Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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A Kid-Safe Christmas Tree With Paint Chips & Ribbons

That she blows! Or maybe I should I say “thar she glows!” Either way, we got ‘er up. And this year the theme was: free stuff we already had (no getting in the car to go fetch anything, since we feared that would cost us another week to get things up) nothing pointy/hard/breakable (for bean safety reasons) color, color, color (just like our tabletop tree in the living room) So yes, we gave our full-sized tree a whole new look (see what it looked like in 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007 here) using stuff that we already had in the house, like a bunch of leftover paint chips from my bin. Yes, I save old

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Our Favorite DIY Tools

Here it is, the much requested post about our favorite DIY tools for all of you folks who are asking Santa for something tool-ish this year (or trying to figure out what to buy a handy guy or gal in your life). None of the items in this list paid us or perked us for the mentions, they’re just actually the tools that we use and love on the regular. So without further ado, let’s chat about the things that help us get ‘er done…. We previously wrote this post about a few things that we pretty much can’t live without (any of which would make great gifts/stocking stuffers), so here’s a quick summary since

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Storage For A Small Room

We’re so impressed with how much style Marianne packed into such a small room. So for anyone out there struggling with the small space blues (our last bedroom was tiny with no closets – so we can totally relate!) hopefully this will inspire you! Enough chit chat, here’s Marianne’s letter: I gave the smallest room in our house a total makeover. And when I say small, I mean small: The room is barely even 4 square meters big (about 43 square feet if I’m not mistaken) but I feel I still managed to give the space some oomph and character. Since I know you guys love  living a ‘simple’ life without a lot of unnecessary

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How To Make DIY Christmas Ornaments

As I mentioned earlier this week, we got a real mini tree! And I finally got some twinkle lights up and some ornaments on that guy. I say this with much enthusiasm and hardly any hyperbole: it’s a life changer. I’m in love. And Clara and Burger love it too (play Where’s Waldo in the dark and find them): It’s so charming and warm and it looks so sweet with all of the handmade Pinterest challenge ornaments that I made here. These are the only breakable ornaments that we’ll be putting out this year (since the tree is up on a table, so Clara can’t get to it). And it glitters like the dickens. So

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Our White Corian Counter Review

Merry Countermas to us! They’re here. And they’re spectacular. Just as a reminder, the cave room looked like this back when we moved in last December: But back to our brand-spanking-new Corian counters. I didn’t expect them to feel as chunky, heavy, and stone-like as they do. They’re like marble without the veins. Seriously. Nothing plastic-y about them. And they’re sleek but sort of matte too if that makes sense, which looks/feels really chic and sort of honed-marble-ish (according to our installer the white matte ones are the only ones that don’t show scratches, which will definitely come in handy). So yeah, it’s safe to say that we’re completely smitten. Of course things were looking

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Updating Our Living Room With A New Rug

There’s something about being nearly a year into living here that makes it feel like we’ve accomplished a fair amount of “evolution” over the last 357 days (not that I’m counting…). I guess it’s because living somewhere for a month isn’t really a lot of time for tweak-age, but twelve of those in a row – well, it’s enough time to get things going. Like living with a floor plan for 11 months (just to be suuuuure) and then knocking out a wall that we’ve wanted gone from day one: It’s also enough time to make a few furniture and accessory changes as we transition from working with what we have (like random stuff carried

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Prepping For A Corian Counter Installation

We were feeling a little less than pumped about how unfinished our “new,” tile-ready walls were looking… … mostly because we found ourselves staring at that mismatched unpainted paneling (shudder) and those ugly unpainted/stained/gross parts of the ceiling that were exposed when we removed the upper cabinets. So what’d we do? Why we got a-paintin’ of course! The paneling took two coats of primer and two coats of paint (just to be safe). And the ceiling took… well, more coats of primer and paint than I care to share (I lost count, actually – maybe five or six?). Since some of it was totally unpainted and other areas were stained, we just wanted to be

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Fab Freebie: Home Sweet Illustrated Home

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Random.org has surprised us this week and selected a male winner for the first time in foreverrrrrrr (shocking, we know). His name is… Thomas (and he’s looking forward to time off this holiday season). Congrats dude! (Congrats buddy? Congrats fella? I dunno, I’m so used to saying “Congrats ladies” I’m kinda at a loss). One of our favorite things to give are custom house portraits (we’ve actually purchased two for my parents in the last year – and even bought one for ourselves). So as we enter the giving-est time of the year, we figured it would be fitting to give one of

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How To Make An Advent Calendar

We’re still working away on the kitchen, so we’ll have update post #561 for you soon (kidding, it’s probably more like #19 or something – but still). This week we’re hoping to share lots of major progress (new counters and a working sink again – finally!). In the meantime, it’s about time we got into the holiday spirit. There’s just something special about spending our first real Christmas in our new house that makes us want to go all out. We moved on the 13th of December last year, so we were technically here for last year’s holiday season, but we were living out of boxes and Clara was too young to really get excited

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November Superlatives

So yeah… it’s suddenly December? Guess that means it’s time to take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff to keep things spicy. This month we were all over the place as usual, from doing some exterior, nursery, office, ornament, and place-setting stuff to a bunch of kitchen things. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives (you know, just for giggles). Oddest Couple: Little ol’ Sherry and this tall built-in that we made to give our fridge a more finished look

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Making A White Kitchen With Simply White Cabinets

Lately lots of the submissions that we’ve been getting are kitchen related, and you know we’re in the kitchen mindset these days… so we’re happy to share. Jasmine & Sam’s remodel wooed us with their use of white on white with tons of texture and a sleek clean feeling. And when it comes to function, we’re really impressed by how the addition of more upper cabinets and details like molding and trim elevated (both literally and figuratively) the entire room. Here’s Jasmine and Sam’s email: Hey guys! My family and I just had our one year anniversary in our new house and I thought to send you some pics of our new kitchen. We actually

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How To Turn Family Sketches Into Art

Dude, my dad is an artist. I mean not by trade (he’s a super-genius math teacher), but both he and my mother sketched and drew for fun during my childhood (in turn art was my favorite subject in school and off I went to get a bachelor of fine arts in NYC). I remember being in complete awe about how my mom drew horses and ladies while I loved how my dad drew all sorts of abstract shapes that filled a page with lines and dots and squares. Sort of like this. So about a week ago I was standing in the frame hallway thinking about my dad and his awesome drawings and realized that

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