Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Getting Schooled

If the recently arrived “Back to School” season is cramping your summer-lovin’ style, maybe $500 to Target will boost your mood? It’s courtesy of Coupons.com, who rounds up tons of coupons (including online, mobile, and printable versions) for thousands of shops and products. So you’re covered whether you’re sending someone off to school, or just doing some everyday shopping at Target (there’s some pretty great home stuff there these days). 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 (but we’ve got an international one coming next week!). Click to View

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How To Hang And Hem Curtains

This isn’t as exciting as our big laundry room reno (nothing is!) but let’s talk about curtains for a second. Remember when our bedroom was all naked and afraid? (Sidenote: if you’re not watching that show, you should be). We added frames and hung curtains at the same time, but it took us way longer to actually finish said curtains. We knew we wanted nice white linen-like ones for our dark-walled bedroom, and had heard a lot of good things about the Lenda curtains from Ikea around blogland (they’re their nicer/thicker white curtains with a convincing linen-looking weave, as opposed to the cheaper/thinner/breezier ones we’ve tried in previous houses). After seeing – and feeling –

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Demoing & Reframing The Laundry Room

Let’s talk about knocking out a few walls and framing a few new ones, shall we? For two weeks we had virtually no progress in our laundry area, except for rethinking our approach and considering contractor bids. So by comparison, things happened so swiftly over the last few days that it nearly put our heads on spin cycle. What started out looking like this… …is now looking a bit more like this. Yowza. Let’s rewind to early last week, when it clicked that maybe we could do more ourselves and sub-contract certain jobs out instead of relying entirely on one contractor and his team. As you may recall from this post, Option 4 is our

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Beginning The Laundry Room Makeover

After much deliberation, our laundry area is finally seeing some action. Well hello there, washer…. shall we take this to the bedroom? No literally, we took it to the bedroom. JEALOUS? Seriously though – it has been a busy week around here (mostly with unrelated book stuff) but we’ve managed to get some dust flying upstairs too. Long story short, thanks to a lot of thought (and a lot of encouraging comments from you guys) we’ve decided to do more ourselves, while managing some pro sub-contractors directly. Our second contractor estimate (after the initial $5,000 one) came in at $3,300, which was a more digestible number, but he had an impending vacation – and actually

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Painting Our Garage Doors Urbane Bronze

Favorite project ever! Okay, not really at all. (I just couldn’t help trying to match Sherry’s enthusiasm from yesterday’s post), but this is a nice simple way to update basic garage doors so they look a little more stately. Back when we had our house’s exterior patched & painted right after moving in, we opted not to get the garage doors painted since we knew it was a task that we could easily tackle ourselves. Well, 12 months later and it’s finally done. These two doors were sporting the same cream color that the old trim was before it went white, which wasn’t a very good look since it was nixed everywhere else. So we

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How To Cover A Wall With Fabric

Favorite project ever! Ok, I probably say that to myself every month or two, but this one might reign supreme for a while. Especially in the small/easy division (our sunroom reno and Teddy’s built-ins might have given it competition if it fell into the heavy-duty upgrade category, but there’s no way it belongs there because it was so simple). Ladies & gentlemen (gentleman?), I give you… Clara’s closet: I’ve been obsessed with the idea of covering the back wall of Clara’s closet with something fun for a while, especially since images like this inspired me to add some playful to make it feel more like a little hideaway within her room. Right after we moved

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Celebrating Seven Years Of Marriage

Every year we like to celebrate our “I Do”s by doing stuff, like recreating our wedding menu, taking a day trip near our engagement spot, cooking up one of our favorite honeymoon meals or even taking a big ol’ trip to Hawaii. This year was no different as we continued some of our anniversary traditions (like our annual picture, which a bunch of you asked about) and we threw in a couple of new celebrations too, like showing our wedding video to Clara for the first time. It was kind of comical because we realized we had no other way to watch it than on the miniscule screen of John’s old camcorder, so we were

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Fab Freebie: So Flexible

Here’s your chance to win a new paint sprayer plus $200 toward your next paint project. The Wagner FLEXiO 890‘s base provides the power and also acts as storage for everything, making it quieter and lighter than a traditional airless sprayer. At the other end of the 11.5ft hose is the handle, which includes controls for both the strength and size of the spray. And you can use the quick-change nozzle to swap in the fine finishing attachment for more flexibility. 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,

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Our Laundry Room Makeover Plan

Thanks for all of the laundry room ideas last week, guys. We spent a lot of time mulling over every last suggestion, and even got some quotes for a few things (like moving the hookups, the doorway, and possibly bumping out a wall). One common alternate suggestion (we’ll call it “Option 3”) was to take our original Option 1 and rotate the laundry appliances 90° so that it’s out of sight. Then we could put access to the storage room on the back wall so there wouldn’t be any more of that walk-through-one-room-to-get-to-another-one issue. It was an interesting idea for sure. We hadn’t considered it before because, well, it would require moving all of the

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How To Spray Paint A Brass Chandelier

Continuing the recent trend in our house – Clara is the latest family member to get a ceiling fixture in her room. And methinks Sia might break out in song about it (“from the chan-de-li-eeeer!”). If it looks familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it before in our dining room. Well, a previous incarnation of it at least. We’ve always been intrigued by this chandelier, which was here when we moved in.  The finish wasn’t totally our style, but the swirls and flat arms (it almost looks like an intricate paper chandelier) always made us think it could be a good candidate for Clara’s room. The main problem was that it was too big. Even without

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Buying A Teil Duncan Painting For Our Anniversary

As of Monday, John and I have been married for seven years. Or a hand and two fingers, as Clara likes to joke (“what’s seven?… A HAND AND TWO FINGERS!” *maniacal laughter*). As you can imagine, when you get married on 7/7/07, your seventh anniversary feels like a special one. The golden birthday of anniversaries, if you will. We went to Hawaii for our fifth anniversary, and have always thought we’d end up going somewhere awesome for our seventh (Australia is the ultimate dream – maybe for our tenth – but for lucky seven we were thinking about somewhere in the Caribbean). But as this summer approached we realized the last thing we wanted to

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Fab Freebie: Light Saber

‘Tis grilling season. And Saber Grills will be sending one of their high-end grills someone’s way, along with $100 to help kick-off their next cook-out. The winner can choose between two stainless steel grills: a full-size Saber model ($999) or its built-in cousin ($1,199). They’re created by outdoor cooking experts (hence their collection of recipes), so they’re designed to get the most flavor out of your food with things like infrared heating for quick and efficient cooking. Plus they boast cool features like commercial grade stainless steel and halogen lights on the hood for nighttime grilling. Neighbors are about to be jealous. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second

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