Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Holiday Decorating Ideas

Nothing makes a house (especially one that we’ve lived in for 6 months) feel like a home like a little holiday coziness. So along with decorating the front of the house, and setting up our tree, each year we love to document how we festive-ify the rest of the house (here’s that post from last year, two of them from 2011, one from 2010, one from 2009, and one from 2008). This year was an especially exciting year because it’s our first Christmas of living in this house… which means I have new spaces to play with – like a different fireplace mantel, and stairs for the first time in seven years of home-ownership! For

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House Crashing: Textured & Southwestern

To everyone who has asked where our House Crashing posts have been lately, we’re sorry for the hold up and we’re excited to share this one! It’s a well overdue tour full of inspiration, affordable finds, and a really unique style perspective. Plus it’s full of transformation photos because Lindsay and her husband started with such a rough “before” of a house (they totally saw a diamond in the rough). So let’s poke around and see what they’ve done, shall we? Here’s Lindsay now. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband and her Great Dane, Gracie – and was so gracious to virtually invite us all over. This is what the living room

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Making Wood Slice Christmas Ornaments

Ok, we have a fun little craft for you guys, complete with an easy how-to, and some festive photos. But first of all, we finally got our tree decorated this weekend… We’ve shared a bunch of different trees with you guys over the years, and each year it has been fun to switch a few things up with a new “theme” like classic silver and white, citrus inspired lemons and real dried oranges, pastel pink and soft green with silver bows, crafty paint strip ornaments and ribbons, and a fun white to pink to to red gradient tree from last year. But this year there was a new theme in town: family. We just wanted

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Fab Freebie: Warm Wishes

Well, the weather outside can be frightful this time of year, so staying curled up in a warm bed sounds pretty darn delightful (and it can be your everyday reality if you’re Burger). This week Crane & Canopy is making that temptation even harder to resist with a $250 gift card. They’ve got luxurious designer bedding – duvet covers, sheet sets, pillows, throws, etc – without the designer prices. So this gift card is an invitation to transform your bed with your pick of some colorful patterns, cozy textures, and even some intricate embroideries. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter (it might take a second to load, but it should eventually pop up

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Baby Petersik is a….

… HE! We haven’t done one of these posts since 2010, so it feels kind of strange and exciting to be sharing this kind of news with you guys again. We found out on Wednesday, and then scurried to tell our families over the last 48 hours. Of course, the most important person to tell first was Clara. We didn’t want her to learn the news from an ultrasound technician, so we scheduled a playdate for her with my dad during this particular appointment. Then when we were back together, we surprised her with a baby boy doll (which are surprisingly hard to find, we learned). It was a cute little “OK, look in the

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Four DIY Holiday Decorating Craft Projects

Two weeks ago, we shared our Children’s Hospital makeover project with you guys, and this week we got to start actually installing the room. Holy holly jolly, Batman! We’d share wider room shots except we’re still waiting on around 40% of the stuff to get delivered loaded in. In the meantime, we thought we’d share the details on four easy and affordable DIY holiday projects we completed for the space! A faux fireplace with real branches An interactive paper bulb garland A Gilded cardboard letters A gradient painted Menorah 1. A Faux Fireplace With Real Branches The first one’s our little faux fireplace that could be used to turn any spot into a kitschy, temporary

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How To Hang Wreaths On Your Windows

“Can we make it like the Home Alone house?” That was Clara’s quote about decorating the outside of our house for Christmas. She loves “Kevin and Bros” as she calls them (yes, Buzz = Bros to her), and has even picked up that they have a similar type of house to ours – albeit a ton bigger and fancier. So we did some family brainstorming (listened to Clara tell us what we should do) and came up with the following plan: wreaths hung in every window with gold ribbon (no other colors were even close to being right according to Miss Clara) some lighted garland around the front portico plug-in candles in every windowsill like

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Adding Three New Kitchen Pendant Lights

Alternate title: spending a junkload of money on lights, but feeling pretty good about it. You guys know we’ve been excited to replace the light fixtures in our kitchen, and, well, the time is now. Decisions have been made. Light fixtures have been bought. And dreams have come true. We’re planning to keep all three of the new lights after our big Phase 2 renovation, so instead of skimping on placeholders we opted to go all-in on three things that we really love – and that we’ll hopefully remain in love with for the long haul. We’d like for all three of the new lights to relate to each other and “play nice” but actually

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Fab Freebie: Art For Two

Finding one-of-a-kind art that you love isn’t always easy, so we’re psyched about this week’s giveaway from ArtTwo50. They’ve got a virtual gallery full of tons of original art from over 500 artists ranging from abstracts and portraits to landscapes and beyond – all priced at $250 including shipping. While you can browse their art on their Pinterest page, the real fun starts when you download their free iPad app, which allows you to take a picture of your empty wall and virtually “try on” different pieces before making your selection. You can even post on social media to get feedback from your friends first. And speaking of friends, ArtTwo50 is giving away a $500

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Introducing Our Dog To Our New Baby

A few folks were asking on Instagram for some specific info about how we introduced Burger to Clara, and how we tried to make the whole transition from living with a dog to living with a dog and a baby as smooth as possible for all parties involved. We definitely did a little googling and even chatted with our vet about what we could do to make things easier on Burger (and us) when this whole GIANT LIFE CHANGE happened, so here’s what we ended up doing, and how it worked out. 1. John left the hospital for about half an hour to bring Burger a blanket with Clara’s scent on it after a day

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A Soft Blue-Gray Paint Color For The Kitchen

Another Monday, another leap forward for our kitchen. Here’s where we were last week, after priming and painting the trim, doors, crown molding, and paneling white. And here we are today, with the walls freshly coated with a little Nelson Blue (the light blue color that we’ve planned on from the start). Shall we all let out a communal sigh of relief that the walls aren’t covered in wallpaper anymore and there are no more spackle holes and raw drywall from under those cabinets that we removed? Together now. Ahhhhh. Update: There have been a few questions about the intercom and why we didn’t remove it yet, but we’re not sure if we’re going to

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Our DIY “Thanks Jar”

For the fourth year in a row we’ve filled up our little thrift store jar that we etched with the word “Thanks” back in 2010 (you can read how we made it here). So before everyone dives headfirst into the gravy bowl (what? that’s not a thing?) we thought we’d stick with the annual tradition of sharing a few glimpses of some things that ended up on the list this year. Spoiler alert: one of them’s you guys. So let’s just pause for a moment so I can tell you how good your hair looks and how nice you smell and how flattering that shirt is and most of all, how grateful we are that

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