Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Our House’s Original Owners

One of our favorite posts in our entire archive is this one about hearing from our first house’s original owners. It was so much fun to see photos of their family in our house back in the 60’s, and we studied every inch of each picture and relished every detail that they shared in their letter. We were also friendly with the people who sold us our second house, so although we never heard from the original owners, it was really great to know the sellers who had lived there for 22 years! So we always hoped to hear from the original owners of our current house. For a while… nothing. And then it happened!

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Hacking A Thrift Store Coffee Table With Blue Stain

You know we love ourselves some furniture tweaking… But first, guess what arrived?! I’ll give you two hints: this and the photo below. Admittedly, both are very strong hints. Maybe I need to work on being more mysterious. Despite Sherry’s promises to throw a ticker tape parade when our new outdoor sofa showed up, its arrival was unceremonious. Sherry was on a conference call. A big truck pulled up. I handed off the baby to Sherry and ran outside. A big box came out of said truck. Yada yada. Clara was out with Grammy, but when she arrived home she declared it “perfect!” and said “I love it!” and that was that. This is also the last appearance

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Organizing Our Home Office

As promised, we’re back with the details of how we organized the six new shelves and eight new drawers in our office, along with the drawers in my floating desk and the filing/printer cabinet on the other side of the room. In other words: what went where. It’s awesome to have so much more storage space, both out in the open and behind closed doors, so let’s spin over to the left and face our new desk/bookcase wall first. Here are the animated GIFs that John mentioned on Monday. You were on the edge of your seat for these, right? Or were you excited about donuts? I can’t remember. Here’s the bookcase to the left

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Fab Freebie: Ultra Handy

How does a fancy new tool and $500 sound? That’s what Dremel is dishing out this week with their new Dremel Ultra-Saw, a 3-in-1 tool that’s like their Saw-Max (which I own) except it’s cranked up a few powerful notches. In addition to making flush and plunge cuts in all sorts of materials (wood, metal, plastic… even tile and stone!) it can also do surface prep like grinding off old thinset or stripping paint off metal and concrete. And Dremel is throwing in a $500 Visa gift card so you can take it for a spin (literally) on whatever project you dream up. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a

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How To Take Your Own Newborn Photos

You guys have asked some questions about taking our own newborn photos, making Teddy’s birth announcement, taking Clara’s four year photo & making her annual video, and what I got for Mother’s Day (spoiler alert: it’s a super sentimental photo book of kid quotes from Clara), so this post is a smorgasbord of all that documentation. As I wrote this I thought “maybe John and I are more ‘document-happy’ than most people” – you know, to take so many photos and make a yearly video, etc. But then I realized that most people with a blog probably lean towards a love of capturing things, and a ton of our non-blogging friends and relatives have phones

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Adding Fjalkinge Bookshelves To Our Home Office

I’m The Fjalkinge Of The World! Our office has made perhaps its most significant functional improvement since we started talking about it back in March. We have six spacious shelves and six extra long drawers thanks to two tall systems that flank the desk. They’re balanced looking and full of function (our previously bare wall was sorely lacking). In short: we love them. And the soft close drawers are the icing on the office cake. It’s not finished (still want window treatments, a rug, art, a ceiling fixture, etc), but it’s inching a lot closer than it was a week ago. As weird as it sounds, I think it was having Teddy that snapped us

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One Year Into Living In Our House

This week marked our 1 year anniversary of moving into this house. So to celebrate that milestone (while we work on an office update to share on Monday) we thought we’d drop some infographics up in hizzere. YE-AH, BOY! As an homage to this stat-tastic “before” post, we picked out some fun facts and figures from the last 12 months-ish (and we dropped a preview of our in-progress office project in there for good measure). For a more all-inclusive rundown of the progress we’ve made over the last year, complete with before & after photos and links to each project, you can check out our (freshly updated!) House Tour page. Or if you’re in the mood

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Finding The Best Outdoor Sofa

The combination of all this nice weather and hosting Clara’s party outside have us back on The Outdoor Update Train. Chugga chugga, baby. Just picture me wearing spit-up-stained overalls with a striped hat to shade my mom-to-an-adorable-baby-who-wakes-up-all-night eyes. It’s particularly exciting because we worked for a few months last year to renovate the sunroom by ripping up the old carpet, removing the old broken doors, lofting the ceiling, getting some electrical work done, installing a plank ceiling, hanging two fans, and tiling the floor. There’s currently a daybed out there (an indoor daybed from West Elm, which has no long-term business being outside) along with an ancient Ikea coffee table. And two of our dining

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How To Make Wall Decals

If Teddy ever forgets what letter his name starts with, he now has a whole wall to remind him. That’s right, it’s always “T” time in there. Har-har. As we mentioned a few weeks ago, Sherry and I settled on a plan for a subtle accent pattern on the wall between the built-ins. Our original plan was to paint the Ts, like Sherry did for Clara’s raindrops. But after some of you suggested things like vinyl decals in the comments, we decided to give that a whirl instead. Vinyl has become a pretty mainstream option these days, especially for kids’ rooms. It’s removable and affordable, so we see the appeal. This tube – which is

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A Full Tour Of Our Showhouse On Video

Here we are, folks. After over a year of planning, second guessing ourselves, more planning, sweating, and filling our car with vases and egg chairs, we’ve reached the end of the Homearama Showhouse tour. So in celebration of completing this whole-house marathon of sorts, we’re kicking off this post with a whole-house video tour. Nothing too high tech. Just me stumbling through the house: Photo-wise, there are few rooms on each floor that we still haven’t shared/sourced for you. So let’s slide through the dining room, powder room, mudroom, guest room, guest bathroom, and the laundry room. We love dark wall colors in a dining space, so for this room we chose Kendall Charcoal, which

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Fab Freebie: Artfully Yours

Gallery walls just got easier. This week’s prize (for anyone in the world!) is $500 to Artfully Walls. In addition to offering a wide portfolio of art prints, they’ve got built-in tools for designing your own gallery wall arrangement. So selecting pieces, sizing and arranging them, framing them, and even testing out real paint colors in the background is nice and simple. Or you can browse their suggested walls, which are arrangements that their design professionals have already curated. They even come with recommended paint colors and hanging templates to keep it all frustration-free. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up below

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One Of Our Favorite Bedroom Paint Colors

We finally painted the guest room! And Burger, as you can see, is THRILLED. No more over-spray marks from door painting forming a lovely “accent wall” over the bed. Huzzah! The color? Sparrow by Benjamin Moore. It’s a color we’ve loved for a while now (it was one of our whole-house-color-palette guesses from last year) and we thought the guest room was the perfect place to try it out since it gets a lot of natural light from that giant triple window along the back wall. Since it’s a deep color we used a tinted primer first, and as usual I did the cutting in while John did the rolling. Oh and we painted the

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