Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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House Hunting: The Cottage In The Woods

We’ve been passively house hunting for a few weeks now (driving around different neighborhoods, checking out pics on MLS, and popping into a few of them every now and then) and are finally getting around to writing about it. It’s amazing how frantically cleaning your own house and scheduling showings can distract you from actually blogging about the thrill of the hunt for a new place. Part of our delay has also been deciding the best way to share this house hunting journey with you guys. We’d love to show every nook and cranny of each place, but at the same time we want to respect the privacy of each home’s seller (after all, unlike

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How To Spackle Uneven Drywall

This morning, while Clara was doing this: I attempted to tackle this: A few days ago I slapped some spackle on the walls in the bathroom (we like Dap Crackshot), because as happy as we were with the big bathroom overhaul, you could tell it was definitely our first rodeo when it came to drywalling. And in our hurry to get paint on the walls we were a wee bit less careful with the mudding and taping than we could have been. But thanks to Operation Sell This House we’re making all those never-got-around-to-them tweaks to get things looking as close to perfect as possible. You know, tackling all of those projects that we’ll never

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Mood Board Making: Dark Teal, Wood, & White Bedroom

I can’t promise that we’ll execute this mood board to a T when it comes to our future bedroom – heck, the entire vision could easily shift by the time we move into a new home. But as of right now, this is what I’m loving (and John’s surprisingly right there with me): 1. I’m dreaming of a cozy and enveloping room painted in a rich and saturated teal like the stripe of color across the top of the mood board (Benjamin Moore’s Rendezvous Bay 726). I’d temper the bold color by adding some white furnishings/accessories and some rich dark woods to ground things. And then I’d add a pop of tangerine, just because I’m

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How To Make Puffy Paint Pumpkins

I know, I know. The idea of puffy paint in most craft projects makes you skeptical. Me too. But a few weeks ago John and I were brainstorming about what we should do to our pumpkins this year, after painting them last year: … and carving intricate designs into them the year before: Anyway, so somewhere along the line John said “too bad we can’t use nail polish or something to build up shapes on the pumpkins.” I sort of looked at him sideways at the nail polish suggestion, but I liked the idea of somehow creating raised designs on them… and so the idea of puffy paint was born. We figured it was made

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Hanging With Nate Dog

This post might be filed under the annoying “teaser” category but we can’t tell you anything other than to cryptically announce that you might want to watch The Nate Show next Monday (the 25th) or DVR it if you’re fancy like that because… we’re going to be on it!!! It’s a syndicated show, so we don’t know what channel or time it’s on in your area (in fact it doesn’t even air in Richmond, which is the bane of our existence) but if you hit up thenateshow.com you can use their station finder feature for more info. We’ve always been huge fans of Nate and his work, so we can’t wait to check out Monday’s

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Cleaning & Mulching To Stage Our Home To Sell

If it’s true that cleanliness is next to Godliness, then selling our house is practically turning us into saints. Not that we weren’t teetering on clean freak status before, but I’ve always considered myself more tidy than clean (i.e. clutter’s a no-no, but the tub can go unscrubbed a little longer than I’d like to admit to my mom). But now that we’ve got strangers touring the place it has kicked us into cleaning hyper drive – which I should note is much needed considering that having a newborn all but halted it for a good while this summer. Yes, that’s me breaking out the ladder to give a good wash to the outside of

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How To Paint Metal Cups To Make Two-Tone Votive Holders

When we spotted these odd little metal cups for $1.50 a pop at Goodwill (which you may have noticed in our recent Halloween post) we decided to take them home for a speedy little spray paint makeover. We fell in love with the little cut-out shape and since we already had yellow and white spray paint around (thanks to this project and this project) we got right to work. Our concept was to make the inside of each cup yellow and the outside of each one white, just for a little two-tone fun. So we thought up a few ways that might work when it came to accomplishing that effect. First we debated spraying the

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