Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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A Quick Trip To The Carolinas

Last weekend my cousin got married in Brevard, North Carolina. Translation: weekend road trip! Okay, so it wasn’t on the scale of our road trip to Texas for my cousin’s wedding two years ago (different cousin, btw – I’ve got lots of ’em) but it was still a good time. Brevard is in southwestern NC somewhere between Asheville and the South Carolina border (so close actually, the rehearsal dinner was in SC). It’s about a seven hour drive from Richmond, though we broke up our ride with a stop in Charlotte to see our pals Matt and Kristin. The wedding was obviously the highlight of the trip (you can see some pics over on Young

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Stenciling A Wall In The Dining Room

Coming off of the heels of our own adventures in stencil land, we just had to share this note from Ginny who stenciled her dining nook earlier this year. Methinks she had a clawed hand of her own going on after she finished (just like my lady wife). Here’s what Ginny had to say about her dining area makeover: I wanted to create a dining corner in my living room. Well, although I bought my table, finally got the chairs I wanted, and tried to dress it up, it still didn’t feel like a dining room to me. It was just this table in the corner of the room. Then it hit me like a

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How To Upholster A Chair Cushion

Well, we can check cheerful desk chairs off of our wish list for the office. You can read all about how I prepped, primed, & painted them here. And now for the quick upholstery deets. I had some leftover fabric from the dining room curtains on hand so I laid it over the detached seats and centered one of the grellow thingies (that’s a technical term) and trimmed the fabric around the cushion, leaving enough that I could easily pull and staple to the backside. Update: Here’s an affiliate link to the same fabric on amazon for anyone looking for it.  Making sure it was staying centered, I carefully turned it over and shot four staples into

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Choosing Between Pergo and Cork For Our Kitchen Floors

Houston, we have liftoff! We made a big kitchen purchase. We ordered the floor! Wait, we should back up. We originally hoped to find hardwood floors running all the way under the linoleum in the kitchen (after finding out that it ran under the fireplace side of the room here)… … but we removed the transition between the kitchen and the office on the other side of the room to find… booo!… plywood. So no refinishing for us. Gotta start from scratch. But there were a few limitations off the bat. We learned from the previous owners that the kitchen floors couldn’t handle tile (they would need to be reinforced/leveled from underneath = $$$), so

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The (Joss &) Main Event

So… our afternoon post is a few hours early. Surprise! Fancy meeting you here. Anyway, after teaming up with Joss & Main on one of our most entered giveaways (apparently you guys love you some Joss & Main), they asked us if we’d be interested in curating a sale event over on their site. Which essentially entailed doing some virtual window shopping (sifting through hundreds of items in their database) and telling them everything that we loved, which would then make up a “Young House Love collection” over on their site. Uh. Let me think about it. YESSSSSSS! Never in a million years did we think that the title of “curator” would ever be used

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How To Paint A Chair

Our $35 secondhand chairs – found here – aren’t quite done yet (picture me tapping my foot as I not-so-patiently wait for the paint to dry) but we thought we’d share our makeover progress in the interest of real-time fun. First a quick rundown of all the colors that John & I talked about for the office chairs at one point or another: emerald green turquoise, aqua, or dark teal dark gray or light gray plum navy white or light celery lime green or grellow Oh and here they are in the office before paint and new upholstery (from a few different POVS), just to refresh your memory: Here’s where our brains went when we

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Fab Freebie: Gone Fishing

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Our two lucky winners as selected by random.org are… Susie (who doesn’t like fish, despite her former employment at Red Lobster) and Sarah (who especially loves Maryland crab, shrimp, salmon, and freshly caught smoked trout). Congrats ladies! Back when I lived in Brooklyn there was this cool dishware store down the street called Fishs Eddy that I loved. Last Christmas I even bought Sherry two coffee mugs from there. And now, in what can only be called a full circle moment, we’re teaming up with them for a giveaway for you guys. They’ve got tons of fun colorful patterns so we’ve put together

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Wall Stenciling Tips & After Photos

My little stenciling project above the chair rail in the office has officially concluded. Woooo to the hooooo! It only took three 4.5 hour installments spread out over four days (so my hand-claws could turn back into hands between sessions). You can read all about my stenciling process here), but in short: it was well worth all that work and a bag of chips. Behold: Of course since it’s a subtle tone-on-tone effect, the further away that you get the more – well, subtle – it gets. In person when you stand at the doorway to the office you see pretty feathery texture, but of course in photos it’s somehow MUCH harder to capture. Here’s

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September Superlatives

It’s that time again! When we take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff, just because we’re over-sharers. This month felt pretty scattered since we did everything from finding secondhand night stands and starting to stencil some walls to building a 13 foot desk, altering a light fixture, framing out a mirror, making free art, and beyond. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives. Why? Because that’s our idea of a good time. Most Pro-Banquette: Starting off the month with a

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Easy DIY Art With Food Coloring

All week I imagined a big office stencil reveal post here. Sadly, it’s not done yet. Oh DIY, why do you take such pleasure in toying with my emotions? Quit playing games with my heart, home improvement. But regardless of the fact that it’s not exactly a quick project, it’s looking awesome and totally going to be worth the blood, sweat, and tears (all three of which have occurred, incidentally). So hopefully by this weekend I’ll be doing some celebratory Rocky laps around the house (yes, with music blaring and fists in the air) and I can share photos & deets of the whole shebang on Monday. Woot! Until then, here’s a still-needs-to-be-finished wall (the

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Online Tools for Planning A Space in 3D

Break out the 3D glasses! Okay, not really. Put them away. This blog will not be coming to you in any additional dimensions today. As you saw in our latest kitchen planning post yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and learned me some Google Sketch-Up (as many of you recommended) to help us plan our kitchen renovation. But having been a loyal user of Floorplanner.com in the past and having recently become acquainted with Ikea’s Kitchen Planner, I thought I’d give you my take on how these three 3D modeling tools stack up against each other… because there’s actually not a clear winner in my book. Each have pros, cons, and a different scenario where

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Why We Decided Not To Do A Banquette In Our Kitchen

For all those wondering when the heck we’ll tackle that kitchen banquette idea that we mentioned a few weeks ago (here and here), well… probably never. Cue the frowny face emoticons. Here’s the deal. After getting lots of positive feedback on the idea a few weeks ago (over 1,400 comments total!), Sherry and I were certain your collective enthusiasm would push us from “we think this is a good idea” to “this is definitely a good idea.” And it nearly did. But parts of us still questioned the whole commitment-factor when it came to actually doing it (we definitely described it as a half baked idea when we shared it). We worried if it’d really

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