Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

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Fab Freebie: Save Room For Cake

***This giveaway is now closed. See who won below!*** Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Our lucky winner this week is… N Shirley (whose favorite dessert “to both make and eat is Virginia Apple Pudding – even makes the whole house smell good!”) Sounds delicious. Congrats! We’ve had a few questions about why all contests aren’t open to international readers, so here’s that info for you. We actually ask every single vendor who approaches us to do a giveaway if they’ll ship internationally and we remind them that the more folks are included, the more exciting it is for everyone. We LOVE you all and always want to open our giveaways to as many people as possible! It

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How To Frost A Window

We wish we had a giant bathroom update to share, but we’re at that phase of the project where some of the bigger things have been checked off (building a shelf, painting the walls) and a few little mid-point upgrades are on the agenda since we’ve been flying around a lot lately (10 flights in 11 days!!). But now that we’re back home, the next bathroom installment will be bigger (either framing out the mirror and making a shade from some amazingly bold fabric that I’m obsessed with) so hopefully this tides you guys over. And since I hate to mention “amazingly bold fabric that I’m obsessed with” without showing it to you… behold: Remember it

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NYT, RVA, Chi-town & the T-Dot

Quick note: Tomorrow (Saturday) we’ll be in Dallas at 11am at the West Elm on 5307 East Mockingbird Lane for cookies, cocoa and a book signing (more info here). We’d love to see ya there! We’re back with a little book/life/tour update (#warning it’s long). Admittedly, it’s sooner than we had originally planned (our last one was a week ago), but lots has happened and we’re just brimming with news and pictures so we’ve basically overflowed. Somebody get a mop. Or maybe a tissue. Because we’ve gotta start with some crazy awesome / amazingly humbling news. We just learned that our book has become an instant New York Times bestseller. I can’t believe I just

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Paint Storage & Pegboards In Our Basement Workshop

Go navy! Please don’t misinterpret that previous sentence as a taking of sides in the long-standing Army / Navy feud. I’m 100% neutral on the rivalry. And if anything, my dad was in Army. But what am I doing stirring up trouble? This post is about the basement (and it’s up early since we’re on a flight)… so let’s dive in where we left off: this hot mess of a shelf. This is where we’ve been storing haphazardly placing paint cans and other paint-can-shaped items. It has been the very antithesis of organization for the nearly 24 months that we’ve lived here. In fact, these are two boxes of items that haven’t even been unpacked

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Finally, Now We Can Show You The Playroom…

Quick note: Tonight we’ll be in Minneapolis at the West Elm on 3879 Gallagher Drive for cookies, cocoa, and a book signing at 6pm (we hear this parking lot is small, but there’s a larger lot at a nearby Macy’s as well as a ramp that leads to a parking garage which should hopefully help – as will getting there early, carpooling, or getting dropped off). More info here. We’d love to see ya there! Remember how you guys were asking us to take photos of the holy-cow-that’s-crazy playroom packed with secret book projects, stuff for our yard sale, and future projects so we could share them when the book was finally out? Well, I don’t

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Our Top Decorating Tip: The Middle Makes No Sense

So many people ask us how we know we’re going in “the right direction” in the middle of a project. We try to describe our method as one big study in trial and error, with course correcting and tweaking along the way, but we also haven’t talked much about how we try to at least come up with a general plan in the beginning of a project, and then we try to stick to it loosely as we go, since it gives us a “path” to follow. Why? Because (sing it with me): the middle makes no sense. It’s a phrase that John and I toss around a lot as we go and we realized

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House Crashing: Lesley & Jeff

We can’t wait to share this house crashing adventure because you’ve actually seen how Lesley & Jeff live…. but that was over 4.5 years ago (before they had two sweet little boys and moved into a new home for their growing family). It’s actually a mid-century split level house in a charming woodsy neighborhood right here in Richmond, and of course Lesley and Jeff have completely made it their own. But first, just to refresh your memory, here’s their first house – which we crashed all the way back in 2008! But back to their new place. You guys might remember that Lesley is a master of making ugly things into assets. For example, she

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Fab Freebie: Roll On Some Royalty

*** This giveaway is now closed. See who won below!*** Sorry for the late notice (travel is messing up my winner picking mojo!), but the random winner of this stencil prize is… Jen (who once “made a chevron painting with instructions I found on Pinterest and it turned out great”). Congrats Jen! The love of stencils that first blossomed when we did our office walls only grew stronger when we tackled a couple of stenciling projects for our book (on pages 26 & 282). So in the spirit of sharing the love, this week’s prize comes from the maker of the very stencils that we used in all three cases – Royal Design Studio. We’re

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How To Make A Fake Roman Shade

Alright folks, you know I have a love affair with fabric, so when I realized I had never attempted to make a roman shade (even a fixed one that’s just for looks) I knew I had to get on that. So here’s how I got my fake roman shade on. First of all, is this bare kitchen window begging for some fabric action, or what? It actually leads into the sunroom, so it didn’t need anything functional to draw/close, which is why I opted to go the faux shade route (actually all of the bamboo blinds in our first house remained open since I loved the light flooding in, so if you’re not a shade-drawer,

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Weathering New England

Quick note: Tomorrow (Saturday, November 10th) we’ll be in Chicago at the West Elm on 1000 W North Avenue for cookies, cocoa, and a book signing at 1pm (arriving on the early side might help ya get a jump on the line). More info here. We’d love to see ya there! Who’s ready for our once-every-two-weeks recap of our book tour-y adventures (here’s the first one)? Just us? Okay. Here we go anyways! #warningitslong As most of you know, weather has been kinda crazy in the Northeastern part of the country lately. Between Hurricane Sandy two weeks ago and this spontaneous Nor’easter this week, well, things have been a little crazy. And it just so happens

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Staining A Dresser With A Decorative Flower Pattern

We just flew back from Boston (and boy are our arms tired, har-har) but since we shared our freshly painted bathroom with you guys this morning and we didn’t want to leave you hanging with just one post, we got this Reader Redesign together in the airport for ya (throughout all this travel, we’re doing out best to keep blogging as usual). I know we typically share full room makeovers, but this furniture upgrade had such a creative twist that we had to pass it along. We loved that Beth and Nick rescued this old to-be-trashed buffet with the help of some wood stain applied in an unexpected way. Here’s what Beth had to say

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Painting The Bathroom Elephant Gray By Benjamin Moore

We’re about to hop on a plane back from Boston (which is thankfully not canceled, despite the snowy weather), so this post is up a little early for ya but your comments might not pop up for a little while. Anyway, we’ve debated potential colors for the walls in this hall bathroom from almost the day that we moved in. For a while we were on the deep blue train, but after putting that in the adjacent guest bedroom, we’ve been going back and forth between several other options. Dark? Light? Colorful? Muted? We finally found our focus when we put that bright fish painting on our whitewashed shelf. Suddenly we had a direction. Toned-down-but-not-completely-neutral

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