Young House Love

Home Decorating & DIY Tutorials

Posts By John Petersik

John Petersik is one half of the duo behind the award-winning home improvement and do-it-yourself design blog, Young House Love. Together, he and his wife Sherry have renovated seven homes, published two New York Times Bestselling books, and designed products sold in Target and Home Depot. They are currently enjoying their downsized home on Florida's Gulf Coast with their two kids and their dog, Penny.

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Blogging For Business

Since we’ve heard from so many of you who are enjoying the peek behind the scenes of the blogging business in this week’s podcast episode (so glad!) we thought we’d point you guys to another resource on that subject: our 3-part series on how to start a blog, grow your audience, and earn money. It’s something we actually wrote a few months ago, mostly to have a single spot to send anyone who asked about it (it’s one of the most frequent questions we get asked, even to this day). But since we never published it to everyone’s feeds as an actual blog post, it’s admittedly not the easiest thing to find, and we realized most of

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How To Install Hardwood Flooring

At this point you’ve probably seen our finished and furnished bonus room above our garage, but let’s take a quick joyride back in the DeLorean to talk about how we installed the oak hardwood flooring in there. When we mentioned it oh-so-briefly in our first post about the space, we also promised to share more how-to details, since it was our first time doing a traditional nail-in installation (we previously did a floating hardwood installation). It wasn’t terribly difficult, but it did have its challenges. So for anyone else who might be taking on the task, here’s a rundown of what we did and how we did it. Choosing Our Floors First off, why hardwoods? Originally we had planned to do wall-to-wall

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Holy Cats, We Have A Podcast!

Well, we’re upping the nerd factor around here and giving podcasting a go. The name? Young House Love Has A Podcast. I’ll give everyone a moment to let that process. I know it’s a tricky one. So much nuance. Listen on iTunes | Google Play | TuneIn Radio | Pocket Casts | Stitcher  You can check out our latest episode (a new one pops up every Monday) and all of the previous episodes that we have released (we’ve officially released over 50!). If you’re already a podcast listener, just head over to iTunes, Google Play, TuneIn Radio, Pocket Casts, or Stitcher to subscribe and download all of our episodes. And if you’re new to podcasts, here’s how to listen in (it might sound complicated but it’s completely free and just takes a

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Our Bonus Room Makeover

Hallelujah – the sun is back on the East Coast! So when it finally reappeared after weeks of rain, we broke out the camera and took some photos of our finally finished bonus room (well, “finished” is a loose term, since I don’t think we’re ever actually done tweaking things). We’re happy to report that we crammed in a decent amount of fun, function, and a big ol’ spot to sit down and never get back up again. The couch in here is truly a vortex that’s impossible to resist. But I digress… If you missed what got us to this point (and are wondering where the heck this room is), you can catch up on

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How To Hide TV Wires In The Wall

While our recently-finished bonus room upstairs was never intended to be a dedicated “media room” or “theater room,” we always knew it’d make a great spot for special family movie nights. But in adding a television, we didn’t want to create Cordfest 2016, and have always wanted to try mounting a TV on the wall. So we thought we’d break down the 4 steps that we took to hang our TV, eliminate every visible cord, and hide the cable box. All-in-all, these four steps cost us less than $75 and none took more than an hour to execute (a couple only took a few minutes). They were: Mounting the TV to the wall (we used this $18 mounting hardware from Amazon) Installing an in-wall cord system

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Switchin’ Things Up

One of the most common questions we get asked these days is what we’re up to (specifically, what we’re doing for work). We covered a lot of that back in this post, but in a nutshell it’s a combination of stuff we did before we started blogging (copywriting, ad consulting) and some newer skills that we learned while blogging (like product design and helping a local builder design his spec houses). Perhaps you saw this Instagram photo of the herringbone backsplash we chose for a recent kitchen we worked on. It was hard to get that shot because Sherry kept reaching in and whispering sweet nothings to it. True story. But this check-in isn’t about all

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Finishing The Bonus Room Over Our Garage

Who remembers our old furniture and pillow hoarding room at the end of the hall that we used to call “the storage room”? You may recall that we stole a bit of its square footage to create our laundry room), which conveniently left us with a more rectangular shaped room and easier access via the new glass door that we installed at the end of the hallway. And if you follow us on Instagram or Facebook, you already know that it has been undergoing a bit of a transformation lately… First, some background. We knew this room would someday become a great bonus space for us. Many of our neighbors’ homes had their above-the-garage area finished from the get-go,

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Easy DIY Wainscoting For Your Hallway

Our upstairs hallway recently got the wainscot treatment, and it’s kind of like the debonair older cousin to the DIY board & batten from our last house. Kind of a board & batten meets picture-frame molding look. Let’s just say, if our hallways were the Lindsay Lohans from The Parent Trap, this one would be the fancier-sounding English one (who I sometimes imagine grew up to live a less chaotic life than the American one). The Easy Approach To Installing DIY Wainscoting This DIY project began as one of those no-brainer tasks that we didn’t expect to spread much beyond the confines of a weekend. We planned to just repeat the board & batten look from our last house.

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How To Install House Uplighting

This is a project we did over the summer and kept meaning to Instagram, but it refused to be contained by the limits of one shot just like the writers of The Walking Dead refuse to care about our VERY REAL FEELINGS about very fictional characters. But I digress. So here we are, swinging by like we mentioned we might randomly do in our update post/podcast. We had filed this idea away for waaaay down the line (thinking it would be cost and time intensive), but turns out it was actually neither. In fact, as the sun set on the very same day that we started, we got to enjoy the finished product. We’ve always gawked lustily at

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Hello? Is This Thing On?

Well, last week marked a year since we took our big blog break. We didn’t really know what to expect would happen after stepping away from the blog last fall, and we certainly didn’t expect all of the love, support, and interest you guys have continued to show us over the last year. So before anything else, let us just say thank you and bow down and do the “not worthy” hand motions. Truly, you guys are the best. There have been so many questions about what we’ve been doing these days, and we’ve been mulling over the best way to share one big what-the-heck-we’ve-been-up-to update. Sherry suggested a Real Housewives-style freeze frame with update text next to

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Fab Freebie: It’s Curtains For You

Update: We hoped to have a Thursday post for you guys but this week didn’t go as planned. So sorry! Update #2: We’d love your thoughts on this thread that popped up on this post. What are your opinions about smaller posts when we can’t write something juicy? Skip them and just own that we can’t post that day with a little update like this one, or would you rather see something small instead of nothing (like a quick organizing update, a Reader Redesign, a dilemma we’re debating, etc)? Thanks for the feedback! Curtains can make the room. And pillows, well, you can never have too many (at least according to my pillow obsessed wife).

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How To Hang A Door

Hope you guys had an awesome Labor Day. We split time between family and house projects which is pretty much our sweet spot. This week is going to be especially hairy thanks to having book stuff nearly every day, but we did manage to eke out a few things to share and hope to be back to normal next week (might not be as on top of comments until then either). But back to my jamb. Or should I say my jambs? They don’t have casings yet, the leftover doorknobs will be upgraded to these backplated-versions, and one door still needs to be painted like whoa – but boy does it feel good to have

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