Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Our Messy Basement Workshop

This week has been all about cleaning and organizing, so it’s only fair that I take this opportunity to own up to the most unclean, unorganized space in our house (perhaps ever in our whole lives). The horror lies behind this door, in my basement workshop: Just like our first house, we have a separate entry basement that you access from a door in the back yard. Except in this house, I’ve avoided showing this space the entire 16 months that we’ve lived here. Yes, it has been kept completely off camera and video – which is almost unheard of for over-sharers like us. Why? Because I’m embarrassed to my core about its state. I’ve

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A Kitchen With Wood Cabinets & Sage Green Tile

In honor of this week’s organization extravaganza, we thought this makeover was a great reminder that organizing and planning isn’t just about putting things in baskets or sorting your socks. An organized thoughtful approach to your home could help a dark and dated space become beautiful & functional with a little (or a lot) of planning, penny-pinching, perseverance, and perspiration. Morgan and her husband Kevin took their paneled den and turned it into a bright and modern kitchen. The transformation is, in a word, insane. And their planning tips are awesome, like scouring Craigslist every day in a nice wide radius to save serious loot – and rethinking the placement of a kitchen to make

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A Picture’s Worth… Well, You Know

Hi guys! I’ve been behind the scenes messing around with tech organization while the lady wife chats about feminine products and nail polish and whatever else she has been chatting about lately (justkiddinghoneyIloveyou) but since today is the day we said we’d get on some paper/tech org – specifically some blog streamlining (but you guys can tackle anything like digital photos, filing paperwork, or cleaning up your desktop) I’m here with the goods on that. With all the organization happening around our house this week it was bound to spill over to some blog organization eventually. And the portion of our site that was feeling the most out of control was our Projects page. You

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Simplifying Our House & Living With Less

It’s easy to crave less. Less to buy. Less to clean. Less to store. Less to chose from. Less to throw away. And we’re those people who get a rush from consolidating two items down to one or earning more space in the drawer/cabinet/closet by paring down, so this is our idea of a good time (why buy ten bottles to do ten things when one product can do it all?). Three years ago I wrote a post about how we try to keep things simple in small ways, so after more than a few requests for an update/extended list, here it is. Happily, three years after embarking on Project Simplify, we probably have fewer

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Bathroom Drawer Organization

Dude, meet our disaster drawer. I know you guys already got a preview of him yesterday, but you know how a horror movie has that dun-dun-duuuuun sound effect? This drawer needs one too. It’s that bad. Like “what wild animal got in there and rooted around?” bad. So in the name of organization week (and general sanity) it was about time we got on it.   The issue is that we don’t have a medicine cabinet, thanks to the window in front of the sink, as demonstrated by this pic from our House Tour page. The drawer in front of the sink is actually a false drawer, so we can’t use that one for additional

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How To Organize Kid Clutter

OK, it’s day two of our organizing week and we’re currently working on our crazy sink drawer that we shared yesterday. In the meantime, this isn’t one of those organizing play by plays with before, during, and after pics (that’s this afternoon’s post) it’s more a full breakdown of a system that works for us when it comes to taming the Clara-phernalia that threatens to take over our house. Around twice a week we get a question like: “can you do a post about how your organize Clara’s stuff? I could really use some ideas on how to control the chaos!” So here’s the rundown. In the beginning it was pretty simple. She was little

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Fab Freebie: Boys In The Yard

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** After lots of love proclamations for NSYNC, NKOTB and more, random.org has survived boy-band-mania and crowned our winner as… Megan G (who says she loves the original boy band…The Beatles). Congrats Megan! In the spirit of a week of cleaning & organizing, who could use a new lawn mower to tidy things up outside? Well, someone’s getting this puppy (valued at $339) thanks to Lawn-Boy. It’s self propelled, easy to start, and features a “Blade Stop” system that allows you to turn off the blades without killing the engine, which comes in handy if you’ve got a lawn frequently peppered with sticks or

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Organizing The Whole House, One Cabinet At A Time

You Down With O-R-G? Yeah You Know Me. Yes, that’s a Naughty By Nature reference. But why O-R-G? That’s $herdog’s abbreviation for organizing. I’ve gotta be honest. Our house hasn’t been this trashed/chaotic/messy since we moved in 16 months ago. Seriously, I’m not talking about a little dist around the baseboards or some streaks on the windows, I’m talking about serious stuff like not being able to locate anything in our completely ridiculous sink drawer: So although we have two entire sections of our Projects page dedicated to cleaning and organizing posts of yore, there hasn’t been much of that going on lately. At all. It all started to fall apart back in Jan/Feb during three

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Richmond Craft Fair: Spring Bada Bing

Two weekends ago we hit up the Richmond Craft Mafia‘s Spring Bada-Bing craft show (which we told you about via this giveaway). It was similar to their Handmade Holiday event that we checked out back in December, so since that post was such a hit with you guys, we thought we’d share all of the awesomely local craft-y goodness that we happened upon during this show too. Oh, and while we didn’t leave with the bounty like we bought last year – we did purchase one of the many things we loved (times three, actually). So feel free to guess what it was as we lead you on a little craft tour de jour (and we’ll

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A Red, White, and Teal Bunkroom For 4 Girls

Projects like Shannon’s almost make us wish we had four daughters running around. I should emphasize the “almost” on that. Haha. But, once you see the project Shannon took on, you’ll see why the idea of having four girls around sounds kinda awesome (and this is coming from a guy who grew up with three sisters). Hey guys! It’s so funny reading your blog. We were and are where you guys are – but we started almost ten years ago when we bought our first house. Since then we’ve brought our total baby count to five (yup, five!) and we’re still in the same house – trying to make it work. Anyway, with the birth

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Cloth Diapering Review

There’s a vicious cycle going on. We blog about something and then we live with it. And while we do, we tackle other stuff and blog about that. Lather, rinse, repeat. So we’re not always good about keeping you posted on those older things that we’ve already talked about since we’re so busy gabbing about new stuff. Which probably explains why we get asked for updates on a handful of things nearly every day. In other words: it’s about darn time we followed up. So here’s a nice juicy post full of a bunch of those updates for everyone. Cloth diapers: Believe it or not, we’re still using the very same original 12 cloth diapers

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Turning Kid Art Into Custom Fabric

Well, Clara can go ahead and add fabric designer to her resume. With her 23 month photo in the can (see the full photo project here), it means the next monthly picture in line is the big 2-4… otherwise known as age 2. And since we concluded her first year of weekly-fabric-backdropped photos… … with a custom fabric design that we made through Spoonflower by scanning her name drawn out in marker on paper (and tiling it in Photoshop), we though we’d make it a tradition and create more homemade fabric for her second birthday. We thought about doing something similar with Clara’s name for our she’s-two fabric (perhaps in Sherry’s handwriting instead of mine)

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