Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Our Landscaping Makeover

In honor of moving week, we’re going to share a post full of empty house pics (and a list of what stayed with the house) in a day or two, but we also wanted to take a look back at our exterior progress one last time. We’ve done outdoor video tours in both 2011 and 2012, so this video that we shot a few weeks back (right before we started packing) makes it our third and final installment. *Before you press play, I’m intensely awkward when I’m the one holding the camera and talking, so be warned that I hit on the deck. And it doesn’t respond. Now that we have that out of the

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The First Day In Our Third House

We love being able to look back on Day One at our previous house (as clammy as the photos make us) – so we took a second to walk around our new house on Day One (in this case, the day all of our big furniture finally got moved over) and snapped these lovely photos. What do you guys think? Gorgeous, no? Our work here is done. The living room: The kitchen: Other side of the kitchen: The office: The dining room: The guest room: The hall bathroom: The spare room: Clara’s room (here’s us frantically trying to get it ready so she had a place that felt like home – and a place to

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Did We Make A Profit Selling Our Second House?

We answered this question after the sale of our first house (spoiler: we bought in the bubble and sold in the recession), so now we’re back to do it again – but this time the coins stacked a bit more favorably, thanks both to selling in a slightly better market and by not sinking as much into this house’s improvements (it helped that we didn’t need expensive upgrades like a new roof and windows this time around). We managed to sell this latest house for $23,000 more than we bought it for back in 2010. And our best estimate is that we put around $14,500 into improvements that stay with the house (i.e. not furniture

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Fab Freebie: Arhaus To Your House

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** And our randomly selected winner is… Alyson (who says they use their sofa for “cuddling with our dog while watching tv or reading. My day doesn’t feel complete without cuddle time!”) Congrats! Sit back. Put your feet up. Take a load off. Because someone’s winning a new couch this week, courtesy of Arhaus – up to over $2,500 in value! Arhaus covers a wide range of rooms (from dining to bedroom) in a wide range of worldly styles (from traditional to unique). So to showcase that spectrum, this week’s winner will get to pick one of three sofas: the curvy and tufted Club sofa, the

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What We Did To Sell Our House Faster By Owner

Ok, so today our house looks like this. So – spontaneous decision! – while we get settled and find our underwear, this week is going to be moving week! Turns out you guys still wanted to hear a whole lot about the sale of our current house. So let’s do the dang thing. Here’s what we plan to cover in honor of Spontaneous Moving Week: How we staged/sold our house (including a glance at our real estate flyer, a list of what we changed before showings, etc) What we made when we sold our house vs. what we put in- budget breakdown included! Empty house pics (dude, it’s trippy to see your house all echoey

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A Fresh Start

We’re spending today packing things up, and although we thought it would feel monotonous and tiring, it’s oddly exciting. Even the act of wrapping a bunch of cups in newspaper feels like “IT’S HAAAAAAPPENING! We’re really DOING IT!” Can you believe Clara looked like this last time we moved? Three birthdays (and a significant amount of hair) later, my baby’s gone. Sniffle. But there’s a pretty cool kid (complete with an arm tat) in her place, so it’s a fair trade. Life will change with this big move, and our blog and our process for the new house might feel different to you because we’re approaching it, well, differently. More than any other house that

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How To Install Oak Hardwood Floors

Get on the floor. Seriously, wood, get out of those boxes and do your thing. Oh how I wish it were that easy. Turns out laying oak flooring takes some serious time. But man oh man is it gorgeous when it’s down. So it turns out wood-floor-laying, my friends, is time well spent (picture me saying that as confidently as Ron Swanson says “turkey can never beat cow”). Don’t mind the dusty little path emerging from Clara’s room. We still have a few more spots to sweep… As we mentioned here, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs (plus the stairs) have nice

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Chip & Joanna’s Farmhouse Kitchen Reno

Something about renovating a farmhouse just sounds so idyllic to me. And Joanna’s farmhouse kitchen renovation doesn’t disappoint. She and her husband took it from closed off and dated to open and, well, check it out yourself… Hey guys! I live in Texas and my husband and I are in the middle of renovating our 125 yr old farmhouse. We have been married for ten years, have four kids, and have lived in 9 homes. All of which we bought, lived in, and flipped. After we move into the farmhouse, I am done. I hope. When my husband first showed me this house, I walked right out of it and said there is no way.

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A Full Rundown Of Home Makeover Projects & Links

Packing up our current house and new-house-floor-laying continues… … but we didn’t want to scoot outta our beloved current house without one more updated Listy McListerson full of everything we’ve checked off and a few things we’d love to have done if we were staying here longer (those are bulleted at the bottom). #warningitslong Just for fun, here’s the very first list that we shared for this house back in 2010. I love how plans seem to evolve as you live somewhere and figure out what we love/want as you go. It’s also really funny how quickly your eyes adjust and you forget what you started with, isn’t it? Seriously, a week after we knocked

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Adventures In Hardwood Flooring

Late last week we were finally able to start installing our hardwood floors at the new house. It’s going well (we’re getting it done with our own four hands), but it’s proving to be a time intensive project – which is not necessarily the type of project you want to take on when you’re short on time (we’re scheduled to move in this weekend and would like to be completely done with four bedrooms and a long hallway by then – egads!). So once we’re breathing a bit easier and a bit further along, we’ll write up a play-by-play of how it all (literally) is going down. ‘Til then, enjoy this still-dusty pic of the

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Fab Freebie: Indie-stagram

*** This giveaway is closed – see who won below! *** This week’s lucky random winner is.. Keelan (who’s favorite picture of herself from her Costa Rican honeymoon, saying “my husband took it of me at the end of the trip while I was lying in a chaise lounge and I just look the epitome of happy – relaxed, tan and soaking in every minute of our adventure.”) Congrats! We’re spending today with our family for the Memorial Day holiday, but we wanted to drop in with a giveaway for you guys. Are you a fan of Instagram? A lover of gallery walls? A sucker for things that are fast and easy? Well, read on,

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How To Make Fabric Tea Bags For Kids Tea Parties

Guys, I did it. I broke out the sewing machine to make something for Clara’s third birthday. It’s a little tradition of ours to make her something instead of buying it since she gets a ton of store-bought presents from family and friends. I even used her big ol’ stash of monthly photo fabrics, which have also come in handy for making her a quilt, a table runner, a beanbag, and even a birthday banner (remember that epic battle of woman vs. sewing machine?). It all started when I saw these fabric tea bags on Pinterest and thought they’d be really fun for Clara’s play kitchen since she’s so into making food and pretending to

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