Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Decorating The Outside Of Our House For Christmas

This holiday season is full of firsts for us. It’s the first time Clara can shout things like “I love you Santa!” to the inflatables at Home Depot (this actually happens quite often). It’s also the first time we got a real tree (even if it’s of the tabletop variety). And it’s our first real Christmas in this house (we moved last December but were still living out of boxes then). But perhaps our biggest first is actually decorating the outside of our house. We’ve never done that. Isn’t that crazy? What the heck were we waiting for? There’s definitely some magic to waiting until it gets dark, plugging everything in, and stepping back to

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Dude, We’ve Lived Here An Entire Year

Which means this time last year, we woke up to a surprise snowstorm… … that resulted in our UHaul slipping into the gutter of our old driveway (more on that here). Man, it feels like that was just yesterday. John and I still remember every word of that truck-snafu conversation… JOHN: Hey Sherry. Walk-through went fine. They’re off to go close and I’m headed to the new house. SHERRY: Okay, be very careful. It’s snowy out there so drive as slow as you need, even if people are honking at you. Just take your time. JOHN: I will. Don’t worry. SHERRY: Great. I just don’t want you ending up in a ditch or anything. [HANG

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How To Hide A Microwave By Building It Into A Vented Cabinet

So, remember that microwave that we got a great deal on a couple of months ago? Yeah. Well. We returned it. A few of you questioned why we needed “such a big microwave” when we originally posted about it, which did get us thinking that we don’t do all that much microwaving. A bowl of soup here. A bit of reheating/defrosting there. And when we took down the kitchen’s original black over-the-range microwave (which was just as wide as our oven – 30 whole inches)… … we realized just how hulking the new 30″ one would look in its new home next to our pantry. See, we had originally planned to build it in there

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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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