Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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House Hunting: Strange, But True

House hunting has been a fun adventure and, like any adventure, it took some weird twists and turns. So we figured since we highlighted some of our close-but-no-cigar finds (here, here, here, and here) we should take a second to share some of our no-way-no-how finds as well. Because they were actually pretty darn entertaining. First, we encountered a mammoth split level. From the outside it looked like your usual split-level home. Until we got inside and realized it had SIX floors. Yes, six. That’s six times the number of levels we’re currently used to. Granted the top (attic) and bottom (basement) weren’t entirely finished, but still – wow. You can thank my brilliant artist’s

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Fall Decorating Ideas

I got all leaf-happy to add a bit of that fall/Thanksgiving vibe to the dining area. It was free and it took about ten minutes total. Here’s the dining table with some pretty branches from the cherry tree out front: And I popped a few smaller branches from the same tree into my floating cb2 hanging vases. Sure, they’re looking a little limp, but after adding some water to the vases, they perked right up. And since they’re free I’m ok with them lasting just a week or so if that’s what mother nature so ordains. Oh and I thought a $2 bag of mixed nuts looked kinda Thanksgiving-ish (saw something similar in an old

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The Floor Plan Changes We’re Planning For Our New House

We’re still holding off on taking you on a full virtual tour of our soon-to-be new home (you know, until the deal is 100% done and we actually live there). But we thought we’d give you a sense of what we’re gonna be working with thanks to this rough floor plan that we threw together with the use of floorplanner.com (it’s a free service, btw). Everything is approximate since we’re borrowing from the measurements that we took during the inspection and copied from the sales flier, but here’s what we’ve got (the washer & dryer are stacked in the small mudroom off of the carport): *There aren’t measurements for the smaller spaces like the bathrooms

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John’s Bee-Day Gift

Yesterday was my sweet hubby’s birthday so I figured I should share what Clara, Burger and I got him. John and I have recently been talking about how we’d love to amass more “real art” to complement all the DIY stuff that we have framed on every wall. This goal is definitely inspired by our friends Matt and Kristin – who we House Crashed here and here. The cheerful original art that lights up their home always has us jonesing to add more color and fun to our walls. So consider this painting to be the beginning of an exciting little collection that will happily hang in the new house: It’s a 12 x 12″

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How To Host A Moving Sale

Apparently gathering over 100 things to get rid of didn’t take as long as we thought (see the full list of purged items here), so we got all crazy and decided to host a last-minute moving sale this past Saturday (just to get rid of stuff while we still had that no nonsense iron will- you know, before we caved and decided to keep a few things around). We took about two weeks to plan our last yard sale, so making the decision to hold this one just two days out was a bit nerve-wracking, but the days aren’t getting any warmer, so we figured why waste time? Plus, hosting a yard sale isn’t rocket

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Fab Freebie: The Target Lady

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – scroll down to see who won!*** I love today. Not just because it’s my 29th birthday, but because we are giving away a gift card to (drumroll, por favor)… TARGET! We don’t really need to waste time reminding you guys how much we love Target (we’ve got about a million posts like this and this to prove it). I even created this graphic to try to convey how excited we are: Can you handle that enthusiasm? And while I always love a good opportunity to reference SNL’s Target Lady, this time I’m going to mention a different woman paired up with the red bullseye: HGTV’s Sabrina Soto.

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How We Got Rid Of 100+ Things!

Nothing lights a fire under your arse like making a public proclamation that you’re going to get rid of 100 things. So even though we’re not moving until mid-December, we made our way from room to room paring down every single thing that we don’t love/need/use. The mantra as we went? No mercy. Because nothing is worse than packing, moving, and unpacking things that aren’t worth the time they took to transport or the space they’re eating up in the new place. Here’s our getting-rid-of-it office pile: Then we tackled the kitchen (Clara helped): Here’s our outgoing kitchen pile (what you don’t see are a bunch of baskets and towels on the floor): And here’s

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Window Shopping At Garden Ridge

So many people have told me about the miracle that is Garden Ridge, but I’d never been to one. Until yesterday. Yes, one finally came back to Richmond (we heard a lot about the one that used to be out by the airport but it was gone by the time we moved here 4+ years ago). Anyway, here’s what I found on my maiden voyage to the big Costco-ish warehouse full o’ house, garden, and other random stuff. My first reaction was “man this place is huge” followed by “Teresa Guidice would like it here” (NJ Housewives reference anyone?) since there are oversized urns and stone columns a plenty. Klassy. Let’s just say it’s one

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Setting A Goal To Clear Out 100 Things Before We Move

I want to get rid of (via donations, craigslist, ebay, freecycle, etc) at least 100 things before moving day. On one hand the number sounds kinda high, but on the other hand, I know there are at least 100 things in our house that we never use, need, or should spend time and effort moving. And I actually plan to keep track, writing all 100 items down on a piece of paper in list form. Why? Because I’m weird like that. To kick things off  I went through my shoes (pun intended). Amazingly, I realized that I hadn’t worn a good amount of them since leaving NYC and moving to Richmond 4+ years ago. How

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How We Sold Our House By Owner

Well, I guess we haven’t actually sold our house by owner yet. That’ll happen at closing in mid December (fingers crossed). But here’s how we got an offer. We’re hardly real estate experts, so this post is just a roundup of things that happened to work for us. Here’s hoping they help anyone else attempting to DIY their house sale too. The cool thing is that the people buying our house aren’t blog readers (they’d never heard about us or YHL- but we disclosed the blog to them to ensure that they were cool with images of the house with our furniture remaining on the site). Anyway, we thought it would encourage other FSBO peeps

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