Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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How To Sew A Fabric Bunting

Growing up my aunt and mom sewed all the time (they made all my Halloween costumes and my aunt even sewed my mom’s wedding dress) but whenever I tried to learn on my mom’s machine I broke it. Not just jammed it or temporarily messed it up, I legitimately ruined it (at least six episodes ended with my mom carting it off to the shop and paying lots of money to get it repaired). And then I wasn’t encouraged to use it quite as much if you catch my drift. I don’t blame my mom at all. I was clearly cursed. So in an insane turn of events, I recently purchased a nice affordable beginner

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Easter Bid-ness

We’re pretty sure Clara has a new favorite holiday (although it could be that Easter is just the first major holiday that she’s finally old enough to really enjoy). Either way, someone had a fantastic Easter weekend. Her love of Easter could also be skewed because as far as she knows, the festivities stretch over at least 5 days. We actually kicked things off last Wednesday with an egg hunt at a local park with her older cousins Jake (who turns 13 today! Happy Birthday Jake!) and Olivia (age 10), since they’d be spending Easter weekend with their dad’s side of the family this year. She found two eggs (aka, Sherry and I handed her

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Fab Freebie: If Walls Could Talk

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – look below to see who won!*** First, a reminder that you can always get 15% off your WallQuotes.com order with code YHL15. But the three people who are getting $100 credit to go along with that (thanks to random.org) are… Kaycie Christine (whose walls would talk about episodes of shows like American Idol and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Michelle (whose walls would say “these people are nuts!”) and Bette (whose walls would complain “too many photos already!!”). Congrats ladies! WallQuotes.com is hopping on the giveaway train this week and hooking up a trio of winners with $100 worth of vinyl wall quote-y goodness. They’re removable and

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Decorating A Console Table Behind A Couch

The console returns. Yes, the console is like Rocky and Batman movies. The sequels keep coming. Maybe instead of The Console Returns we should say “Console: The Final Chapter” or “The Console Strikes Again” or “I Still Know What You Did Last Console.” No? Fine. We’ll stick with The Console Returns. Yes, after many (many) posts about our big console build, this is the official finale. And this one is the most exciting for me because it’s all about the fun stuff I put on it. Haha. I’m deep, what can I say? I’m sure it’ll constantly change, but here’s what it looks like today: The lamps were more than we’ve ever spent on lamps

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How To Add A Rain Barrel

Happy Earth Day everyone! (And Happy Birthday to Sherry’s little brother, who’s also known as Almost-Doctor-Dan <– warning, very cute baby Clara pics here). In honor of this eco-tastic holiday, we thought we’d share a story about driving down the street and noticing this sign: We’d been meaning to get a new rain barrel since we left the old one that we made at our first house when we sold it. Of course we would have been happy to make another one, but we had yet to get to that part of our to-do list (and sign up for a local course to get our mitts on a large food safe barrel). So we took

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Giving The Gift Of Painting

Sherry, Clara, Burger and I took our little home-improvement-hungry hands on the road this past weekend to help out a few family members in Northern Virginia who, by coincidence, have also moved recently. There must be something in the water – or at least in our gene pool – that has us all relocating lately. First up was my little sister Carrie, who we managed to get zero pictures of so here’s a random shot that she sent me after the fact (that guy on the left is her boyfriend, Robert, who will be making another appearance momentarily). Carrie just rented a new apartment in Northern Virginia last month (you may remember us helping with

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How To Build A Console Table: It’s DONE!

Well, it took us 3+ weeks, but our 12 foot long DIYed living room console table is officially finished! Before I get into any more pics of the final piece in place, let me back up a bit and recap some of the most recent constructions steps that got us there (since the last time you saw our console table it was stained but still topless). As you know, we had to turn to Plan B for the top since the pallets didn’t play nice (more on that here) so after lots of driving around town in search or something reclaimed that we could use (where sadly nothing was the right width or available in

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Something’s A Little Off

If this post were a fable, its moral would be – when something in your home just doesn’t feel quite right, do something about it. Or wait for it to randomly die on its own accord and take it as a sign. We’ll use this light hanging in our living room as our story’s lead character. You may remember that there’s always been something “off” about it – it’s the only permanent fixture in that huge room, and it’s placed awkwardly in a corner (which is why Sherry tried to distract us from the annoying placement by adding a bit of color to the glass shade to cheer things up while I was out for

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Creating Custom First Birthday Party Invitations

It’s her party and we’ll DIY invitations if we want to. You would DIY them too if it happened to you if you were us. After all, our wedding invites were homemade… … so how could we phone it in for our daughter’s first birthday party? Even though much-more-talented-invitation-designers like Mrs. Limestone generously offered to lend a hand (so nice), we stubbornly set out to attempt to create our second party invitation ever on our own (well, with the help of a cute baby and a computer). I guess we just have a thing for doing it ourselves (ya think?). So we started out with a very familiar set-up to our weekly Clara photos like

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Fab Freebie: A Break From Boring

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries  – see who won below!*** According to random.org, our two giveaway winners are… Amy I. (who’d enjoyed a weekend away and then a few days at home for her pretend spring break) and DebbieRN (who’d go to Sanibel Island). Don’t you wish there was a no-adult-left-behind official grown-up spring break? Since many of the kids in our county are out of school this week, it made us think about how nice it would be if every adult scored the same week-long break from the office grind. Luckily this week’s prize from The Office Stylist promises to inject some fun (and function) to your desk job. They’ve got loads

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How To Make A Hallway Frame Gallery Wall

Isn’t it strange how you can start a project (in this case the gallery of frames that we wanted to “wallpaper” our hallway walls with) and then just leave the other half of it undone for a month. Not weeks. Literally a month. What’s wrong with us? And it’s not like we weren’t obsessed with the results of the first half of the project (recounted here): We just ran out of frame gas or something, so we switched over to console building and chair painting and closet organizing and ceramic dog gluing and tree trimming and sectional leg spray-painting and all the other odd things that we’ve tackled since our little wall-hole-making spree. It’s so

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Hanging Two Mirrors And Using Them As Dry Erase Boards

In our last office we found that hanging a mirror helped keep us organized. Not just because we noticed if we had something on our face, but also because we could write on it with a dry erase marker to keep track of our to do list (and could even use it to write a welcome message to our guests since that room slept our friends and family as well). When we moved I missed that little organizational corner, so I started taping a comically small piece of paper on the wall with a list of things to do. And then it grew into two lists, one on each side of the large doorway. The

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