Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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How To Spray Paint A Wood Box

This week’s first project for my little self-imposed Dude Get On That Already challenge is small – but it’s not animal related (so that’s something, right?!). It actually involves a fifty cent wood box that I found at Goodwill about three months ago and then… you guessed it… stuffed it into our playroom, never to be seen again. Until now. Here’s the only before picture that I shot with blue spray paint in it before deciding not to go blue… Nope, I didn’t go gray either- that’s just primer. Yup… I went yellow! I still had some leftover from this horse head bookend makeover of yore, and I thought it would look like a little

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Fab Freebie: If You Were Here

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And the random winner who’s about to get their read and their DIY on is… Julie Smith (who said we’d see her at her desk in the office day dreaming of going home and painting her half finished bathroom project). Congrats Julie! That’s the title of Jen Lancaster’s latest bestselling book – and if you enjoy the story of a young couple renovating their first home (ya never know… you just might), this book belongs on your reading list. Jen never fails to crack us up and we were flabbergasted when we she mentioned us last year on her blog. So now that

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Aloha Vacation, Aloha New Floors

See “Aloha” means both “Goodbye” and “Hello,” so… yeah… buh bye Hawaii and hello half-done cork floors. We’re back in Richmond (insert forced enthusiasm here – woot?) and we’re eager to tell you more about our trip. But we’re more eager to dive back into DIY and spill all the details about our big cork floor project that we started right before we left (about twenty four hours before we hopped on the plane actually). Oh and for those who didn’t drop in on us last week since our little vacation announcement, we actually did share two posts (along with a giveaway) while we were gone, so you can find those here and here. We’re

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Why We Chose A Cork Floor

Why? Because we’re crazy. And coming home to a partially-finished floor is our idea of a good time. You think we’re kidding, but getting a jump on our cork floors by starting to lay them before we left for Portland/Hawaii wasn’t half bad. Heck, returning from paradise to the idea of finishing them and enjoying a rich, glorious mocha floor is downright titillating to nerds like us. They snap together and float over our old vinyl floors (which have an asbestos liner, so we followed safety recommendations and didn’t tear those up before laying the cork). And the floating aspect of our new snap-and-lock flooring means that our house sitters can just step on the

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Guess Where We Are?!

Last Monday, a surprise snowstorm (in the middle of a super mild winter) made for this picture out of our living room widow:   And Clara went outside and had fun doing this:   Fast forward about a week, and our view looks more like this:   And Clara’s sporting a different kind of outfit:   Yup, true to our anniversary resolution, we snuck off to Maui, Hawaii to celebrate finishing our book, our impending five year anniversary (in July), turning 30 (I will in March and John already checked that box in November), and any other celebration-worthy excuse that we could think of (Clara’s first four syllable words: escalator, helicopter, and anemone!). It’s actually

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How To Organize Your Coupons

Psst- Today’s our leaving-Portland travel day (sad face) so we’ll probably be spotty and slow on comments/etc after 1pm EST. We’re sorry for the interruption, but so happy to have gotten the chance to explore Portland. We owe you guys a big post about all the stuff we did/bought/ate! We purchased some local art, crashed an amaaaaazing house, ate bacon on a donut, and John scored not one but two new t-shirts (neither of which are soda related, but both of which are food-related). Lately I’ve been asked a bunch of times about how I organize/store our non-food coupons (since the grocery store ones are just stuck into one of those clear envelopes and stashed

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A Dining Room With Board & Batten And Dark Blue Walls

The boldest color we’ve ever used on any wall is Martha Stewart’s Plumage (which we slathered all over our guest room walls). Long story short: we’ve loved it ever since. So when Jackie sent us her dining room makeover boasting lots of Plumage, of course we were all over it. Here’s her letter: “When we moved into this house, the dining room started with just a table and the bamboo armoire. We didn’t even have dining chairs. Over the last six months I prioritized finishing this room in time for the holidays. It is filled with DIY projects including art silhouettes, board and batten walls, mercury glass vases, jute wrapped monogram, and my favorite: the

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Petersiks In Portland

Wow, so yesterday was a fun little whirlwind. We spent pretty much the whole day romping around the Portland Home & Garden Show (minus a break to scarf down some much-recommended Voodoo Donuts – and yes we tried maple bacon – mmmm).  The Expo Center here is stuffed with gorgeous gardens, cool green living ideas, and tons of friendly Portlanders. Or Portlandians? Portlandites? Whatever they’re called, the people here are crazy nice. We’ll give you an actual Portland shopping/stuff we did/house-crashing trip roundup once it’s actually complete (today’s our Explore-The-City day) but for now we’d at least tell you about our time at the show yesterday. It kicked off early with some interviews with the

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How To Install A Dishwasher

As we mentioned on Monday, before we hopped on a plane yesterday, we tackled our bisque colored dishwasher. And let’s just say the stainless one is a crowd pleaser (we like it, but Clara loves it). We’ll get to that in a moment. We had been telling ourselves that it would be better to do this once the new floors went in (so we didn’t accidentally trap it behind the new cork boards or something). But then we realized that was a dumb excuse because we could just slide it on top of a few cork planks so it would be the same height as the rest of the floor once it goes in. Plus

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How To Make An Emergency Kit

After our disaster-filled week last August (we had an earthquake and a hurricane within a week of one another) we had several requests for a post about emergency preparedness. We hemmed and hawed because we’re no experts in that department, but then a couple of actual experts / regular YHL readers reached out to us with emails fulled of information. Phew! So without further ado (since it’s already taken me like 6 months to finally write this post), here are some of the recommendations and information they sent our way. First off, our experts are Amanda F, who has her Master’s degree in this field and worked as an emergency coordinator for a hospital in

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Hanging A Towel Hook In The Bathroom

goose! And horse. So apparently my little self-imposed Dude Get On That Already challenge is just a sick joke where the universe tells me: “hey crazy lady, stop hoarding animals in the playroom.” But at least I’m getting things off the floor in there and up on the walls of the rest of the house so they can actually be enjoyed (or that’s just the denial talking). So without further ado, two more thrift store finds from here and here. Yes, this week was a double whammy of getting on that, since no painting was required. And they’re both over a year overdue. Another big surprise. So it was time to get these guys up

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Fab Freebie: Made In Portland

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** As our time in Portland comes to an end, we’re excited to share that the random winner of this very Oregonian prize is… Joyce (who would go all the way back to the late 1700s to check out the Constitutional Convention). Congrats Joyce! Since we’re headed to Oregon this week, we thought we’d send a little bit of Oregon your way in return. So how does $500 in product from Portland-based Rejuvenation sound? They started off as an architectural salvage shop, but now they serve up authentic lighting, hardware, and other home staples from a whole slew of time periods and styles. We’re

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