Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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2012 Holiday Gift Guide: For Little Ones

We’ve received a bunch of requests for a Christmas gift roundup for kids, so here are a few items that we’re loving (most items are under $25 – some are even under $12, and nothing is over $49). 1. Clara loooves painting and definitely has an appreciation for vibrant colors, so I think she’d love something like this $25 watercolor print from Etsy. Another fun gift idea would be to get some colorful paints and a few pieces of cardstock for some good quality time spent painting together. 2. Clara’s always enamored with toys like this in waiting rooms and other kid’s houses, so when John’s mom asked for links to things she might like,

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Simple Christmas Decorating

Let’s talk about the festive-ification of various surfaces. Booyah. $herdog had some fun with the mantel… as she is apt to do. And since $herdog is also apt to share the play by play of her various surface-switcharoos with you guys, especially around the holidays, you better ho-ho-hold onto your hats. Because it’s about to get festive up in here. Spoiler alert: the console table and the built-ins weren’t safe either… The mantel makeover was pretty simple, I hung our stockings by the chimney with care, and stacked some faux presents that I made a while back on the mantel (more on how I made those here). Oh and see that glittered stag at the

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Fab Freebie: Sew Simple

***This giveaway is now closed – see who won below!*** After clocking 10,000 entries under 24 hours, we’re already back to crown a random winner of the SINGER One sewing machine. The lucky person is… Angela (who says she’s a 1 on the sewing skills scale: “I can sew a straight line, but only if someone threads the machine for me first”). Congrats! I’ve never touched a sewing machine in my life, but I’ve heard Sherry’s passionate muttering from the next room while using hers. Which is why anything labeled “Our easiest to use machine!” sounds compelling. And we’re so (sew?) excited that Singer is helping us give away a SINGER One – a feature-packed

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How To Paint Extra High Vaulted Ceilings

“Oh what a feeeeeeling, painting on the ceeeeeiling.” Why yes that was a Lionel Richie reference. You’re welcome. It was time to get some paint up in this heezy. And by heezy, I mean sunroom… hence the furniture being all piled in the center. But before we get to painting, let’s talk about the half-brick wall in this room – since you guys offered up lots of thoughts and suggestions in the last sunroom post. Some had suggested covering the drywalled portion in brick veneer or reclaimed wood. Unfortunately the dry wall sits in front of the brick, so there’d be this weird lip between the real brick and the veneer/wood (so we’d prefer not

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November Superlatives: Rams, Moose, & Sailfish

Update: Yeesh, sorry about that oddly reoccurring Amazon/B&N.com “out of stock” message. To everyone who’s contacting us about getting our book (thank you!), you can order a signed copy here (they can ship it right to your door) or you can try calling/visiting a Barnes & Noble in your area (we hear they’re easier to find in stores at the moment). Happy Friday y’all. Now that we’ve checked off a bunch of projects this week (decorating our tree, framing our bathroom mirror, and ORBing our hardware) along with a craftsman house crash, a DIY link-fest, and a look back at a bunch of mistakes we’ve made, we thought we’d take a moment to look back

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Five Home Mistakes We Made (We Learned The Hard Way)

I was lying in bed thinking about what random lessons we’ve learned in over nearly seven years of homeownership and DIY, and I realized it might make a good post. Shoulda woulda coulda – ya know? Here’s what I came up with (which is by no means all-inclusive, but hopefully will help someone else out there who’s just learning as they go like we’re apt to do). Who’s ready for number one? Ok, since I can’t actually hear you guys (but clearly you’re all screaming “we are!”), I’ll continue. 1. It’s not always best to blindly follow one sentence tips in home improvement magazines without knowing if they’ll work for your system/house. For example, we

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How To Spray Paint Your Old Brass Door Knobs

You down with ORB? Yeah you know me. The deed has been done. After years (yes nearly two years!) of planning to upgrade every last old brass door knob in our entire house, we finally got ‘er done. Strike up the band! I can’t hear you. Can I at least get some cow bell? Yup, we removed 19 knobs with the intent of oil-rubbed bronzing (aka: ORBing) those babies. First we tried this method with a few exterior knobs, handles, and even a doorknocker a while back, just to see how they would hold up before doing the whole shebang (and I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t really have energy for the whole shebang up

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House Crashing: Lovely At Last

We’re working on wrapping up a few projects for you today – pics and details to come! – plus we have a well overdue house crash to share. It feels kinda unnecessary in this case, but we’ll say it out of formality: Meet Nicole (and her smiley son August). If that picture alone didn’t make you say “Wait, that’s Nicole from Making It Lovely!” then allow us to say “that’s Nicole from Making It Lovely.” You guys know we like to crash homes of all types (we’ve shared nearly fifty of them, from modern apartments and traditional homes to eclectic or retro spaces or crazy bright and colorful ones – each from big bloggers, small

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Book Projects By You (Over 300 DIY & Craft Projects!)

As soon as we decided to number all the tips in our book over two years ago we hoped to someday create an online component where folks could upload their take on any of the projects along with the project number. And that day has finally come! So not only will folks be able to access this page right here, we’ll also be linking to it directly from our book page – so if you’re ever bored and want to check out a ton of reader submitted projects that have been completed after checking out our book (which will just keep growing over time) this post should eventually be chock full of them! It’s sort

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How To Build A Wood Frame Around A Bathroom Mirror

But first, who framed Roger Rabbit? I dunno. I can’t remember how that movie ended. But as for who framed out our hall bathroom mirror? We did. Putting a dressed up frame around a plain builder mirror is one of the easiest ways to upgrade a bathroom, especially if you’re working with the tile and not doing a total gut job (which we thankfully are in this room since the classic b&w tile is in great shape). It’s actually kind of crazy that we haven’t really tackled this yet (well, we sorta did it here I guess, but this mirror has been naked for the last two years since we moved in). There are companies

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Fab Freebie: Homes On Homepage

*** This giveaway is now closed. See who won below! *** An early Christmas present (in the form of this $500 Visa gift card) has randomly chosen to come to the hands of… Mary (whose dream house would be a “big cozy log cabin out in the woods” complete with fishing pond, swimming pool, hot tub, huge whirlpool tub in her bathroom and a giant walk in closet. Her fantasy list doesn’t end there, so check out her comment for the rest). Congrats Mary! With a URL as broad as Homes.com, there are a lot of topics you might think they cover. Because people buy homes. They decorate homes. They do home improvements. You get

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How To Make An Ombre Gradient Christmas Tree

In the esteemed words of Snooki… the party’s here! Woop woop, the tree is up. And this year now that Clara’s a big girl who we think can handle real ornaments (well, we got a few shatter-proof ones for the very bottom just to be sure) we went with a gradient from white to hot pink to red. Booyah. Or as I’ve been saying way too often: boom goes the dynamite. Oh and we have a bunch of meaningful/special ornaments that we love the most, but we save those for our real mini tree (we got a tabletop one last year and loved it so much that it’ll be a tradition). So we’ll post about

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