Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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The Kitchen & Living Room In The Showhouse

Happy May and, well, Happy Opening Day of Homearama! Yep, our showhouse is officially open to the public as of today, along with the six others in the show. Deepbreathsdeepbreaths. Since we last showed you the office, butler’s pantry, and main bedroom (along with the en-suite bathroom & closet) and then took a pause to have a baby, let’s pick back up in the main living spaces of the house: the living room & the kitchen – which you can see from the floor plan below are both pretty big zones on the first floor. The walls in both the living room and the kitchen are Simply White, and then we layered in some colorful

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Fab Freebie: Peel The Love

Got a wall that’s looking kinda plain? Well, the people at WallsNeedLove have an answer in the form of $500 to spend on their site (and it’s open to anyone in the world!). They’ve got a whole slew of decal and vinyl designs to romance your space (and everything’s removable if you ever want to change things up). In addition to cool patterns and shapes in their decal design packs, they’ve also got wallpaper, prints, and even an “Easy Stripe” solution where you can customize the size and color for any stripe pattern that you can dream up. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it

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Making A Waterproof Vinyl Changing Pad Cover

When we last left off in the nursery, we had painted the closet door green, but still had a few lingering functional things that we needed (like a changing pad cover, a hamper, and a bin for dirty diapers) as well as a plan for the wall behind the crib that we had been debating. Update #1. You probably remember when we were considering this fun arrow wallpaper for that spot (among others) but thought it might be a little busy on that side with all the built-ins, so imagine our surprise to find a changing pad cover in the same pattern on Etsy. Teddy loves it. So much, in fact, that he has already

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How To Make A Deck Gate

Today we’re going to show you how we constructed an easy DIY deck gate to help keep our dog Burger from escaping. He loves laying in the sun out there, but we wanted an affordable and attractive way to stop him from running off after a squirrel or something. We also have a newborn and a toddler, so the gate will help with them too. And the whole thing only took a couple of hours and cost us less than $30! We don’t have a fence on our property, and he has gotten more brazen lately and may even wander into the neighbor’s yard. So far our solution has been this very classy plywood boards

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Less Is More (Unless You’re Talking About Oreos)

Life has been busier than ever for us – and there’s nothing like having a baby to confirm your true priorities. We’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately: what exactly are our goals? What are we working towards? Hoping to gain? The answer, we realized, was definitely not more blog hits or traffic or approval. Honestly we both feel unsettled by the idea of our blog growing any larger, and we look fondly back on the earlier days when we worked less, slept more, and spent more quality time with our family and friends. This little website of ours has already surpassed every expectation we ever could have had for it. So what are

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Listy VonListerstein

I’m not going to lie. These days this is pretty much all I want to do (add Burger, Clara, and John in there and I’m even more mooney-eyed and kissy-faced). But to everyone who requested an updated Listy post, I finally got ‘er done. We last shared our to-do list in November, so this check-in is well overdue – and I figured it could make us feel somewhat accomplished just to look at all the stuff we’ve crossed off since then. Picture me making Zoro-esque slicing sound effects with every slash (Teddy thought it was hilarious). These posts were born when people asked how we organize all the stuff on our to-do list and I

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How To Seal Ardex Concrete Counters

Thanks for all the kind words on Teddy’s arrival last week. We’re home now and settling into life as parents to a newborn again (anyone have tips for getting one to sleep between the hours of 10pm and 4am?), so we’ll definitely be on a lighter schedule, but one project that we rushed to check off the to-do list around 48 hours before Teddy was born was finally sealing our kitchen’s recently Ardexed counters. We’ve shared a few other “how to seal” tutorials (like this one about de-hazing & sealing tile, this one about sealing grout, and this one about sealing cork) so here’s what we settled on for protecting our Ardex counters. We read

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He’s here!

We’re thrilled to introduce the newest member of our family, baby Teddy! On Wednesday, April 16th at 8:51 am, Theodore Freeman Petersik was born wielding a tiny drill weighing in at 8 lbs on the dot and measuring 19.5 inches long. We’re crazy in love with him, including Clara who just can’t stop kissing and snuggling “her baby.” Especially when he whimpers or coos, it becomes her personal mission to soothe him. Teddy was named after my dad’s dad Theodore (who went by Teddy his entire life) and his middle name honors John’s maternal grandfather (Freeman is John’s middle name too). Teddy is already proving to be a little spitfire like his sister, although he

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Fab Freebie: The Hook Up

HEADS UP! Since baby boy is scheduled to arrive tomorrow, we’re spending some special family time with Clara today. So we’re posting this week’s giveaway early, and hope to stop in later this week (maybe on Thursday?) to officially introduce our little man. But back to the freebie. This week we’re hooking three people from anywhere in the world up with a $500 Target gift card along with a complete set of our hooks (you can see them all here) in the finish of their choosing. I feel like this is the part where I should bust out an Oprah-esque “You get an octopus! You get an octopus!” but it just doesn’t have the same

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How To Paint A Room

The office ceiling and walls are officially painted, which is good news because we’re at T-minus 48 hours until this baby’s scheduled delivery. Note: the trim is pure white in here (the same color as the desk in the middle of the room). No idea why it’s looking a little cream – maybe just the time of day/lighting? It’s still looking really stark in here (holy cow, who watched Game Of Thrones last night?), so we can’t wait to add: But even though we’re only around 10% done, it has come a long way since its former days of blue-trim. And there’s nothing like some final-hour pre-baby hustling to get your blood pumping. In the

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A Tour Of The Showhouse Bathroom & Closet

Continuing our showhouse-heavy week of reveals, we’re bringing you a bunch of after photos from three more spaces – the main bedroom’s en-suite bathroom, its attached closet, and cool little atrium space. We showed you the main bedroom on Tuesday (along with the office and the butler’s pantry) so it only felt natural to continue our virtual tour where we left off. The attached bath and closet sit off a corner of the main bedroom and are separated by a space that we’ve been lovingly calling the “atrium” (it’s really more of a vestibule) which you can see above on the right side. Here’s the floor plan for a clearer map of how that area

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Our Line Of Hooks & Rails At TARGET!

To everyone who has said “go rest!” or “we understand if you have to catch your breath after this showhouse marathon and before this baby comes” we are SO APPRECIATIVE of the encouragement. We’re still over there every day shooting each remaining room for afters/source lists and are also hoping to record a video tour for you guys, but we fully intend to cash in on that whole sit-down-and-breathe-for-a-second thing as soon as we finish documenting everything. But amongst the last crazy week of showhouse stuff, another crazy thing happened that we just had to talk about for a second. We can’t begin to tell you how awesomely surreal it has been to see our

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