Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Exploring The Georgia Aquarium

Ack! We’ve been home from Atlanta for over two weeks and I just realized we never shared our other animal-filled adventure in ATL. This one was more of the aquatic variety… Yep, in addition to the zoo, the Bowers took us to the Georgia Aquarium. And it was AMAZING. I haven’t been to lots of aquariums in my day so maybe I’m just easily impressed, but there was just so much to see and so many things for the kids to do that we walked around with our mouths agape for a good three or four hours. You saw a few of these photos in this Young House Love post but we’ve added a bunch

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How To Make Scrap Wood Picture Frames

As Sherry mentioned in her Pinterest Challenge post this morning, we DIYed some easy wood frames for her homemade artwork. We did it partially because, well, we’re cheap. And partially because we wanted to see how truly simple we could keep this project. So we challenged ourselves to try to spend zero dollars and just use things that we had around, which basically ended up being: leftover scrap wood wood glue a staple gun a hammer sandpaper a miter saw (but a miter box and a hand saw would work too) duct tape spray paint (the kind with primer built in) Here’s how it all went down. We started off on the right foot by

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Making Acrylic Art

It’s Tuesday the 10th… so it’s time to share this season’s (completely unofficial) Pinterest Challenge (not sponsored by Pinterest or anyone else, just dreamed up by Katie to make us stop pinning and start doing). Cue the choir of glue-gun-wielding angels! I actually tried my hand at painting, just because I thought it would be fun to get back into. Other than this painting that I did a while back, I haven’t painted much beyond walls, accessories, and furniture for the last decade or so. Are my Pinterest challenge paintings going to land me an art opening anytime soon? Not on your life. Haha. But it was so much fun and I found spots for

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Add Something Old To Every Room

You know how a bunch of designers have been saying things like “every room should have something old in it”? Or have I been the only one noticing that lately? Sort of like how they say “every room should have something black in it” (but other than oil rubbed bronze curtain rods or dark mocha wood, virtually nothing in any of our rooms is black – although 95% of my shirts are black, so maybe that counts?). Either way, it’s official. I’m on the “something old” train. It all happened when I was browsing craigslist (searching the words “dresser” and “sideboard” and “buffet” every week or so, if you’re wondering about my craigslist technique) since

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A Wood Truck That Holds Crayons

Here’s the story of the little two dollar Goodwill truck that I got Clara in Georgia (mentioned in this video yesterday). This is what it looked like when I snatched it up: Perfectly charming and vintage-ish, but a little less “Clara” than it could have been. So I thought it would be fun to get Clara involved in a little makeover. Yes, Clara would be the ultimate truck graffiti artist, but first I applied one coat of blue paint, just to set the stage for her scribbles (the entire project was free thanks to using a little test pot of paint leftover from this old art project last year). The color is Embellished Blue by

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A Living Room With Benjamin Moore’s Wythe Blue

It’s no secret that we’re suckers for a dark room turned light and bright. And during the summer months, we’re especially keen on the beach-y, coastal vibe that Jessica achieved with the help of our pal Rhoda. So check out her letter below: We finally finished our family room makeover. I feel like I’ve been working on this room forever. The colors in the room before were traditional and on the darker side. The old furniture was a set we bought many years ago and was in a much smaller room (so it looked a bit lost). I decided to change the look from traditional to a cottage-y pottery barn style. This was a joint

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Goodwill Goods, Grimaces, and Giddiness

If you have read our blog for the past year or so, there’s one thing you know. Goodwill + Katie B + me (+ John with video camera) = all kinds of ridiculousness. This time we literally ran around the store supermarket-sweep-style and tossed things that we thought were cool into our cart. Then in the name of keeping it real, we made a one-take-only video about everything that we found. No cuts. No corrections. John just pressed record and we jabbered on. So much so that we had to break up the video across both of our blogs since we went on (and on). You can check out the first half of it over

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June Superlatives: Northern & Southern Fun

Since it’s a holiday here in the US (America’s birthday, no less!) we’re spending the day with our family, but we thought we’d take a minute to look back on the month of June (once again we’re late with our little recap – sorry guys!). But in an attempt to TOTALLY REDEEM OURSELVES (name that movie), we’ve also linked to a bunch of Fourth of July related posts of yore for ya (here, here, and here) and we snuck a few never before seen things into this recap – like a new family portrait that the lovely and talented Katie B snapped for us while we were in Atlanta (how is no one crying?!). If

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House Crashing: Where Soft Meets Bold

Yay! We finally went through over 1,000 photos that we snapped during our ATL adventure and we cobbled together the first of a few House Crashing posts for ya. This one is all thanks to Jae, who lives in the Atlanta area, and invited us over to snoop around and take some pics. Her house is an awesome example of embracing color and boldness in some spaces, while balancing it with light and airy rooms. Such a fun mix. So without further ado, let’s get crashing… Look, here’s Jae to welcome us in. She could not have been sweeter in person. We were laughing the whole time we were there (Katie B came too and

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It’s Baaaaaaack…

Yup, this highly embarrassing video can only mean one thing: we should never be on camera 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). My favorite part is the outtake. Yes I’m saying I’m going to pee on myself at one point. Elegance is my middle name. The whole Pinterest Challenge thing started over a year ago 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

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Fab Freebie: Mixed Media

*** This contest is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And our lucky winner of over $400 worth of art is… Kate (who loves the mix of love salty and sweet: chocolate covered pretzels, salted caramel, trail mix, etc). Congrats! There are so many incredible options when it comes to bringing art into your home, so we thought we’d put together a mixed bag of three very different, but equally cool artists’ work. The first comes from D is for Dino, a local guy who also moonlights at our favorite candy store. He makes awesome graphic prints that are crisp, beautiful, and contain “a hint of geekery.” Here are a few of

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Failing The Inspection To Build A Deck

If at first you don’t succeed… dig more holes. At least, that’s what was on my agenda after failing our first deck footing inspection (this post explains that debacle). This project definitely isn’t moving along at the speed of lightning, but we’re creeping slowly towards the goal of a finished deck to enjoy family meals on by the end of the summer – maybe even by this time next month if we’re lucky. But remember this speed bump? Since our original plan got the big ix-nay because we were trying to attach ledger boards to unapproved surfaces (although it was initially approved by the county), our new plan required us to make it a free-standing

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