Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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The Best 7 Storage Furniture Pieces

Anyone who lives in a small-ish space knows that thoughtful storage can upgrade so many aspects of your life at home when it’s done right (and it can be a daily frustration when it’s not done well or at all). No matter how big your rooms are or how many you have, you just want to be able to access things easily & keep them in a smart spot – and downsizing from our 3150 square foot house to this 1400 square foot home last year definitely challenged us to be even more mindful about how we incorporate the most useful storage systems into our home. Suddenly we were living in 6 rooms (down from

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9 Small Kitchen Ideas

“We just couldn’t figure out why you weren’t tearing out the kitchen.” That’s what one of our contractor’s guys said to us right as we moved in last year. I understood his confusion. We were redoing floors, moving doors, vaulting ceilings, etc – but we left the small old kitchen relatively untouched – complete with mauve laminate countertops. You can see what I mean in this post. But to know us is to know that we strongly prefer to live with an expensive-to-renovate room like a kitchen first, just so we don’t rush into spending major money on big permanent changes that we might later regret or wish that we thought through a little longer.

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Getting A Pool – The Process & The Cost

It’s been a full year in the making, but OUR POOL IS DONE*! Here’s where I imagine someone saying “and the crowd goes wiiiiild” (and the crowd, in this case, is the five members of our household – including Burger shaking a tiny pom-pom). Today we’ve got one HUGE post full of info about the entire process, the budget, and, of course, the finished result. We’re also answering some of the most common questions we got throughout this project. *Well, mostly done. More on that later Neither of us have ever lived in a house with a pool or even in an area of the country where residential pools are very common. So this was

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Before & After House Photos: 14 Months In!

Note: This post was born from an updated Before & After page that we heard people were having trouble finding (since it wasn’t at the top of our blog feed). So here it is, forever immortalized as a chronological post. And now, since we’ll continue to update our Before & After page over time, we have this post frozen in time, which is nice to look back on. Wish we had done it around 6 months in and at the year mark too. We downsized to this 1,400 square foot house in Northwest Florida on May of 2020 after a fast, furious, and long-distance three-month renovation. You can read more about how we found ourselves

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How To Build A Privacy Trellis

BRB, just changing the name of this blog to “Solving Problems With Plants.” And I know we promised a huge pool post, but the pool is still very much in progress. Hopefully it’ll be done next month and we can write one big breakdown with approximately 473 photos. But back to how plants can not only hide ugly stuff, they can also offer some pretty great privacy, as we’re about to demonstrate below. One of the things that contributes to our house being extra walkable to shops, parks, the beach, and restaurants is that it’s less like a sprawling suburban neighborhood due to the lots being a good deal smaller (you can read more about

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Hiding Ugly Utility Boxes With A DIY Shelf

When we shared pictures of our front porch last fall, we said that our decorating strategy out here was basically “plants and more plants.” It helps visually connect the porch to all of the greenery surrounding our house and – as we’ll show you today – it’s also helping us hide some less-than-pretty parts of this outdoor area. Let’s call them wall warts. Three large rectangular wall warts. But more on that in a second. First let’s travel back in time to what this all looked like last February when we put an offer in on this house (that’s our realtor in the photo below) As you can see, we’ve already come quite a long

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How To Strip A Deck For Stain

When we bought our house, the deck was in ROUGH shape. Before we could revive it with a fresh coat of stain, we had to strip off the old stain first. It definitely took some time and effort – our deck is nearly 700 sq. ft! But it was totally a doable weekend project for even a first-time stripper. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. That’s the before-and-after of the stripping process, but if you’d like to see how it turned out with the new stain, check out our How To Stain & Seal A Deck tutorial. And ignore the patch of new wood. We had to repair a section where a tree had been growing

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10 Easy Shed Storage Ideas

We recently added several DIY organization solutions in our new shed – all of which we completed in just one weekend! So today we’re going to show you all of the shed storage ideas we implemented in here, along with a few favorites from other storage spaces we’ve organized. Here’s what we’ll cover in this post: Planning Your Shed Organization Organizing a shed can be overwhelming, especially when you want to cram a lot of different functions into the space. Even though our new shed is pretty large (12×16′), we still had to be thoughtful about the best use of each wall. Ultimately we decided to write a list of: This helped us prioritize the

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Using Ikea Pax Wardrobes To Make A Closet

Long story short, instead of having 8 doors that lead outside in our bedroom (yes, we really had that many), we now have 6. And spoiler alert: it’s still plenty. We really just use the middle set along this huge wall of doors to go in and out, but the view and the light that the other doors let in is truly a room-making detail. We love the view in here and all of the brightness that shines in, and the addition of the fence for our own little private courtyard out there has been so nice. It not only makes the yard feel more private, it makes the bedroom feel more nestled and private

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How To Make Built-In Cabinets

There’s no better kind of storage than built-in storage, especially when you can integrate it with the architecture of a space. So when we finished our attic into a bonus room, we were excited to make use of the recessed niche around the window. Today we’re going to show you how we designed and installed built-in cabinets using stock cabinets. Spoiler: it’s actually an Ikea hack! This post covers the wall-to-wall, built-in cabinets, but you can also read about how we built the DIY floating shelves too. The two features work together to make a functional feature wall, but it’s a bit much to cover in one tutorial! Step 1: Plan Your Built-Ins Because this

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How To Make DIY Floating Shelves

We’ve done tons of DIY shelving projects in our homes, but these simple floating shelves in our bonus room are some of our favorites. We love this tutorial because the shelves turn out modern & thin, unlike most DIY floating shelves that are super chunky. Although if these are too narrow for your taste, you can see how we adapted this tutorial for some thicker floating kitchen shelves. You can also read about how we built in the cabinets under the shelves too, since they were another key part of building out this niche. In that post, we also cover how we planned the layout using Ikea’s online kitchen planning tool. You can also see

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How To Make A Cozy Fire Pit Area

We’ve been enjoying this fire pit hangout spot for months now, but it hasn’t been on the blog… until today. This is basically a lesson in how a fence can make a HUGE difference in defining an area, which can lead to adding some simple outdoor furnishings (in this case, it was four adirondak chairs and a fire pit – which hit the ground and instantly created an entirely new “outdoor room” for our whole family to enjoy). We hang out here and make s’mores at least once a week (and sometimes a lot more than that), so it has been a very welcome addition. Especially during a time when everyone is spending A LOT

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