Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Gotta Hand It To You

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Thanks to random.org, we’ve got a Merry (belated) Christmas prize going out to… Kristin Aune (who made t-shirts for both of her kids, ornaments, buckeyes and has been trying to perfect her fudge pie recipe). Congrats! Wahoo. Hope you guys all had an awesome holiday weekend (you can see a sliver of ours here). As we mentioned on Friday, we’ll be stopping in with one quick post each day this week (amongst family hosting, feverish book-deadline writing, and priming & painting all of our kitchen cabinets). But we couldn’t wait to share today’s giveaway that we wrangled after seeing so much amazing stuff

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An Easy DIY Christmas Card Idea

With family arriving tonight for our first ever Christmas in Richmond, we wanted to be sure we shared our holiday card with you guys first (you know we love ya like family). We couldn’t do this little blog-thang (look at me getting all twangy) without you. And we sincerely appreciate you for dropping in on us. We shot this earlier in the month with the help of a bunch of ribbon snagged on clearance from Michael’s last Christmas (some of which later ended up on our tree). It’s actually two pictures photoshopped together, since getting Clara and Burger to sit still that close to one another without doing something weird (like synchronized diaper sniffing/tail grabbing)

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Updating A Dated Kitchen Yourself

We were so happy to stumble upon Beth’s email in our inbox. Her retelling of her kitchen redo had all the elements that we love in a good renovation story: an ugly before (a brown fridge!), lots of DIY details (yesss!), a bit of drama (the counters arrived the day before Christmas, yowza!) and – best of all – a beautiful after. Here’s her note: Hello, Sherry & John! We bought our current home a little over a year ago, and to say it was outdated is the understatement of the century. Like you, we wanted something to fix up and make our own. Our kitchen was dark, ugly, and closed in. No matter how

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A Handmade Holiday Craft Show

Two Sundays ago we hit up the Richmond Craft Mafia’s craft show called Handmade Holiday. As one of my friends described it, it was like Etsy… only in real life. We love supporting/meeting local (and not so local) artists and artisans, so we went expecting to see some cool things, bump into a few people we knew, and maybe even to snag a gift or two. Instead, we saw LOTS of cool stuff, bumped into DOZENS of friends and blog buddies, and snagged a BUNCH of gifts. Well, I guess I should clarify. They were gifts for ourselves. Here’s a snapshot of our handmade bounty after we returned home and laid everything out on the

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How To Add Toe Kicks & A Window Sill

Can’t we just paint some darn cabinets already?! If your patience to see some painted cabinets is wearing thin – just imagine how we feel! When we were planning this kitchen project our big-picture brains said “We retrofit those few doors to match the rest of the room and then we paint. Hooray!” But now that we’re in the weeds (amid holiday madness, no less) we realize that a lot of stuff actually has to happen between those two steps.” There are gaps to be filled, rough spots to be sanded, trim to be added, hinges to be dealt with, hardware to be chosen, primer to be selected, a final paint color to be decided,

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A Free Calendar Printable

First we’ll get to the freebie download for all of you lovely people, because you know we heart you for reading our little ol’ blog. Since we’ve made a tradition of designing a homemade calendar each year (and 2012 ain’t gonna wait just cuz we’re mid-kitchen reno) we stole a moment – while the wood putty dried – to throw something together for the big one-two. Our calendars from the last few years have all been text-based (you know, as opposed to full of photos). Like our 2010 calendar, where we assembled a dozen weird family phrases & inside jokes and laid them out in simple bright colors: Or our 2011 calendar, where we used

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How To Make A Kids Art Desk With A Door

This is the story of a door turned desk turned tinier desk. When Clara came down with a case of the coloring bug a few weeks ago, it became clear that she needed an alternate surface for her artistry than the floor. You know, just in case she didn’t feel like tummy-drawing. We talked about a few fun play tables over on BabyCenter a couple of weeks ago, but finally found the inspiration that we needed to DIY one right in front of our eyes. And no, it wasn’t this leftover-plywood-slash-side-table combo that Sherry rigged up in about 30 seconds of “hey, maybe this will work!” Sorry, Sherry. #playtablefail. Back to the drawing board… Actually,

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Fab Freebie: Things We Love

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** After an excitement and entry filled holiday giveaway we’ve crowned our big winner. Well, random.org has crowned a winner. And she is… Nina (who’s planning to soak up and celebrate the magic of the season with her toddler, babe, and hubs this week as well as do some gift wrapping, toy assembling, and cookie baking by the light of the tree). Congrats! Oprah has Favorite Things. Martha has Good Things. We have Things We Love (okay, so maybe it’s not as catchy or scream-and-cry-on-national-TV-worthy, but we tried). The point is that we’ve rounded up five prizes that we heart, covering a whole range

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Buying Metal Stools From An Industrial School Supply Shop

John wanted me to work Stool Boom into the post title because of this video (which he requests that you all check it out so that you can hum the song while reading this post). Anyway, now in stool news… we got them for our peninsula! And we’re so excited about 1) where we found them, and 2) the price (because four stools can definitely be a budget breaker if they’re priced at $250 a pop). But first, let’s chat about the kitchen budget in general for a second… We’ve actually spent some real money in certain areas like: new Corian counters (around $1700) new stainless appliances (around $2213 with the new microwave but not

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22 Free Holiday Art Ideas

I warned you that I was really excited to go all out for our first “real” Christmas in our new house, so it’s no surprise that I got giddy and decided to tackle an unexpected-ish space for holiday-ifaction. Was that enough hyphenated-not-real words for you? Anyway that space = the hallway. I actually switched out 22 frames (almost two dozen!) in our little hallway frame collection to make things a bit more festive. And it was free. Yeee-haw. Over the top? Maybe. But it makes us smile and was zero dollars. Holla. Let’s get on with the tour… When you look at the hallway from a distance, the change isn’t overly obvious, which we like

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Painting A Herringbone Ceiling

Sometimes it’s so easy to forget little spaces like entryways, hallways, closets, etc. That’s why we love Mandi’s complete transformation of her entryway, which we originally discovered when Sherry pinned her awesome ceiling paint treatment over on her home away from home (yes, as a guy I still don’t quite understand the magic of Pinterest but then again Sherry doesn’t quite understand the magic of Angry Birds). Anyway, back to Mandi’s entryway makeover. Here’s her story: I’ve spent the last week and a half making over my entryway and I am dying to show you! This is what it looked like before the makeover: And here’s the after. I love it. The hands down greatest

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Cutting Down Cabinet Doors To Fit

We knew from the moment that we decided to add new (secondhand) cabinets to our kitchen that the doors could be a challenge. Even though we only ended up with 5 missing doors, it was important that we get those to match with the rest of the kitchen for a seamless look (aka: so no one would look around and guess we had some mismatched thrift store cabinets among us). Here are the five doorless cabinets that we had to address: We knew we had a few options to result in a kitchen full of matching doors, so one of them was bound to work. Here they are (in order of expense from most to

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