Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Celebrating Our Fourth Anniversary

See what I did there? If our 4th wedding anniversary were a movie sequel I’m sure that’s how the title would be treated on the movie posters (and yes, it would be dubbed a blatant rip off of Scream 4). Anyways, as is the tradition, we’re dropping in with our little rundown about how we celebrated four years of marriage last Thursday (see our three year anniversary post here and our two & one year anniversary post here). This year it kicked off, as most days do, with breakfast. I made this particular breakfast (Strawberry-Orange Stuffed French Toast with Raspberry Butter) as an homage to our so-good-we-took-my-picture-with-it (here) favorite meal during our Alaskan honeymoon. Of

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Spray Painting Chair Legs Oil Rubbed Bronze

Spray paint. Again. Who’s surprised? I’m nothing if not completely predictable when it comes to spraying my troubles away. I mentioned wanting to ORB (that’s “oil-rubbed-bronze” for those not privy to ridiculous decorating abbreviations) the legs of this old chair in our living room for a while. They’re clashy and red in real life… … as opposed to the nice dark ORB legs that we addded to Karl The Sectional: They also didn’t exactly “groove” with the gray-washed beams overhead and the deeper more brown-based wood tones in the console table that we made for behind the sofa (seen fully accessorized here). We plan to refinish the floors someday too – probably in the same

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Fab Freebie: Matchmaker, Matchmaker

 ***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Our winner, thanks to the willy nilly matchmaking skills of random.org, is… Sharon (who’s hoping to be matched up with a piece of art to finish off a master bedroom renovation). Congrats! Art.com is full of affordable stuff to help solve Naked Wall Syndrome (like these horse prints that we recently purchased) so we’re psyched that they’re giving away an $250 gift card to one of you lucky folks this week. They’ve launched a new tool called Match My Image that promises to come in handy next time you’re hunting for the perfect piece. You just upload an image – maybe of a

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How To Fill A Wall Crack So It Doesn’t Come Back

Crack is still whack. I couldn’t resist breaking out that Whitney Houston inspired one-liner, even though we already used it here. Why? Because this is a serious hard-hitting blog about real life issues. Just kidding. This time my fifth grade crack joke is in reference to a giant crack that was running across the side of the ceiling in the laundry room. Here’s the craggy before: And the much less craggy after: We had them check that beast of a crack out during inspection and learned it’s nothing like foundation issues (just normal house settling). Whew. And it was nothing that a little paintable white caulk couldn’t fix. Double whew. Tip: always make sure it’s

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How To Tea Stain Pillow Covers

I got into one of my weird rebellious moods (rebellious is a relative term for me) and decided to tea stain two pillow covers that we already have (originally from this cute Etsy shop). Oh yeah, I’m wild and ca-razy like that. I just figured it was an 100% free project and it would (fingers crossed) be an easy way to take two extremely stark-white (as opposed to warm white) pillow covers to a slightly creamier and off-white tone that would help them layer in more naturally with a slew of other off-white, cream, and even super light metallic bronze pillows that are currently living it up on Big Karl (our dark slipcovered sectional from

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Thrifting In The Outer Banks

For those not in the know (like me five years ago), OBX = The Outer Banks. Which is actually where John first took me for our one year anniversary of dating. Cue the collective aw. Anyway, now that we divulged some details of our recent Outer Banks trip this morning, we wanted to share all of the house-related stuff that we found while we were there. One of our favorite things to do when we travel is search for thrift stores, so I just did a quick hunt for “thrift” on my iPhone and it led us to Hotline Thrift (in Kitty Hawk – it’s a big pink store, you can’t miss it). Which is

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A Beach Vacation To Duck

What’s the perfect cure to a paint and primer hangover? A trip to the beach. And what’s the perfect way to spend your fourth wedding anniversary (yup, today’s the big day)? Why sharing those beach photos of course (since we’ve pretty much covered our wedding/anniversary stuff in the last three years of Wedding Week). Off we go… In honor of the long holiday weekend, we said goodbye to our freshly grellow-ed kitchen and hello to sand and sun thanks to a little road trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We usually do the beach thing in Delaware at my parents’ place, but since my siblings, cousins, and I insist on having babies and

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Switching Out Our Bathroom Light

Let’s talk about a not so quick fix. Between patio building and kitchen makeover-ing, Sherry and I like to “treat” ourselves to a few quick and easy projects that keep the ol’ morale up and allow us to catch our breath (so we don’t burn out or throw things at each other). And one fast & easy job that we’ve had planned for a while was swapping out the fixture in our guest bathroom for something more us. There was nothing particularly wrong with what was there, per se – but it was a bit more traditional than we’d pick ourselves (so we figured donating it to the Habitat For Humanity ReStore would give it

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Window Shopping At Home Goods

A few months ago HomeGoods came a lot closer to home. Hence the celebratory “holla” in the title of this post. Yeah, I’m psyched. The closest location used to be in Short Pump (about twenty five minutes from our house) but a new one recently opened right in Chesterfield Towne Center (a mall that’s about eight minutes from our door). Score. So we thought it would be fun to run around with our camera and take some photos of whatever caught our eye (just like we occasionally do at Target, Ikea, and even the other HomeGoods location). Let’s go virtual shopping, shall we? This cheerful turquoise bench ($150) caught my attention right away. Apparently Mr.

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An Easy Porch Update For Curb Appeal

Hope you guys all had an awesome holiday weekend. We had some fun with our family (more on that later in the week) and are still sort of building up the ol’ momentum again (after our big paneling project from last week) – but we did manage to squeeze in a tiny porch upgrade. See, when we were house hunting in the late fall of last year we snapped these two terrible shots of the porch: Then on moving day we plopped down the wooden bench (from Home Depot a few years back) which used to live on our first house’s front porch… and that was the extent of the update. Blah. Pretty bleak huh?

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Fab Freebie: The (Not) Wedding Week

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Thanks to random.org’s very arbitrary matchmaking skills, our winner is… Lawren (whose favorite wedding moment was when her cousin’s pocketed dress stored tissues to hand the groom when he teared up during the vows). Congrats! Hope everyone’s having an awesome Fourth of July. We’re enjoying some family time but wanted to drop in with this week’s giveaway, so here ya go. Thursday marks our 4th wedding anniversary, which typically would make this “Wedding Week” around here. But since there’s not much left of that dead horse to beat (we’ve already shared every last detail about our wedding, honeymoon, traditions, how we met, how

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June Superlatives

Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of June – high school yearbook style. Most Improved: Finally painting our kitchen paneling Most Annoying: Priming the paneling (which took more than a few tries) Most Destructive: Removing a few cabinets & patching the floor (to make way for our impending paneling makeover) Most Goal Oriented: Announced a new initiative to clear the kitchen table of miscellaneous clutter every night before bed (we’re still hit

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