Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Something Fishy

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** Our random winner of a full house window cleaning is… Christy U (who would also love to outsource getting her car detailed this spring cleaning season). Congrats! Spring means lots of things: sunshine, flowers, and – oh yeah – cleaning. I don’t mind some forms of cleaning, but I won’t pretend that I like washing windows. Luckily (well, lucky for one of you) the window-lovin’ people at Fish Window Cleaning are gonna help you ring in the season with a full house window cleaning! That means the inside and outside of all of your windows & windowsills (they’ll even remove and clean your

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How To Build A Fireplace Mantel

Ready for more progress on the fireplace? Good, ’cause there’s been lots. Last you saw, we had tiled the hearth and part of the surround with marble subway tile. That was the easy step. Well, at least the more straightforward step. Because our next assignment – building out the rest of the frame – involved the addition of a lot more materials. Let’s start with the MDF frame. We decided to work with MDF for the first time since it’s lighter, cheaper, and smoother than wood would be (plus it’s now sold without formaldehyde and it’s FSC certified). A 4ft x 8ft panel cost nearly $35, but the good news is that we only needed

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State Of The Uterus Address, 2013

And now for a bonus Friday afternoon post (aw yeah, I’m a rebel without a cause). Every day on average I get about five readers either asking if I’m pregnant or straight up “calling it” via comments, email, twitter, pinterest, instagram, or carrier pigeon. Which adds up to answering that question – and crushing the dreams of those calling it – around 150 times a month, and a whopping 1,800 times in the last year. The prego-chatter has even hijacked a few comment threads on posts about non-uterus-y topics like room updates and tour infographics. Holy bump-watch, batman! We haven’t seen one of those around here since 2010. First I’ll get one little detail out

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An Amazing Big Boy Room With Patterned Wallpaper

Psst- We usually only post once on Friday, but Sherry will be back with a random little “bonus post” for ya in a few hours.  We always get requests for cool kid rooms, and since we have a girl bean, and shared her recent big-girl-room evolution, we thought it would be fun to share the sweet big boy room that Jesse whipped up for her son. Here’s her letter: Hi Sherry & John! My little boy is officially now a “big boy” (hold on while I wipe a tear…). So I redid his room according to his “wish list” which included: lots and lots of colors (I mean color galore), a place for all his

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How To Hide The Cable Box With A Remote

When we last left off with our little media cabinet we had cleaned all of the grime off (with a Magic Eraser of all things) as well as removing the musty smell from the drawers with vinegar, but we mentioned that we still wanted to hide the cable box in one of the drawers somehow, and also had to seal the wood with something to lock in the color and shine. Well, we finally got ‘er done thanks to some technology and some good old fashioned elbow grease. So here’s how we went about getting that cable box off the ground. We drilled a bunch of large holes in the back of the top middle

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Photo Booths And Boards & Battens

So March is kinda on the way out already, but before we get too giddy for spring (who am I kidding, we’re all hyper for nicer weather) we’re taking uno momento to look back at February. We’ve learned that stopping to appreciate our accomplishments is key when it comes to keeping our momentum up, and February was a month full of travel-detox, hallway-upgrades, and big-girl-room-projects. So here’s a recap of the shortest month o’ the year (plus a peek at something new at the end) in our usual yearbook superlative style. And if you want to look even further back, we’ve got each month of the last two years summarized right here (in 25 posts

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How To Tile A Marble Herringbone Fireplace

With our fireplace refacing plan all worked out, and our supplies waiting at the ready, it was time to dive into step 1: TILE! So we’re here with every last detail, from prepping and tiling to grouting. In case my sketch below is still indecipherable to everyone but me, I highlighted the areas of the photo below that are going to get the tile treatment. The tile border is only about 7 inches wide because the rest of the brick is going to get framed out with wood and MDF (which will layer on top of the tile, hence doing tile first). Oh but it’s smart to check the code in your area to make sure

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Fab Freebie: Sherry’s Birthday Wish

***This giveaway has reached its cap and is now closed – see who won below!*** You guys shut this puppy down with 10,000 entries in less than a day. Wow! So we’ve already selected our random winner. She is… Rhonda (who thinks she’s gonna ask for a juicer – to go along with her Christmas blender). Congrats! Tomorrow is Sherry’s 31st birthday. So a few weeks ago I asked her if she wanted to do anything special giveaway-wise to celebrate. She looked dreamily towards the sky, a smile spread across her face, and she said “I want to do a Jonathan Adler giveaway and I want a picture of him holding ceramic animals and grinning

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Planning & Buying Materials For A Fireplace Makeover

Having fresh paint in the kitchen has given us a chance to look at the room with, well, fresh eyes. And it has sparked our plans to take the fireplace to the proverbial next level (we mentioned building out the mantel and retiling the painted-over tile hearth a few times like here). It has already come a long way since we moved in, thanks to removing (and craigslisting) the old stove and giving it a paint job. But with the rest of the room feeling a little more upgraded (there’s shiny penny tile all the way to the ceiling on the other side of the room), we’re itching to amp up this side too. As

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Infographing It Up

Back when we did this post full of fun charts and graphs (concocted from the results of our 2012 reader survey) we learned that you guys are just as into infographics as I am. So in that spirit, I tabulated and illustrated a bunch of random facts and figures that we never want to forget from our recent book tour. Sort of like an info-scrapbook that encapsulates that crazy time in our lives (in under 100 words) so we can always look back on it. So without further ado, here are all the places we went, the adventures we had, and even the pounds that we put on along the way. Enjoy! * Each of

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How To Add Remotes To Your Bedside Lamps

Number five is alive! (Short Circuit, anyone?) I went with that intro because we recently added a helpful robot to our household (you know I’m into gadgets – I think my favorite post ever was this one entitled Super Toilet). Let me start from the beginning. We’re big proponents of having lights that you can reach from bed. It sounds obvious, but for a while the only light in our first master bedroom was overhead and operated by the switch by the door (which feels miles away when you’re lying in bed half asleep). So until we installed the wall sconces two years into living there, we experienced a battle of wills each night to see

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Painting Our Kitchen A Soft Blue Color: Colorado Gray

Can I get a kitchie kitchie ya ya da da? (name that song) Also, we painted the kitchen. SURPRIIIISE! We’ve mentioned that we’ve been flirting with the idea in our last two Listy McListersons (here and here), and when Nonna came to hang with Clara this past week we jumped at the chance to tear the kitchen apart and get to it. Just to keep it real, we grabbed this shot to demonstrate that when one room is getting love, some nearby room is getting dumped. It’s like saying “kitchen, will you accept this rose?” and meanwhile we’re sending the dining room packing (with a bunch of extra baggage). There’s usually one of these “displacement

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