life.younghouselove.comYoung House Love | DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans

Young House Love | DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans Young House Love DIY Home Decorating Projects, Tutorials, & Shenanigans Our Current House Our Previous Homes Our Richmond House Our Beach House Our Duplex Before & Afters Our Current House Our Richmond House Our Beach House Our Duplex Our First House Our Second House Our Showhouse DIY & Decorating Tips Most Popular Home Improvement Painting Cleaning & Organizing Crafting & Art More . . . Podcast Getting Started Show Notes Shop Our Fav Home Finds Our Lighting Line Our Books Book Club Picks Black-Owned Businesses | By Sherry Petersik | January 13, 2021 | A Loveseat For The Sitting Room A bunch of you got a sneak peek at this change thanks to Instagram Stories right after the holidays, but here’s a quick update about the new loveseat we got and what the sitting room is looking like these days. We got the loveseat on Overstock, and of course now it’s out of stock – but I did find it here and here in the darker color (ours is the “light gray” one). So far we’re loving it, and it really went a long way in making the whole area feel like a legitimate hangout space. It’s also super comfy, which is really what matters (and you know this post is going to have some [ Read More ] Filed Under: Decorating , Our Florida House | By Sherry Petersik | January 6, 2021 | Updating A Covered Porch With Floor Paint & A Hanging Tent If there’s one thing we’ve learned about living here, it’s that we do a ton of living outside. Between each at-home learning break the kids are out there running around, we make s’mores at our fire pit every week or so, we sit on our front porch and watch the neighborhood dogs go by, and we often eat or hang out on the second-floor deck (we even work on our laptops up there on especially nice days – which is where I’m writing this post right now). We can really feel the house working extra hard for us thanks to the location/climate (good weather definitely encourages us to be outside a lot), but also due [ Read More ] Filed Under: Home Improvement , Our Florida House , Painting | By John Petersik | December 16, 2020 | How We Built An Easy Modern Fireplace Mantel… Just In Time For Stockings! We mentioned in this year’s holiday decorating post that we wanted to get some sort of fireplace mantel built this month and, well, Santa delivered! ::pats self on back:: Yes, setting a goal to have a place for hanging our kids’ stockings is a little random, but we were happy to have the motivation to check this project off our list sooner rather than later. If you recall, our fireplace looked like this when we moved in: Here’s a wider shot of that area right after we got here, just for kicks. Ah, those packing blankets as curtains are #MEMORIES. So yeah… it feels good to be here: Sherry did some work to freshen it [ Read More ] Filed Under: Furniture Upgrades & Building Stuff , Holiday & Entertaining , Home Improvement , Our Current House | By Sherry Petersik | December 10, 2020 | Our Kitchen & Sitting Area, Six Months In *We updated this post to add additional pics & a video, so if you see something here that you don’t remember when you first read it, that’s why. You’re not going crazy ;) We shared this space three weeks after we moved in and now we’re back with a six month update. Much like we said in that first post, we have some long term plans for this room, so this is just what it looks like as of this moment in time (I highly recommend photographing rooms to see how they evolve because it’s so much fun to look back on). Since that three-weeks-in post, we did a series of inexpensive updates that have [ Read More ] Filed Under: Home Improvement , Our Florida House | By Sherry Petersik | December 3, 2020 | How We Decorated Our New House For The Holidays* *Aka, the moment I’ve been waiting for since, oh, the day we moved in. There’s something extra special to me about decorating a house for your first holiday season spent there. It’s right up there with seeing whatever pops up outside during your first spring at a new house (I basically scream out the window like I’m the announcer at a football game: “over on the left it’s A PATCH OF DAFFODILS! NOBODY SAW THAT COMING!!” But back to our holiday house tour. It’s looking very sweet & festive around here. Since this move also involved some serious downsizing & simplifying (last week John shared an update on that), it promised to be an interesting [ Read More ] Filed Under: Decorating , Holiday & Entertaining , Our Florida House | By John Petersik | November 25, 2020 | Has Downsizing Been What We Expected? Believe it or not, we’ve lived in our new house for over six months now. Half a year! So we thought this would be a good time to check in on some of the goals we had for moving and downsizing to see what has met and exceeded our expectations – along with detailing some of the biggest challenges we’ve encountered along the way. This is going to be long & detailed, because it feels like there’s a lot of ground to cover, and while this rundown will be pretty specific to our situation, I think it’ll still give you a good window into the realities of downsizing that you might also encounter if you [ Read More ] Filed Under: Cleaning, Organizing, & Eco , Our Current House , Our Florida House , Saving Money | By Sherry Petersik | November 18, 2020 | Holiday Gift Guides For Everyone On Your List (With Stuff Under $15, and even $9) This year we got our gift guide post up a lot sooner than usual, because we’re highlighting tons of small makers and Black-owned businesses that we love, and we want to give those shops as much lead time as possible (heck, large stores seem to need more lead time than ever these days too). We also included a handful of tried & true items from larger companies that we’ve bought and loved (like a favorite tool or family game). There’s stuff for grown-ups, kids, and a ton of budget-friendly ideas that are under $20, and even under $10 that would be great for teachers, neighbors, coworkers, or white elephant exchanges! Gifts For Grown-Ups Here’s what [ Read More ] Filed Under: Favorites , Holiday & Entertaining , Shopping & Thrifting | By John Petersik | November 11, 2020 | How We Added Some Much-Needed Storage To Our Smaller Home Downsizing from 3200 square feet to 1400 means storage is a big deal to us these days, and a couple of weeks ago we got two major upgrades in that department. We still have some “hacking” to do to the simple Ikea cabinets that we bought, but we’re stupidly giddy over just having them assembled and installed. They basically add up to 8 more large cabinets worth of storage – and our kitchen only has 7 cabinets, so the excitement was palpable when those flat-packed boxes arrived (they had about a 4 week wait time, but otherwise delivery was smooth and uneventful for those wondering how the ordering experience was during this time period). They [ Read More ] Filed Under: Cleaning, Organizing, & Eco , Decorating , Favorites , Our Florida House | By John Petersik | October 28, 2020 | Our Front Porch: Big Plans & Even Bigger Plants It has been about five months since we first introduced you to the outside of our house. That was our very first week of living here, and our outdoor spaces have been getting a lot of use ever since. You’ve already seen how our second-story deck has come together, so today we wanted to update you on our front porch as well as the covered area that we call the side porch and some new landscaping that we’ve added too. We’ve made some functional and organizational improvements, some strictly aesthetic enhancements, and have some other upgrades that are still in the works. So won’t you join us on the front porch? Here’s how it’s looking [ Read More ] Filed Under: Favorites , Our Florida House , Outside | By John Petersik | October 21, 2020 | How We Installed A Stair Runner Sherry recently hint...