’re feeling feisty (try Benjamin Moore’s Limestone 513 and Flowering Herbs

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14 Months Of Breastfeeding

Yup, that’s what I did. Well, technically 14 months and three days if you’re really counting. And yup, this really is a post about breastfeeding, so feel free to skip it (you know, if you’re my brother for example). I never thought I’d be writing about it. But I actually get a lot of questions on the subject. And since I blather on about other random things (like cloth diapering) and this blog is really just a way for us to remember things that we might otherwise forget (like paint colors and vacation happenings), I figure that something I did for so long (around 425 days straight) deserved a post about the range of emotions

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Finding Children’s Chairs At A Yard Sale

This weekend we got these vintage kids chairs (they’re just 2 feet tall) for $7.50 each at a local yard sale. They were marked as $10 a pop but we bartered using the old “how about two for $15?” method. Sold! We knew they looked like oldies (we loved the solid construction, steel legs, clean lines) and were pleased when we tipped them both over and saw the word “Brunswick” engraved on the bottom. Not that we knew what it meant, but we thought google might. A little bit of searching turned up this description here: This original vintage 1950’s children’s chair, with its mid-century danish-modern design is actually made by Brunswick – the same

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How To Spray Paint A Metal Outdoor Patio Set

Waste not, want not. That was my attitude when it came to using up the rest of the oil-rubbed bronze spray paint from this project that I had leftover. So I turned my attention to the mismatched patio furniture that we inherited from the previous owners (seen here in an old photo with my dearly departed ceramic dog, sniffle). Sure, I like painting things white (and white ceramic animals, and white chocolate among other snow-colored objects) but sometimes white things outside = grungy. As this shot demonstrates, any time it rained little dirt and leaves splashed into the crevices of the table and looked all grubby. Parts of it were peeling too: And you should

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How To Paint Your Fuse Box So It Blends In

Our freshly painted laundry room is so bright and happy that makes me want to sing and dance like a crazy person. First I repainted all the trim (with Olympic No-VOC semi-gloss off-the-shelf white) and painted the annoying brown quarter round near the baseboards, so it blended in with the white trim. I applied three thin coats of the same Olympic No-VOC paint (no primer because I used the same method with success in the living room five months back and I’m lazy). Then when it came to the wall color, we decided to use the leftover paint that we used in the adjoining kitchen (remember when we painted that beastly paneling here?). Why that

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