Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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More Virtual Gift Shopping

We’re back with part two of our virtual gift shopping roundup (see part one here) and this time we headed into Pottery Barn to see what we could find. Here’s what we loved. This charming $12.50 rubber stamp kit is so cute for anyone from a well traveled kid to a crafty adult (who might use them to whip up some custom stationery). In the can’t-get-much-cheaper-than-this category, these $3 vases would be perfect for this DIY reed diffuser project that we tackled last year. These $11 “His” and “Hers” knobs would be cute for any married couple who share a bathroom (which is pretty much all of our friends and relatives since we’re not of

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Christmas Gift Ideas For Everyone

As we continue to unpack, we thought we’d share this year’s virtual gift roundup (a la this one from last year). It’s a three-post-in-a-row thing (we couldn’t fit all the pics into one) so stay tuned for two more that’ll pop up today. First we hit up Crate & Barrel. Here’s what we found: These cute wine glasses were on sale for $1.50, and two of them along with a bottle of inexpensive vino could make a nice little gift for someone that doesn’t drain the ol’ bank account: This pretty ceramic serving tray was on sale for $5.95, and could be filled with anything from cookies to candy (I’d do an assortment of fancy

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The First Day In Our Second House

We’re running about a day behind since we didn’t have internet at home until late yesterday, but here’s how things looked on Tuesday (our first full day in the house) with all of our boxes littering every room. Goodbye clean blank slate. Hello chaos. Oh and it bears mentioning that nothing is necessarily staying where we put it (we just dropped furniture and boxes around the house, and will definitely be living with things a bit before committing to final placement for anything). But let’s rewind a bit for a moment. The last time we moved, we were going from NYC to Richmond in a minivan (well, I guess technically we moved one more time

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Monday The 13th

You don’t even know the half of our moving day adventure. We glossed over it because we knew you deserved empty shots of our old place and pics of the new house’s interior – but we couldn’t let this story go untold. So take a moment to pantomime the buckling of your seatbelt and get ready to enjoy the ride. As we mentioned earlier, the day started off with an unexpected surprise: a snowstorm. And even though it wasn’t a Friday, the thirteenth of this month (aka Monday) surely lived up to its less than lucky reputation. Which is so not a good thing when it’s closing/moving day. Sure the snow was pretty, but it

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Did We Make A Profit Selling Our First House?

Are you kidding? In this market? Of course not. We managed to sell it for around $5k more than we bought it for back in 2006 (in “the bubble”) and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we spent more than five grand on improvements (we estimate that we spent around $35K on new bathrooms, a new kitchen, new flooring, new windows, a new roof, a new patio, a paved driveway, and upgraded details like crown molding and wider doorways). This is where a “womp-womp” sound effect would come in handy. But we’re sleeping like babies and are downright giddy about the sale of our house and the purchase of our new one.

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The New Digs

Greetings again from Panera (there’s no internet at home yet – so we stop in, get hot chocolate, and slap together a post or two for you guys whenever we have a spare moment thanks to their free WiFi). We know you’re anxiously awaiting interior shots of our new house all empty and move in ready from yesterday (can’t believe it’s really ours!). So here they are. I ran around quickly, which resulted in some less than perfect shots (our friends and family were outside in the snow waiting to start bringing things in so I made it snappy and didn’t have a chance to record a video so that’ll have to come later). But

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Our Last Day In Our First House

We promised pics of the old house all vacant and ready for the new owners so here they are (brought to you thanks to sitting in a booth at Panera to get WiFi since we can’t get that stuff hooked up at our new house until tomorrow). As for yesterday, we hoped to share more updates and info for you guys, but as anyone who has ever tried to coordinate a “domino” closing (when one person closes on your house, you wait for the funds to come through and attempt to close on a second house in the same day) knows, there’s usually nothing easy about it. The buyers of our house had an unexpected

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Please Stand By

We’ve got some serious moving in progress going on. We’re not sure when we’ll be able to check in again (heck, we’re not even sure what time we’re closing this afternoon- assuming it doesn’t get bumped to Tuesday) but we’ll stop in with more pics and info as soon as we can. Until then cross your fingers that my ceramic animal menagerie makes it to the new house in one piece and that we actually get to move in this afternoon as planned. We do plan to post some empty house pics of our first home (we figure you guys need closure just as much as we do) and of course share pics and even

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Using Up Everything In The Fridge Before Moving

Remember when we mentioned that we were on a grocery shopping hiatus? The idea was to make a concerted effort to eat as much as possible that we already had in the fridge and the freezer so we didn’t have to worry about keeping things cold for the 6-ish hour delay between being out of our house and getting to move into our new one (which will hopefully still happen Monday afternoon assuming the bank stays on schedule with the transfer). Here’s what the fridge looked like just two weeks ago when we started: And here’s what the fridge looks like now that it’s truck-loading day (after two weeks of eating some pretty “creative” meals

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Moving Lists & Tips

We’re about 90% packed, which is a good thing with moving day looming around the corner (we’re packing the truck on Sunday and officially moving on Monday afternoon if all goes well and our closing doesn’t get bumped to Tuesday). Cross your fingers for us! Here’s how we’re doing on our little to do list that we shared on Wednesday: remove every single item from the wall and patch/paint every nail hole in the house (this was actually about 500 times easier than I expected- just remove all the nails at once, spackle everything at once, and then paint room by room. It’s a lot faster than doing those three things in each room before

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Leaving A Note For The Future Owners

We made a little time capsule to leave behind and it was actually a lot of fun more fun than packing. Our big hope is that someone finds it at least a few decades from now (when there are flying cars and precogs) since it would be kind of a womp-womp moment if the new owners discover it as soon as they move in on Monday. Which is why we hid it very very well. So well that it may never be found. Of course we can’t reveal its location because that could ruin the surprise, but consider it to be something along the lines of “inside the walls” trickery. No “taped under the sink”

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