Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: World Play

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!*** And the lucky / randomly selected / soon to be quite worldly person is… Briana (who says “London, Ontario is special to me. That’s where I first lived on my own, went to University, met my husband, and I just loved that city. Plus, it has the best spaghetti restaurant ever, Spageddy Eddy’s!”). Congrats! And for everyone else, scroll down to the contest entry details for a sweet little discount the Wallpapered folks added for everyone. One look at Pinterest and I don’t feel quite so alone in my fascination with maps. So to everyone else out there who digs a little cartography

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The Slow Journey From Junk Room To Playroom

About a month ago we were walking around the park and Clara pointed to a dogwood tree and said “wow, that’s a big big tree in a big big world.” John and I cracked up. So now when I think of Clara’s playroom/big girl room, I also think of the big big tree and the big big world of ours. Hilarious. Anyway, back to the room that we have affectionately (and ironically) called the playroom. Remember that it looked like this when we moved in? And then it got all cluttered up with junk and looked like this? And then we organized it with the help of my mom and it looked like this? And

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On The Road Again

Man, it feels like it’s been a month since we had a book tour update for ya. Oh, that’s because it has. We were on hiatus while bookstores and retailers focused on the holiday rush (instead of hosting authors) so last week’s adventures in Texas and Florida were our first stops since finishing up in DC and Richmond in early December. And as much fun as stops in northern cities like Boston, Chicago, Toronto and Minneapolis were – we were excited to enjoy some warm weather in the southern half of the country. #longpostwarning But then Austin had to go and look like this… Texas was apparently in a month-long drought until we (and our

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Adding Storage With An Ikea Expedit Bookshelf

We’re trying to redo the sunroom on a budget using as much that we already have as we can (since we have other projects like Clara’s big girl room, a guest bathroom, and a porch & carport overhaul that we’re saving our pennies for). But there’s a delicate balance between function and saving money. Sometimes you can use 100% of what you already have and achieve 70% function in a room, or you can spend a little money along with using 90% of the things you already have and end up with 100% function. So as you might guess, we’re going for 100% function on a small budget. So far all we’ve bought is one

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Adding A Kitchen Banquette Eating Nook

We always love a big kitchen renovation when it comes to Reader Redesigns, but sometimes making over just the corner is enough to get us inspired bigtime. Just check out what Deme and her family did to the breakfast nook of their dated kitchen. Here’s her email: Hi Young House Lovers! Your blogs is one of the highlights of my day and I wanted to share our  breakfast nook with you. After removing a thick lacquered chair rail and scrapping layers of fruit patterned and 70’s wallpaper, we ended up with some pretty fugly untextured walls. We started with a dark dungeon of a corner and ended up with something bright, fresh and uber functional

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Our Whole House Color Palette

Q: Hi guys! I was snooping around your blog to try and find a floor plan of your new home with the colors you used for each room (like you did in the post from Feb 24/2010) but I didn’t find one! I would L-O-V-E to see what your new house looks like now, with a visualization of the color scheme per room. Is this possible, or am I asking way too much? HAPPY NEW YEAR by the way! – Danielle A: Oh yeah – we’re way overdue on that! So when Danielle submitted that comment here, we officially bumped it to the top of our to-do list. We did one of them for our

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How To Make Wood Frames For Large Art Or Posters

This is it. My most favoritest art ever. Yes I know that’s a big statement. A big statement with a non-word, at that. But it’s all deserved because I’ve framed and hung my bike art and I’m in love. Not only with how the final product looks, but how easy and cheap it was to achieve. So forgive me if my enthusiasm is more annoying than usual today. I’m a man with a love of all things bike and all things easy. Wait, that sounds wrong… So here’s that wall before with my retail display cast-offs just pitifully taped to the wall. And here they are all framed up. In frames that only cost us

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Fab Freebie: This Is Your Pilot Writing

***This giveaway  is now closed – see who won below! *** Clearly I’m not the only one who loves a good writing utensil (and Target card) as this giveaway reached our 10,000 entry cap within just 24 hours. Nice work team! So that means we get to crown a winner early. That lucky writer is… Heather F (who “writes notes on the back of envelopes and then loses them. Argh.”) Congrats Heather! This sounds kinda weird, but I’m very particular about my writing tools. So when the folks at Pilot noticed that we tend to write with their products, they wanted to thank us by passing some freebies along. But you know we don’t take

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Some Sunroom Art

From the moment we painted that brick wall in our sunroom, we were itching to get some art hung. And we finally found time to get ‘er done after returning from a six-flights-in-four-days blitz on Friday. It’s weird how much more “lived in” a room feels when you slam some art on the walls. Seriously, I know the feeling of dragging your feet on the hanging of the art, but after nearly seven years of house-fixing-up, it never ceases to amaze us how that little step makes such a difference. In continuing with the general theme of this sunroom design, we’re trying to spend as little money as possible and just use things we’ve already

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Our Free Annual Calendar Template Is Finally Here For You

It was December 30th when it struck me: “Cripes, we don’t have our 2013 calendar ready.” So I spent a couple of hours on New Year’s Eve morning and a couple more the next evening cranking out our fourth homemade calendar – and as always we’re sharing the file so you guys can download it too (and sub in your own pics and quotes to personalize it for yourself) just like we’ve done last year, the year before, and the year before that. I’ll be honest, over the years these calendars have proven more decorative than functional. At this point they may just be considered a tradition. It started back in 2010 and for the past

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How To Store Christmas Decorations

Q: Can you post about how you store all of your Christmas decorations? Since you rotate the ornaments on your tree each year and have a large tree and a smaller tabletop one as well as exterior decor and mantel stuff I wondered how much space it all takes up. I have an attic like you, which I think is where you store yours, but I don’t really have a system so it feels chaotic. Any tips for getting mine under control? Thanks! – Meghan A: We actually get this question a lot, so you’re not the only one wondering, Meghan! We store it all in a 6 foot by 5 foot area in our

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December Superlatives: Projects Plus Parties

We’re sneaking in one last look at December, in case there was anything y’all missed – and also just to remind ourselves that we didn’t spend the entire month in a Christmas cookie-induced food coma. We’ve noticed that taking a second to appreciate the items that we have checked off the list each month inspires us to get going on even more projects that we have yet to tackle. So it’s a nice breath of you-did-it-now-don’t-stop to keep our DIY momentum a’ flowin. And if you want to see more of last year (or even the year before) we’ve got each month summarized right here (in 24 posts instead of about 840 – not bad,

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