Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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When The Thing You Really Want Sells Out

I was going to do it. I was finally going to buy the Coco mirror from West Elm that I’ve been obsessing over forever. Yes, we’re moving, but it’s such a classic piece that it could be hung anywhere in this house or the next one. And I was just gonna go for it- all $199 of it. Even though I’m usually too cheap to buy things full price (even if I’m head over heels in love) I had this whole talk with myself about putting on my big girl pants and bucking up and just splurging for something that I’m 99.9% certain would make me happy for decades. Then I saw this when I

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Katie Bower In The House

Well not anymore, but she was this weekend. Along with her main man Jeremy and their adorable bambino Will. And if you don’t know who the heck I’m talking about, you can read up on the Bowers over at their blog: Bower Power. We had tons of fun feeding them, showing them around and just generally having a grand old time from Friday all the way through Sunday. We even squeezed in a little video (as is the tradition whenever we’re together- check out this original one along with these three shot during our rendezvous in Nashville last summer: hotel inspiration part 1, hotel inspiration part 2 and shopping for DIY inspiration). We went back

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Adding A Baseboard Heater For More Finished Square Footage

How did we gain a ton of extra square footage to take our for-sale casa from 1300 finished square feet to 1550 in the last 48 hours? We’ll give you a hint: we didn’t add an overnight addition. We just added a permanent heat source to our existing sunroom… and now it counts as livable square footage! A realtor friend of ours advised us that rooms don’t need to be heated and cooled to count as “finished” here in Richmond –  just heated. Meaning the only thing keeping the biggest room in our house (our sunroom) from getting counted as official square footage was a source of heat. So we called a few electricians and

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Making A House Hunting Wish List

First off, my cheeky hubby has decided he’s deserving of a public “you were right.” So here it is. Check out this video from a year ago where he calls that we’ll move someday while I vehemently deny it (skip to 5 minutes and 45 seconds). Who’s married to a know it all? This girl (points to self with thumbs). Before I climbed on the moving bandwagon UHaul with my smarty pants spouse, we rethought a bunch of potential layout adjustments to this house and even entertained the idea of an addition instead (which we also tossed out as an option in the above video over a year ago). But the fact that the already-here

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Halloween Decorating With Crows, Candles and Skull Photos

Halloween is in just a few short weeks so we broke out the old creepy raven along with a bunch of other spook-tastic props from last year (see our big Halloween ’09 set up here). And other than springing for some candy for the kids in our neighborhood and some candy corn for ourselves we didn’t spend a dime (hindsight: candy corn is the worst- it’s basically just a stomach ache waiting to happen). Oh and we grabbed some $4 carnations too. So here’s the console table all decked out: Nothing too fancy, just a piece of burlap as a casual runner with things like some eerily titled books that we dug up along with

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An Inspired & Inexpensive House Tour

After Jordan and Landon shared their amazingly affordable (and drop dead gorgeous) kitchen overhaul with us (here), we definitely were left wanting more. So when they offered up the opportunity to House Crash them, we said “uh… yes please.” And we figured since it’s their house they’d be the best at showing you around, so we’re passing the virtual mic over to them for the tour while we clean our house within an inch of it’s life in an effort to woo a few more potential buyers this weekend (fingers crossed). Enjoy the tour! Welcome to our home in Columbia, South Carolina! We’re Jordan & Landon from landonjacob.com. You’ve already seen the kitchen (here), but

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Decluttering Tips To Try Before A House Showing

How do we learn around these parts? By doing. And sometimes by panicking. So when someone called us to see our house out of the blue, and wanted to drop by in an hour, we panicked. But only for five to ten minutes. Then we used the other 50 minutes to do the ahh-someone’s-coming-to-look-at-our-house shuffle. Luckily the house was already pretty clean since we knew we would be showing it sooner or later. But what about that recommended pairing down step to reduce clutter and make cabinets and closets look bigger (so you don’t seem like you’re bursting at the seams)? Here’s how that went: Step 1: Take two large plastic bags (ideally big black

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Mo Mortgage, Mo Problems

One of the first steps we took when we officially dubbed ourselves “house hunters” was to find out how much house we could afford. Sure, we knew what was in our bank account and what sort of mortgage payment we could handle… but it’s not about what we think. It’s about what the banks think. So we made an appointment with our lending agent (the same guy who helped us buy & later refinance this house) so he could analyze our assets to estimate what loan amount we’ll get – which obviously will help us determine the price range of the new house that we should be hunting for. We were cautiously optimistic about this

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Farah’s Living Room Makeover: We’re Done!

Here’s where we explain the second half of Farah’s home makeover (click here to read our first post on the subject). Basically HomeGoods offered us some free merch for our house and we asked if we could pay it forward and transform someone else’s casa instead. Unbelievably they agreed. And we decided that we couldn’t stop at just sprucing up Farah’s mom cave after we laid eyes on her family room. So we have another before and after for all you transformation loving fiends. Here’s her cute family again, just to refresh your memory. And here’s their family room before: Here’s the same room after we got our mitts on it: It was pretty much

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Word To Your Motha Cave

Move over man cave, this post is all about a mom cave. When HomeGoods contacted us to offer us a gift card to create a mom cave in our house, we asked if we could pay it forward instead. And they were game. Oh and then we asked what the heck a mom cave was. It’s actually a little haven for any mom in her own home. The mom’s answer to the man cave if you will. It can just be a small corner of a bedroom with a chair for relaxing and reading or an entire room devoted to crafting, pedicuring, or anything else that your little mom heart desires. So I set out

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