Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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How To Install A Cork Floor

This is supposed to be the post where I declare “The floors are DONE… enthusiastic exclamation point!” But instead I’m here to say “The floors are almost done… sheepish period.” But they’re mostly down and they weren’t actually that hard to do! Seriously, anyone can do this. Since we last updated you, they’ve gone from this: To this: Note: Some of these photos have the cork looking more red/orange than it is in real life. But if you watch the video where we’re installing it (or the one with Clara in it), it’s probably the most true to life (a rich mocha color). We’ll try to take better pics next time! We thought we could

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Can You Smell That Smell?

Yup, the faint smell of bacon, spray paint, and sweat can only mean one thing… it’s Pinterest Challenge time (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie Bower to make us stop pinning and start doing). So let’s do this thing, people. Let’s do it together. In bikinis (let’s be honest, bikinis haven’t been an option for me since having Clara). It all started last June 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 gorgeous stuff that we’ve pinned (and call it… wait for it… The Pinterest Challenge). It’s a welcome slap of stop-pinning-and-start-doing. Because

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This Land Is Portland

After all that sun we got in Hawaii, we almost forgot that we still have some adventures to share from a notoriously less sunny place. We already told you about our day at the Portland Home & Garden Show (you can read more about that here – and if we met that evening, our pic together might be here). And yes, Sherry is holding someone else’s baby and I’m wearing an apron (meant for Clara!). Between all of that presenting/meeting/greeting we actually had some time to take in the city a little bit too. So for anyone planning a visit (or just wondering what the heck we did) here ya go… We got into town

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How To Spray Paint A Wood Box

This week’s first project for my little self-imposed Dude Get On That Already challenge is small – but it’s not animal related (so that’s something, right?!). It actually involves a fifty cent wood box that I found at Goodwill about three months ago and then… you guessed it… stuffed it into our playroom, never to be seen again. Until now. Here’s the only before picture that I shot with blue spray paint in it before deciding not to go blue… Nope, I didn’t go gray either- that’s just primer. Yup… I went yellow! I still had some leftover from this horse head bookend makeover of yore, and I thought it would look like a little

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Fab Freebie: If You Were Here

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And the random winner who’s about to get their read and their DIY on is… Julie Smith (who said we’d see her at her desk in the office day dreaming of going home and painting her half finished bathroom project). Congrats Julie! That’s the title of Jen Lancaster’s latest bestselling book – and if you enjoy the story of a young couple renovating their first home (ya never know… you just might), this book belongs on your reading list. Jen never fails to crack us up and we were flabbergasted when we she mentioned us last year on her blog. So now that

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Aloha Vacation, Aloha New Floors

See “Aloha” means both “Goodbye” and “Hello,” so… yeah… buh bye Hawaii and hello half-done cork floors. We’re back in Richmond (insert forced enthusiasm here – woot?) and we’re eager to tell you more about our trip. But we’re more eager to dive back into DIY and spill all the details about our big cork floor project that we started right before we left (about twenty four hours before we hopped on the plane actually). Oh and for those who didn’t drop in on us last week since our little vacation announcement, we actually did share two posts (along with a giveaway) while we were gone, so you can find those here and here. We’re

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Why We Chose A Cork Floor

Why? Because we’re crazy. And coming home to a partially-finished floor is our idea of a good time. You think we’re kidding, but getting a jump on our cork floors by starting to lay them before we left for Portland/Hawaii wasn’t half bad. Heck, returning from paradise to the idea of finishing them and enjoying a rich, glorious mocha floor is downright titillating to nerds like us. They snap together and float over our old vinyl floors (which have an asbestos liner, so we followed safety recommendations and didn’t tear those up before laying the cork). And the floating aspect of our new snap-and-lock flooring means that our house sitters can just step on the

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Guess Where We Are?!

Last Monday, a surprise snowstorm (in the middle of a super mild winter) made for this picture out of our living room widow:   And Clara went outside and had fun doing this:   Fast forward about a week, and our view looks more like this:   And Clara’s sporting a different kind of outfit:   Yup, true to our anniversary resolution, we snuck off to Maui, Hawaii to celebrate finishing our book, our impending five year anniversary (in July), turning 30 (I will in March and John already checked that box in November), and any other celebration-worthy excuse that we could think of (Clara’s first four syllable words: escalator, helicopter, and anemone!). It’s actually

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How To Organize Your Coupons

Psst- Today’s our leaving-Portland travel day (sad face) so we’ll probably be spotty and slow on comments/etc after 1pm EST. We’re sorry for the interruption, but so happy to have gotten the chance to explore Portland. We owe you guys a big post about all the stuff we did/bought/ate! We purchased some local art, crashed an amaaaaazing house, ate bacon on a donut, and John scored not one but two new t-shirts (neither of which are soda related, but both of which are food-related). Lately I’ve been asked a bunch of times about how I organize/store our non-food coupons (since the grocery store ones are just stuck into one of those clear envelopes and stashed

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A Dining Room With Board & Batten And Dark Blue Walls

The boldest color we’ve ever used on any wall is Martha Stewart’s Plumage (which we slathered all over our guest room walls). Long story short: we’ve loved it ever since. So when Jackie sent us her dining room makeover boasting lots of Plumage, of course we were all over it. Here’s her letter: “When we moved into this house, the dining room started with just a table and the bamboo armoire. We didn’t even have dining chairs. Over the last six months I prioritized finishing this room in time for the holidays. It is filled with DIY projects including art silhouettes, board and batten walls, mercury glass vases, jute wrapped monogram, and my favorite: the

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Petersiks In Portland

Wow, so yesterday was a fun little whirlwind. We spent pretty much the whole day romping around the Portland Home & Garden Show (minus a break to scarf down some much-recommended Voodoo Donuts – and yes we tried maple bacon – mmmm).  The Expo Center here is stuffed with gorgeous gardens, cool green living ideas, and tons of friendly Portlanders. Or Portlandians? Portlandites? Whatever they’re called, the people here are crazy nice. We’ll give you an actual Portland shopping/stuff we did/house-crashing trip roundup once it’s actually complete (today’s our Explore-The-City day) but for now we’d at least tell you about our time at the show yesterday. It kicked off early with some interviews with the

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How To Install A Dishwasher

As we mentioned on Monday, before we hopped on a plane yesterday, we tackled our bisque colored dishwasher. And let’s just say the stainless one is a crowd pleaser (we like it, but Clara loves it). We’ll get to that in a moment. We had been telling ourselves that it would be better to do this once the new floors went in (so we didn’t accidentally trap it behind the new cork boards or something). But then we realized that was a dumb excuse because we could just slide it on top of a few cork planks so it would be the same height as the rest of the floor once it goes in. Plus

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