Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: This Little Life Of Mine…

*** This giveaway has reached its cap of 10,000 entries, and has been closed – see who won below!*** After reaching our cap within 24 hours, we’ve gone ahead and let random.org pick our one lucky winner. They are… AJ (who can’t wait to take our next picture for our annual anniversary photo). We know the feeling. Congrats! …I’m gonna let it… be organized online? If you’re one of those people that can’t seem to get a handle on your family photos – between your camera, phone, computer, and Facebook / Instagram / Flickr – you just might find the answer to your prayers in ThisLife. It’s a free cloud photo storage tool that, among

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Making Our Post Holes To Build A Deck

Before we get to our weekly deck update, we just have to say HOLY COW you guys have awesome homes! So many folks submitted house crashing photos for our upcoming trip to Atlanta for the Haven conference – and we wish we had time to see every last one of you! We’ve worked out a plan to crash as many as we can fit in and are crying a little inside that we can’t get to all of you –  but we might be back out that way for book tour stuff in the fall so there’s always next time! So this is just a huge thanks to everyone for offering to allow a toddler, a

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Our Anniversary Photo Tradition

Deck progress drags on, so we’ll be back with more details for you on Monday (wish we had more full days to devote to it, but it’ll probably be a weekly update situation like our first house’s bathroom reno and our kitchen redo since it’s such a big undertaking). But I just couldn’t resist sharing this in-progress picture of John and his dad telling the auger who’s boss: Oh but the time it’s taking us to build this deck isn’t what I meant by the title of “half a decade” (at least we hope it won’t take us five years to get ‘er done). That has to do with our five year wedding anniversary, which

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House Crashing Update: Kelly’s Outdoor Escape

We had tons of fun House Crashing Kelly Moore last May (you can see the whole shebang here)… … so when she told us she had made some outdoor updates, we couldn’t wait to check out this little haven that she created out on her deck. Complete with outdoor drapes, a hanging egg chair (from Ikea), some colorful seating (from CB2) , and lots and lots of potted plants  – it definitely has serious come-hither charm. We especially loved the leaning pallet planter that she DIYed with hose clamps from the home improvement store. Some pallets have chemicals in them while others are more naturally sealed (with heat) so they’re less questionable for outdoor crafts

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How We Use Photoshop For Blog Photos

Since Photoshop is our go-to tool around here for blog picture editing (and we get asked for a post with tips, tricks, or pointers pretty regularly) here it goes. But first, you should know a few things… 1. We’re not Photoshop experts: I took a digital photography course in college (in 2003) that taught me some basics and a few tricks, but it was by no means exhaustive. Sherry has a similar background, having used it a bit in art classes in high school and college. But both of us consider most of our skills to be self-taught. Basically just playing around and seeing what button created what effect on our photos. Sherry was a

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How To Replace Shower Tiles

First a little Facebook diatribe: we’ve been hearing from folks who no longer see our posts or Instagram pics hitting their Facebook feed and have learned that FB made a few changes, so if you’d still like to see our posts in your feed again, just take a second to do this: Click over to our Facebook page Hover over the button that says “Liked” Make sure the box next to “show in news feed” is checked. If it isn’t, just check it. Then everything should permanently show up in your feed again. Sorry for the trouble! And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging… In case you missed the post where the tale of

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Window Shopping At World Market

We’re doing our best to keep our word to those who have requested more window shopping posts, so we decided to keep the fun going by hitting up World Market (and taking you with us). For those who remember these things, we just stroll around a store (we’ve done big chains, small local shops, and even random little stores that we find while road-tripping) and take photos of all of the things we love. Not for compensation or anything – these sprees are just for fun. So let’s all go skipping through World Market together, shall we? First there were the pretty drinking glasses that were the reason for our visit (we got a few

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How To Remove An Old Shower Tile Border

We no strangers to removing unsightly trees. In fact, taking care of the dead/dying/dangerous trees that we were warned might fall on our first house during our home inspection was a big part of the transformation of the front yard. But taking out these particular trees was a new challenge… because they were in the form of tile in our bathroom: We’ve never been crazy about the beige-on-beige color scheme going on when it comes to the tile in that bathroom, but at least most of it is neutral enough to not call that much attention to itself. Except for that tree-tacular border. Every time we walk in the opening chant from The Lion King

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Fab Freebie: Home Depot Gift Card & Tools

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Thanks to random.org’s trusty randomness, we’ve got our winner and it is… Gretchen B (whose husband is “a mastermind with wood. He can make almost anything, at times he has surprised himself at what he canters up.”). That sounds familiar. Congrats Gretchen! Sorry this post is a few minutes late (380 pages of book proofing = crazytown). But Happy Almost Father’s Day everyone! To help us celebrate, Home Depot is giving away an $100 man card, er, gift card so one lucky reader gets a fast and easy way to show their handy hubby/dad/uncle/brother/grandpa/neighbor how much they care… or how much they really

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How To Gather Materials To Build A Deck

Good news: we made progress on deck building. Huzzah! Bad news: we didn’t make as much as we’d hoped. Harumph. I’m kind of having flashbacks to our bathroom remodel project back in 2009, when we’d schedule a long weekend with my dad to hopefully complete the whole thing but found ourselves just having started tiling by the end of the last day with him. But that’s just how real DIY life tends to go. So let’s rewind to the middle of last week when we got all of our materials delivered from our local 84 Lumber store (totaling about $1,000 including delivery and screws/metal hardware/concrete for footers/etc). That all went smoothly, especially when we realized

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Sweet & Personal Gift Ideas

Woot! Yesterday we OFFICIALLY BROKE GROUND ON THE BIG DECK PROJECT! Although breaking ground is a bit of an overstatement since we are not even close to digging post holes yet – we’re still working on getting our ledger board up (those are the support beams that run along both sides of the house to start the deck frame). Let’s just say that cutting and drilling into brick – especially brick that makes up the side of your house – is not for the faint of heart. So we still have a long way to go, but we’ll be back on Monday to share our progress! Until then here’s an Instagram sneak peek that I

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A Boy’s Bedroom With A Wood Plank Ceiling & Checkered Curtains

Since we don’t have any excuse to decorate a little boy’s room, we live vicariously through friends and readers. Which is one of the reasons we’re excited to share Kat and Mitch’s awesome transformation of their son Ryder’s room. They not only did a bang-up job on the whole thing (and took on lots of DIY projects to keep it affordable) it was all inspired by a free bed they found. Here’s Kat’s letter: We just finished my son’s room and we’re so proud of how it turned out. First things first, this is what this room looked like prior… well several years ago anyway when Ryder was a baby. What made us decide it

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