Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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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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Taking Down Those Old Curtains

Yup, we finally called it. The old floral curtains couldn’t last another day. So we made a few jokes about Kim Kardashian’s Met ball dress and got ready to say goodbye. They looked pretty fancy, but they just weren’t our style, so it was time to take them down and make a nice little donate pile for Habitat for Humanity. The funny thing is that when we got up on chairs and lifted them down, we discovered that these babies were pinned and even screwed right into the window at times! Cracked us up. I mean, we’re no strangers to using fabric remnants and wood braces screwed into windowsills, but seeing white pushpins sticking out

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April Superlatives: Inside, Outside & Acting A Fool

Um where did April go? The shower-iest month seems like a distant memory by now, but it was filled with outdoor makeovers, bathroom updates, shades a plenty, and even a bit of rapping. So we’re taking a moment to appreciate all the things that we checked off of our list as a motivator to hopefully make the coming months just as productive. Oh and you can catch superlative recaps of the last 2+ years here (in 27 easily skimmed posts instead of nearly 900 long ones!). Plus, we’ve got a little clue about what’s happening next week in the mix below… Most Photogenic: Next Monday’s giveaway, which should make all of you fellow Instagram addicts pretty

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How To Use A Paint Sprayer On Trim & Doors

If we’ve made one thing clear about our new house, it’s that we’re not crazy about the trim colors… Somewhere between the Williamsburg Blue and the Muddy Mauve, our painting hands began to quiver with excitement. Or was that dread? Not sure. We reasoned that while all of the carpet was up and before the new hardwoods went down, we should take advantage of the can-get-painted subfloor and go ahead and tackle the upstairs trim. Correction: trim and doors. Sixteen doors to be exact… which we removed and de-hardwared first for easy painting. Attempting to quickly paint four bedrooms and closets worth of trim along with a long hallway plus nine windows (with tons o’

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A Dragon Themed Kids Birthday Party

Who smells smoke? Don’t panic, that’s just Clara’s dragon party, rollin’ into town (er, the internet?). Note: you can’t really smell this party through your computer, so if you smell smoke, please look into it. This year’s party was lower key than our last two (here’s her first birthday party, and her worm party from last year) and even though it was rainy and wet outside, eight kiddos and twelve adults jammed out inside. It was fun. And Clara made me cry. She’s just so big and sweet and hilarious and I’m the luckiest mom in the world. Plus, dragons. I mean if that’s not a trump card for a party, I’m not sure what

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How To Make A Whole House To Do List

Exciting times guys. Operation Ditch The Blue Trim is currently in progress! So while we sweat our way through un-blue-ing things on the second floor – that’s four bedrooms, a nice long hallway, and at least 10 doors – we thought it was high time we shared our master to-do list for the new house (and for anyone jonesing for trim-painting info/photos, we hope to finish up and be back with a full report for you on Wednesday). These posts came about when people asked how we organize all the stuff we have on our to-do list. We explained that we basically have one long run-on document that we update as we go. Folks kept

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Making A Homemade Painted Fabric Background

Clara turned three on Tuesday (Threesday?) so we’ve spent the last few days marveling at this wonderful little lady before us and wondering where the heck the time went. And just like we did for her two previous birthdays, we marked the end of another 12 months by customizing the fabric backdrop for her photo project. You might remember that this tradition started on her first birthday, when we used my handwriting to create a pattern that we printed on fabric using Spoonflower (here’s how we did that). Spoonflower came to the rescue again last year, but we took advantage of Clara’s artistic abilities and converted one of her scribbles into the fabric that time

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Having Fun Painting Fabric

Someone hit the big 0-3 this week and that same someone is pretty excited about it! As you may have read over on Young House Love, to culminate this year’s photos we again let Clara help design a custom “fabric” for her birthday picture. This time around it meant letting her paint directly on two yards of white cotton fabric. And as usual, we wanted to share some of our favorite outtakes with you guys. Like this one, where we asked her how old she was going to be. Pretend you don’t see seven of those fingers. Here’s her Home Alone pose. There was also a nice amount of marveling at the glorious mess that

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Pricing And Picking Oak Hardwood Flooring

Let’s talk about wood, shall we? As we mentioned on Tuesday, we decided to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs along with the stairs themselves have a nice medium toned oak already (pretty similar to the hardwoods in our first house that ended up being super dog/kid friendly). As for where to get it, first we looked on craigslist to see if anyone had a large quantity of something in the right tone/amount (no dice) and then we headed to Lumber Liquidators, since we’ve had luck with them when it came to buying hardwood floors for half of our first house back in 2007

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Halfway Through May

It’s time for our monthly moment of thanks to the sponsors who make the other 30+ posts possible. Without them we might not have food on our tables or clothes on our backs (and hungry, naked blogging doesn’t make for good DIY morale). So feel free to check out some things that caught our eye this month, and peruse our usual round-up of discounts at the bottom of the post – plus a hint about Monday’s $500 giveaway! This “Splatter Stacks” print from Hoot Design Co. Because books make me happy. Shades of Light‘s dhurrie rugs, like this honeycomb guy that comes in five colors. Our pal Dusty’s DIY backsplash install as featured on The

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