Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Er, Should We Say “U-Fab Freebie”

For years now, one of our favorite places to score awesome fabric on a budget has been a local shop called U-Fab (also run by a young married duo!). Everything from our headboard to our old dining room curtains to the backdrop we used for last week’s pregnancy announcement has hailed from there. And now that they’ve launched an e-shop, we’re excited to do a giveaway with them. And not just any giveaway – a $500 gift card giveaway! So, you can either stock up on fabrics… or take their custom upholstery services for a spin (they do bedding, pillows, window treatments, and even furniture). Plus, they’re all-around nice, fun-loving people. Please use the Rafflecopter

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Leveling and Dry Fitting Tile In An Outdoor Area

Since we last checked in on the sunroom last Thursday, Sherry and I have managed to check four more things off the list: installing two ceiling fans, cleaning the concrete floor, leveling it, and cutting the tile and planning out our pattern (aka: dry fitting). But excuse me while I backburner the fan installation tutorial (I promise it’ll pop up in a few days) because we’re just too psyched to share those three tiling prep steps with you guys. We made some serious weekend progress – more than we thought we would – and we couldn’t be more excited about the tile pattern that we landed on. In fact, I’m probably outside tiling as you

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The 411 On Baby #2

Holy cow, I think you guys had even more questions than the last time we did this after announcing that Clara was on the way! But it was fun to dive in and answer as many things as we could before hitting 4,500 words (because honestly that’s pushing it, even for us). So here are a whole lot of answers for you sweet folks who had us beaming all day on Wednesday after our little bun announcement. We have so much to be thankful for, and you guys are definitely on the list. Will you find out the sex of the baby? Are you taking a blood test to find out early, like Maternity21? Do

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A Marble & Dark Wood Bathroom

It’s official – we’ve got bathrooms on the brain after our impromptu update over the weekend. And not just bathrooms, but closets too. Fortunately, Meghan and her husband Sean shared a double-dose of makeover-y goodness with us: their bathroom and closet. Go figure. So check out their recaps below while we try our best to resist shopping for tile… I didn’t have a blog when you guys kindly featured our kitchen redesign, but you inspired me to start one and it has been a really fun way to document our adventures! I thought I’d share with you our bathroom renovation. It was extremely small, extremely dated (think 1960’s fab), and smelled extremely bad (no idea

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How To Add Exterior Trim And Then Caulk And Paint It

First of all, thanks so much for the unbelievable outpouring of well-wishes for our announcement yesterday. It was great to share our news with you guys. While madly trying to keep up with the 3,000+ (!!) comments, our afternoon post sort of fell by the wayside, so we figured we’ll share an afternoon one today with you instead. In the meantime, Sherry is cutting and pasting a ton of questions from yesterday’s comments and working on Friday’s Q&A post for you, and I’m here to shake my tail feathers about managing to cross a few more things off our sunroom to-do list in this week (yes, feel free to picture that). So let’s talk about

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Now Expanding

We’re excited to announce that the Petersik family is under construction again. Yup, someone’s gonna be a big sister… and she’s pretty darn excited about it. The proverbial bun in Sherry’s oven is scheduled to arrive in April, and we’re both elated to be growing. (I’ll happily put on some sympathy weight – it’s the least I can do) Burger, on the other hand, has no idea what’s going on. But he’s generally excited about life, so that’s nice. Sherry’s first trimester wasn’t without a few trials (a fender bender that had us worried for a bit and some pretty intense morning all-day sickness for the lady-wife to name a few) but we’re so grateful

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How To Make A Fall Wreath

I don’t know if it’s the crisp autumn breeze or the explosion of all things pumpkin on Pinterest, but a few days ago I woke up jonesing to make a fall wreath. Yes, some people have chocolate cravings, but I have craft cravings. Come to think about it, I also have chocolate cravings. Is there a correlation? Someone needs to study this. Some of you have even been requesting more small crafty projects (like these) which have always been in the mix, but lately we’ve been so busy painting, stripping wallpaper, & renovating the sunroom that little homemade updates seem to have fallen by the wayside. But not anymore. The truth is we’ve missed them

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Fab Freebie: The Art of Home

You guys know we’re suckers for a good house portrait, so we’re happy to be serving one up this week thanks to watercolor wizard Michelle Schneider of The Art of Michelle. She creates all sorts of good stuff, but we’re drawn the most to her charming renderings of people’s homes and gardens. It’s always fun to see the different twists that artists put on painting their most structural of subjects. You might find someone’s pet popping up in the yard of some of Michelle’s work – or some sheet music adding some texture to a tree or a roof. This week she’s giving one of you a custom 11 x 14″ house portrait, which is

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Ripping Up Old Wall To Wall Carpet

I realize four months isn’t an eternity, but it was about 3.9 months longer than we wanted to spend with the last vestiges of the old carpet upstairs. Especially since it was in our bathroom. Ah, carpeted bathrooms. We didn’t remove it – or the portion that extended into our closet – back when we removed the rest of the upstairs carpet because we knew we didn’t want hardwood floors in the bathroom. So, in the absence of a new flooring decision, we just left the old stuff. The old, wrinkly, creamy stuff that blended right in with the creamy walls and creamy trim. But yesterday morning (yup, about 24 hours ago!) we decided to

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Blogiversary 6: You Guys Are Hilarious

As our sixth blogiversary winds down (and we stow the t-shirt launchers and airhorns until next year) we wanted to thank you guys for the good times. Hashtag thanks for the memories (please tell me you’ve seen this). Last year’s blogiversary concluded with a geeky graphic round-up of some of the most interesting stats from our annual reader poll, and this year nearly 30,000 of you guys took the poll at the end of Wednesday’s post, which was a pretty big contrast to our first blogiversary poll where I copied and pasted all 199 comment responses into a spreadsheet by hand). It was interesting to see what has changed since last year’s infographicized recap (and what

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Blogiversary 6: Rugs Under The Rug

We’ve shared a few behind the scenes posts about how we take on side gigs, like this one about how our lighting collection came together, and this one and this one about our experiences with writing a book. So we thought it would be interesting to share a side gig that didn’t work out, despite putting lots of behind-the-scenes hours into it. You know we like to share the good, the bad, and the ugly – so why hide something that ended up being a big ol’ bust when we can tell you guys about it? Without naming names, a very nice company that makes wool/cotton rugs approached us and said “Let’s do a Young

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Blogiversary 6: Did Somebody Say Oprah?!

The funny part about talking about our Oprah-related experience during blogiversary week is that we talked about almost appearing on Oprah’s show during our very first blogiversary week (spoiler: we got bumped last minute by Ty Pennington and some twins in need of a makeover). So it seems, now five years later, that things have come full circle. Was that an O pun I just made? Yes. Yes it was. First of all, the exciting news. For anyone who wasn’t able to watch or stream the short film when it aired on Sunday, the kind folks at OWN have generously provided a clip for us to share here. So here it goes. The nice thing

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