Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

| By | | 3 Comments

Checking Out Our Pashmina Granite At The Stoneyard

Our new and improved granite slabs moseyed into town this week and, unlike our last visit to the stoneyard, it was definitely love at first sight. Here’s Sherry gettin’ friendly with our two hunks of Pashmina before they go in for cutting. The best news of the day was that our beautiful new counters are coming home on Tuesday. Score! That means our Home Depot installer can come back on Wednesday to hook up the plumbing and – dare I say it? – our new kitchen will be COMPLETE. ‘Til then, you’ll find us drooling over this photo we snapped of our soon-to-be countertop.

[ Read More ]

| By | | 20 Comments

Painting A Textured Ceiling

The sheer equation of gravity + paint = nightmare. But add abnormally absorbent ceiling tiles that are bumpy and uneven to the mix. Sounds like something you’d like to do on a Friday night, right? Well for some deluded reason, it’s exactly how we spent our Friday evening. We’d been meaning to attack the dingy, half-painted ceiling tiles in our den for a while, and we finally got around to it this weekend. We even knew to use white primer instead of white paint for extra coverage (a tip passed along by one of our old contractors) so we thought it wouldn’t be that bad. It was. The whole process involved two gallons of primer,

[ Read More ]

| By | | 2 Comments

Ripping Old Carpet Off The Stairs

We’d love to claim these before and afters as our own, but most of you know that our house is a one story ranch by now. Bummer. Anyway, this is what the stairway at my best friend’s Washington DC townhouse looked like this morning: And this afternoon: Let’s give the girl a hand! Amazing transformation. I’m never one to endorse covering up gorgeous wood flooring- and this gleaming staircase is no exception. Doesn’t it look much better naked? Of course she has some painting to do on those toe-kicks, but that’ll be quick and painless. The good news is that no sanding and restaining of the once-covered floorboards is necessary. Gotta love it when carpet

[ Read More ]

| By | | 26 Comments

Why You Should Pick Granite Counters From A Slab, Not A Sample

The excitement began yesterday when we visited the stone yard to check out our granite slabs. And ended when we laid eyes on the giant hunk of Blanc Noir. The small, white sample with gray & black flecks that we fell in love with months ago looked nothing like the huge, gray, polka-dotted pattern in front of us. We knew our tiny kitchen definitely couldn’t pull off that busy, 101 Dalmations-esque look and we had to hunt down another option. Fast. Thankfully, several trips to Home Depot and a few local stone yards led us to our one true love: Pashmina. It’s everything that Blanc Noir isn’t: much lighter and less spotty with much more natural “movement” (think

[ Read More ]

| By | | 8 Comments

How To Warm Up A Living Room That’s Feeling Stark

While the majority of America seems to love hoarding and clutter, John and I are lone mice. Or whatever the opposite of a pack rat would be. But there’s a fine line between clean, uncluttered spaces and cold, stark rooms. It’s not an easy assessment to make on your own. But I was able to make an honest evaluation by photographing each of our rooms and then comparing each room in our house to rooms in decorating magazines and favorite furniture catalogs like Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and Ballard Designs. I quickly realized that while our rooms were clean and simple, they were severely lacking in the design department. So of course I was

[ Read More ]

| By | | 3 Comments

Kitchen, You Are Missed

This not having a functioning kitchen thing is getting old. It may sound strange, but we were too lazy to go out to eat tonight. Instead, we mustered the energy to attempt cooking in our counterless and sinkless kitchen. Fortunately, the meal itself (chocolate chip pancakes) was relatively easy to make using a cabinet top as our work surface. We also confirmed that our stovetop still functions after almost 3 months of dormancy. It’s the already annoying task of clean-up that reminds you how frustrating it is to not have a kitchen sink. Let’s just say doing dishes in the bathroom doesn’t exactly inspire me to play chef again anytime soon.

[ Read More ]

| By | | 6 Comments

Blast From The Past: Part 3

We’ve returned from our Christmas in West Virginia just in time to grace you with the third and final part of our “Places We Used to Live” video series. This time it’s a new city (Richmond, VA) and a new arrangement (cohabitation). Ooh la la. Our First Apartment Together in Richmond was a pretty cookie-cutter one-bedroom in a pretty cookie-cutter suburban apartment complex. That didn’t stop us from being over the moon about finally sharing a home together AND getting way more space for less than half of our combined rent in NYC. Here are the goodies to watch for this time: The giddiness in Sherry’s voice as she excitedly points out certain “features” Our

[ Read More ]

| By | | 2 Comments

Blast From The Past: Part 2

Is it painfully obvious that we’re trying to keep everyone entertained while holiday celebrations are distracting us from working on the house? We thought so. Now that you’ve seen my little space in the big city, it’s time to show John’s Apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side. It’s second in the series of videos I shot for Kitty, my BFF who lived in Iowa at the time. John actually edited this one down a little bit so you don’t get to see the living room. That’s because it was only a living room for a few days before they had walls built to create a third bedroom in order to accommodate a third

[ Read More ]

| By | | 7 Comments

Blast From The Past: Part 1

First things first – Merry Christmas everyone! We’re busy enjoying some quality family time, so here’s a pre-prepared post for everyone to enjoy in the meantime: The other day we set out to clean up our poor little iBook’s overloaded hard-drive. It quickly turned from a mass-file-deleting to a mass-let’s-reminisce-about-this-and- then-keep-it-for-the-memories. So, the bad news is that the hard-drive didn’t get much relief. The good news is that we found fun things to share. The best of our re-discoveries was a series of video clips. Between the many clips of puppy-sized Burger we actually found a few home-related ones. Our favorites being video tours of some of our old NYC apartments that Sherry had shot

[ Read More ]

| By | | 2 Comments

Spreading Holiday Cheer

As mentioned in our “acceptance speech,” we planned to give a portion of our prize money from RemodelingMySpace.com’s contest to a local housing charity. So when our check arrived on Saturday it was finally time to spread the love. And this time the love went to Richmond’s Better Housing Coalition. The Better Housing Coalition has been working in Richmond for 20 years to revitalize communities in our area, primarily by taking neglected homes in historic neighborhoods and turning them into affordable housing for low-income families. For instance, they do work in Union Hill, the neighborhood featured in the TLC special “Flip It Back” we reported on a few weeks ago. We’re still learning about the

[ Read More ]

| By | | 2 Comments

A Brown Area Rug From JC Penney

I am rarely excited by anything from JC Penney, but we just got the most amazing area rug for the living room. It has this great pattern (they call it “honeycomb”) and it’s real wool, which makes me feel like such a grown up. It was a steal for around $200 (the detail, the quality, and the coloring is totally reminiscent of a thousand dollar version I saw a while back- yessss). Plus since I ordered it online, I was able to use a promo code to score an additional 20% off AND free shipping (tip: google the name of the store along with the words “promo code” to save a bundle of cashola- in

[ Read More ]