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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Spray Painting Chair Legs Oil Rubbed Bronze

Spray paint. Again. Who’s surprised? I’m nothing if not completely predictable when it comes to spraying my troubles away. I mentioned wanting to ORB (that’s “oil-rubbed-bronze” for those not privy to ridiculous decorating abbreviations) the legs of this old chair in our living room for a while. They’re clashy and red in real life… … as opposed to the nice dark ORB legs that we addded to Karl The Sectional: They also didn’t exactly “groove” with the gray-washed beams overhead and the deeper more brown-based wood tones in the console table that we made for behind the sofa (seen fully accessorized here). We plan to refinish the floors someday too – probably in the same

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How To Fill A Wall Crack So It Doesn’t Come Back

Crack is still whack. I couldn’t resist breaking out that Whitney Houston inspired one-liner, even though we already used it here. Why? Because this is a serious hard-hitting blog about real life issues. Just kidding. This time my fifth grade crack joke is in reference to a giant crack that was running across the side of the ceiling in the laundry room. Here’s the craggy before: And the much less craggy after: We had them check that beast of a crack out during inspection and learned it’s nothing like foundation issues (just normal house settling). Whew. And it was nothing that a little paintable white caulk couldn’t fix. Double whew. Tip: always make sure it’s

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How To Tea Stain Pillow Covers

I got into one of my weird rebellious moods (rebellious is a relative term for me) and decided to tea stain two pillow covers that we already have (originally from this cute Etsy shop). Oh yeah, I’m wild and ca-razy like that. I just figured it was an 100% free project and it would (fingers crossed) be an easy way to take two extremely stark-white (as opposed to warm white) pillow covers to a slightly creamier and off-white tone that would help them layer in more naturally with a slew of other off-white, cream, and even super light metallic bronze pillows that are currently living it up on Big Karl (our dark slipcovered sectional from

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Thrifting In The Outer Banks

For those not in the know (like me five years ago), OBX = The Outer Banks. Which is actually where John first took me for our one year anniversary of dating. Cue the collective aw. Anyway, now that we divulged some details of our recent Outer Banks trip this morning, we wanted to share all of the house-related stuff that we found while we were there. One of our favorite things to do when we travel is search for thrift stores, so I just did a quick hunt for “thrift” on my iPhone and it led us to Hotline Thrift (in Kitty Hawk – it’s a big pink store, you can’t miss it). Which is

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Window Shopping At Home Goods

A few months ago HomeGoods came a lot closer to home. Hence the celebratory “holla” in the title of this post. Yeah, I’m psyched. The closest location used to be in Short Pump (about twenty five minutes from our house) but a new one recently opened right in Chesterfield Towne Center (a mall that’s about eight minutes from our door). Score. So we thought it would be fun to run around with our camera and take some photos of whatever caught our eye (just like we occasionally do at Target, Ikea, and even the other HomeGoods location). Let’s go virtual shopping, shall we? This cheerful turquoise bench ($150) caught my attention right away. Apparently Mr.

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An Easy Porch Update For Curb Appeal

Hope you guys all had an awesome holiday weekend. We had some fun with our family (more on that later in the week) and are still sort of building up the ol’ momentum again (after our big paneling project from last week) – but we did manage to squeeze in a tiny porch upgrade. See, when we were house hunting in the late fall of last year we snapped these two terrible shots of the porch: Then on moving day we plopped down the wooden bench (from Home Depot a few years back) which used to live on our first house’s front porch… and that was the extent of the update. Blah. Pretty bleak huh?

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June Superlatives

Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of June – high school yearbook style. Most Improved: Finally painting our kitchen paneling Most Annoying: Priming the paneling (which took more than a few tries) Most Destructive: Removing a few cabinets & patching the floor (to make way for our impending paneling makeover) Most Goal Oriented: Announced a new initiative to clear the kitchen table of miscellaneous clutter every night before bed (we’re still hit

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How We Painted Our Wood Paneling

About a week ago (after we painted our brick fireplace) our kitchen looked like this: Then we removed the desk and upper cabinet (that will be in the way of our big future doorway to the dining room) and after one coat of not-covering-at-all primer it looked like this: Then we finally got the primer thing right after dealing with maddening bleed-through issues thanks to two days of applying coat after coat and three different types of primer (more on that here): And now it looks like this, although it reads a bit more yellow in these photos than in person (it’s a smidge greener in real life). It’s definitely a warm golden green tone

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Priming Our Wood Paneling

And now, for the dang paneling update. Hold on to your hats ladies and gents. This post = wild ride. As you probably know, we’re no strangers to priming and painting paneling. Sure we could remove the paneling, but it would mean removing and rehanging all the cabinets since they’re hung in front of it – and revealing goodness knows how many scary issues behind it (they’re old plaster walls so that just felt like a big ol’ can o’ worms). And we could attempt to drywall over it (but it would mean drywalling around the existing cabinets and a lot more expense/trouble than just painting it). So we decided early on that we’d once

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Tips For Hosting A House Party

Paneling = oy. Update tomorrow. But while we’re here… Can you believe that Clara’s b-day bash was the largest party (weighing in at 25 attendees) that we’ve thrown since our backyard wedding almost four years ago? How lame of us. And I know, it’s been over a month – enough already about the party. But since a lot of our posts are actually just notes to self (how else would we remember what color we painted our old bedroom?) we figured we better record what we lizz-earned now (or forever hold our peace forget it all). 1. Keep the focus on a few carefully selected rooms (and don’t put stuff for guests to peruse in

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A Beautiful Office Full Of Inspiration

The bleeping paneling is taking a wee bit longer than we expected. Le sigh. Hopefully we’ll have an update for you soon. In the meantime… Every once in a while a shop or office inspires us so much that we decide to crash it (just like we did when it came to this fun kids consignment shop). And we weaseled our way into this office space for Towne & Reese (a jewelry company named after two Charlotte ladies’ kids) thanks to a house crashing adventure from a few years back. You have to remember this one, right? Here are a few shots to jog your memory: And here’s a pic of the cute couple with

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Junk Drawer Organization

Sometimes one big drawer of junk isn’t nearly as easy to navigate as two smaller drawers full of half the junk each. So in that vein I decided to transfer all of the stuff out of our double-wide junk drawer, which has gotten increasingly “rowdy.” Especially in comparison to the obedient glasses, mugs, and vases in the upper cabinet: We have some completely empty smaller drawers on the other side of the kitchen near the office which should do the trick. We’re blessed to have more storage than we know what to do with in this kitchen – and putting this stuff near the office is so much easier since we use 99% of it

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