Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Things That Didn’t Work Like I Thought They Would

Cabinet hanging continues in the laundry room (details tomorrow!) so since yesterday’s post had a giveaway worked into it (we can’t believe over 25,000 of you took the poll, John is beside himself with infographic glee), I thought I’d share a quick post about three recent redos. Sometimes things get wonky when you least expect them to, and the second time ends up being the charm (at least you hope it is). Redo #1. Our cork bulletin board in the office. Back when we made this a few months ago, we used Loctite Spray Adhesive, since the back specifically said it worked for bonding cork to wood. Well… the cork squares slowly started to pop off

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Survey Says…?

***UPDATE: We’re sending out a giant thank you to the 30,000+ respondents to our survey! We’ve selected a random winner of the $500 West Elm gift card using random.org and the lucky person is… Sarah M from Birmingham, AL! Congrats Sarah – check your inbox!*** It’s no secret that I’m a card-carrying infographic geek (in case you’re wondering, the card has a pie chart on it). Here on our blog we’ve captured one year of living in this house, our book tour, and of course your responses to our annual blogiversary survey all infograph-tacularly, so with some sweet talking to my wifey and gentle nudging to our publisher, I’ve convinced them to let me put

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Installing Porcelain Tile In The Laundry Room

A newly tiled floor in a new room of the house is almost enough to give me jazz hands (a York peppermint patty is enough to give Sherry jazz hands, so clearly we have different thresholds). We’re completely enamored with this floor – and there’s a budding romance that involves a saw – so let’s cover the laundry room tile installation, from floor prep to grouting & sealing. Before any tile could get installed, the subfloor needed to be prepped with some cement board, which is a preferred surface for tile installation. They come in 3ft x 5ft sheets, so I was able to fit two full pieces plus a few strips in the room.

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More Tile, Room Plans, & A New Door

Back to THE ROOM THAT DIDN’T EXIST A FEW WEEKS AGO. Pardon my type-screaming, but it doesn’t get much more exciting than that in my world. (Sidenote: I had a dream last night that there was a column in the newspaper called Shellac This! – all about shellacking a different piece of furniture each day – and the world was so enamored with it that normal morning conversation was “did you see what they shellacked this morning in Shellac This?” and it was getting turned into a major motion picture). We left you with a primed-&-ready picture of our new laundry room in Monday’s post, so let’s start there (we used VOC-free Kilz Premium from

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Fab Freebie: Get The ‘Facts

If you’ve ever strolled through Carytown in Richmond, you’ve hopefully hit up Modern Artifacts – a cool corner shop stocked with handmade goods like art, decor, tableware, and jewelry. They even have a few special sections, like an area that’s just for kids and a gallery space with framed art and photography (many from local makers). And even if you’re not a local, this week they’re dishing up a $250 gift card!   On top of that prize, one of our favorite vendors to Modern Artifacts is throwing in another $100 to spend in their Etsy shop. GaugeNYC makes all sorts of cool typographic accessories in metal – from delicate jewelry to chunky decor accessories

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How To Pick The Best Curtain Color

As our laundry room adventures continue (priming, painting, and tile prep are in progress!) I thought it might be fun to share some virtual options that we tried on in the office (we tested out some wall ideas in Clara’s bedroom last fall and checked out a few looks for Teddy’s room about five months ago). Remember when I photoshopped some curtains and a rug into the last picture of this post about our new light and chairs? And I mentioned in the comments that West Elm had a rug sale (making the one we liked $100 off) so we pulled the trigger on it? Well, said rug has shipped and is on its way

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How To Tape, Mud, And Sand Drywall

Over the weekend we wrapped up our how to hang drywall adventures in the laundry room. It was a humbling experience, but we’re feeling nothing short of glorious about how it turned out. In fact Sherry and I spent a few minutes doing this in there on Sunday. Project Completion Euphoria. It’s a real thing. And it can make a grown man twirl. Doing Our Research We’re not ready to put “pro drywaller” on the ol’ resume quite yet, but I do think we’ll go into our next drywallstravaganza with a lot more confidence. We devoured YouTube videos and online tutorials for about an hour one morning, and quickly learned that there seem to be

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How To Insulate Walls

Drywall mudding and taping in the laundry room is going (I think) well.  We’re two coats in and past our first bout of sanding (we tried wet sanding so I’m excited to share how that went) but I’m still holding my breath a bit to get through the third (and hopefully last) coat and onto primer to be sure it looks as good as we think it does, since it’s that last step that tends to be the real test. So rather than split up our mudding and taping tutorial into two posts, I’m holding off until Monday to cover the process from start to finish (with video). So today we’re talking about money and

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Fab Freebie: Mow Money, Mow Problems

Got mower problems? Well, this week you could up your outdoor tool game and win over $1,400 in outdoor equipment from Husqvarna. Someone’s going to get to chose any three of the options below (there’s an all-wheel drive walk mower, a low-noise hedge trimmer, a heavy duty chainsaw, an ergonomic trimmer, and a commercial grade blower). Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up below this paragraph). This giveaway is available to residents of the United States and Canada. Click To View Rafflecopter Widget

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Finishing The Office Makeover

Our office continues to creep towards the finish line (tortoise style) with the addition of an overhead light… … and new desk chairs. You might recognize the light because it’s none other than the one we used to have hanging in our kitchen (loosely meeting both the “old” and “borrowed” criteria from this post’s title). We loved the light itself, but mentioned a few times in the comments that after living with it for a little while, we weren’t sure we loved it as much as we initially thought we would in the kitchen. So we figured we’d try it in the office. The second it was up, we were sold. It feels polished and

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How To Hang Drywall By Yourself

Installing drywall doesn’t have to be intimidating and, in fact, you can do it all by yourself! I was able to do our entire laundry room (including the ceiling) in one day AND without an extra set of hands. So today I’ll show you how and the secret weapon that made it all possible. Drywall Installation Tools & Materials Here’s what you’ll want to have on hand if, some of it is optional depending on the difficulty of your job: Drywall, we used 4 x 8′ UltraLight Sheetrock Drywall lift (we rented ours for $40!) An electric drill, in hindsight I wish I’d gotten a drywall screw gun Drywall setting drill bit (to countersink heads into the

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How To Run New Laundry Vents

Yes, this is a post about how to run dryer duct work and reroute HVAC vents. Why would I make a horribly punny reference to a 22-year-old Disney hockey movie if it weren’t? But first, some background. By the time Monday’s post was going up, David the framer was here putting the finishing touches on our new laundry room by adding that fourth and final wall (the one that will have the door that leads to the hallway). He also added the wall that will eventually house the frosted door to the current storage / future TV room. I took the picture from this side to get around that lovely plastic sheet, which helps us

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