Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Add To Your Collection

“At last, I have all of the furniture, accessories, and items for my home that I’ll ever need” said no one ever. Okay, maybe just said Sherry never. But if you’re like her, then we’re sure you’d find some worthy way to spend the $500 that Home Decorators Collection is giving away this week. Whether you shop in one of their stores, online, or by catalog, they cover just about every nook of your home – from furniture and bedding to lighting and rugs – they even have stuff like bathroom vanities. And they like to run deals too (today lots of stuff is 10% off with free shipping). Please use the Rafflecopter widget below

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A Soft Neutral Paint Color For The Nursery

Goin’ to the chapel and we’re…. gonna have a bay-yay-yay-by. Ok, so that’s not how the song goes, but it is the paint color that we chose for the walls of the nursery (which is pretty sweet considering the name of the paint that we used in Clara’s nursery in our last house was Proposal). Honestly, color names don’t sway us. We’re pragmatic pick-our-favorite-swatch-not-our-favorite-name folks. But it’s always nice when they’re not something ominous. You know, like Sleepless Nights or Zombie Spawn. Back when we shared our plans for the room with this makeshift mood board of sorts, a few commenters asked if we were going to paint the walls that bold green tone. We

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The 5 Best Power Tools For Home DIY Projects

You guys often ask about our must have tools for DIY projects, and the truth is that it still catches me off guard that I’m The Guy People Ask About Tools. Growing up I remember taking trips to Hechinger (anyone remember those?) thinking “who would ever willingly go to a home improvement store?!?” And when my dad gifted me a set of screwdrivers in high school I wondered what the heck I’d use them for. But here I am today – 32 and the proud owner of more tools than I can count (and still fewer than I’d like) – including some of those same screwdrivers from my dad so many years ago. Home ownership

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Books For A New Big Sister (or Brother)

A few folks have asked what we’re doing to prepare Clara for a younger sibling, beyond getting her a baby boy doll when we found out it was a boy in there (she still has a deep love for Captain Barnacles – more on him here and here). Mostly we have just been chatting with her about how she’s going to be a big sister and she seems really excited to “give him bottles and change his diapers and carry him *like this* and share my toys.” We’ve also tried to involve her in fun activities for him, like letting her pick out a stuffed toy for him (she chose one with a mustache)… …

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How To Make A Terrarium

As a bunch of you saw on Facebook and Instagram, we went on a giant lumber run, which means there’s a whole lotta building that’s about to commence in the nursery. But first we have to paint the walls and ceiling, so we hope to knock that out today and tomorrow (and have an update for you guys on Monday). Three cheers for finally saying goodbye to those door-overspray marks on the wall! And while we get our paint on, I thought I’d share a nice and easy “anyone-can-do-it” project (involving living things, ahh!). Most importantly: there’s a tiny deer living in a tiny glass house in our house. And the good news is that

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Review Of Our Nest Thermostat

Blogging is sort of a funny hamster wheel because we’ll do, buy, install, or build something, blog about it, and then we’ll move onto blogging about other projects, purchases, and updates. So it means we’re not always great at keeping you posted on those older things that we’ve already talked about since we’re so busy sharing new stuff. Which explains why we get update requests for things in our archives all the time. So here’s a big ol’ collection of them for you guys, which marks the second one in this series (here’s our first one from a few years back, so you can check out if we covered other topics you’ve wondered about there). Our

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Built-In(security)

We have a nursery update for you guys in the form of two new purchases that we brought home, assembled, and will now attempt to customize. After this planning post we pictured ourselves diving right into constructing our two custom built-ins to flank the crib, but then we realized that before we could actually start on those, we needed to make some decisions about what we wanted them to look like (base cabinets with doors and a bookcase top? lower cabinets with drawers instead? dressers that we could top with shelves and molding? tall armoire-ish things for each side of that wall?). So after a lot of inspiration-room browsing and comparing measurements/product choices on a

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Fab Freebie: Finger Lookin’ Good

This week’s giveaway is not only available worldwide, but it actually comes from the other side of the globe! Two sisters from Singapore founded Fictive Fingers, where they combine original illustrations, traditional art techniques, and simple construction methods to produce small edition fabric goods. From bold pillows to simple sling bags, they used water-based and eco-friendly inks to print their designs on a variety of items (many of which you can shop for by supporting their Pozible Project). So this week, someone’s gonna score a $250 gift card to get their fingers on these beauties. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop

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Painting A Bathroom Ceiling And Adding Trim

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day, guys. We’re back with a fully finished bathroom paint & trim project (we mentioned our plan here last week, and you saw a sneak half-done peek of it in the house tour video on Friday). So here’s what it’s looking like now: Which is a pretty stark contrast to what we started with. You might remember that we removed the glass shower doors pretty early on, but then we didn’t touch the room again until recently waging war on the wallpaper. It’s a tough room to photograph due to all the doorways and nooks – especially when trying to get the ceiling and the floor in one shot. So forgive

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House Tour: Winter 2014

Something about filming the video tour of our showhouse progress made us realize that we were overdue for one of our own house (that and the fact that so many of you have been asking for one). And considering the last one we made was the “before” of this house, overdue is actually an understatement. So please forgive our delay and enjoy this little jaunt around our very much in-progress pad: In the video you might notice a few things… There are several “disaster zones” in the house (the dining room, the guest room, and the unfinished storage room) which are basically a catch-all dumping ground for things that we haven’t figured out a place

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Planning The Showhouse

The past couple of months have seen quite the flurry of activity in the Homearama showhouse department, which you might remember as the house that we’re helping to design and decorate (along with an amazing team of builders, architects, and other pros) to benefit Habitat For Humanity. You can read some background on it here and check out a floor planning post about it here, but the exciting news is that in a matter of weeks the lot has gone from a patch of dirt to an almost fully constructed home. It has been amazing to witness, so here’s two months of progress boiled down into six pictures: A couple of weeks ago we even

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Vintage Gold Chairs In The Kitchen

Maybe we should change the name of our site to WCL (Wire Chair Love), because guess who found four awesome vintage wire chairs for the kitchen for $15 a pop? This girl (*points to self with thumbs, notices there’s peanut butter on one thumb, and licks it off while beaming at pretty new chairs*) Allow me to paint you a picture of chair-finding glory. We’re walking into our favorite local thrift store (Love of Jesus on Midlothian for any thrift-lovin’ locals). We pop in there a few times a month just to see what’s up, and 9 times out of 10 we leave empty handed, so it’s not like we’re always finding amazing things, but

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