Board and batten is one of our favorite, easy DIY projects. It’s completely beginner-friendly and it makes a big impact in any room, entry, or hallway. This is the 3rd house where we’ve installed this type of wainscoting, so we’ll show you our trick for making this project faster, easier, and less expensive than traditional board and batten!

For this particular installation in our beach house, we did a higher board & batten and hung peel-and-stick wallpaper above it. It was exactly the mix of traditional & colorful that we were going for in this guest bedroom!

What is Board & Batten?

Board and batten originated as a style of exterior siding, but is also used as interior paneling. It describes a technique where thin strips of molding – or “battens” – are placed over the seams between larger, flat boards. It can be installed floor-to-ceiling or partway up a wall, and battens can be arranged vertically, horizontally, or even in boxes.

Continue reading Easy Board & Batten Tutorial at Young House Love.

These DIY pantry shelves we made for our beach house are easy to built and can be customized to any space, even if you've got a small pantry or simple pantry closet! They're made entirely of two things: MDF sheets and pine boards. So even if you're a beginner, you can do this. Seriously.

Continue reading How To Build DIY Pantry Shelves at Young House Love.

If you’ve got a tiling project in your future, remember, bookmark, voice memo, tattoo, or do whatever you need to do to remember Mapei Flexcolor grout.

floor tiles: pink, white, and taupe 

I know this sounds like I’m overreacting, but take it from people who have grouted 7 bathroom floors, 3 showers, 3 mudrooms, and 2 backsplashes in the last two years: this grout has been life-changing. And no, this is not sponsored by either Mapei or Floor & Decor, which is where we typically buy ours (sorry, necessary disclaimer because this post is going to sound pretty gushy).

Why We Love Mapei Grout

I’ll explain WHY we love Mapai grout so much AND toss in some tips for picking the right grout color (including our go-to color that works nearly every time).

Continue reading The Best Grout – And How To Pick The Right Color at Young House Love.

In case you haven’t had a chance to listen to this week’s podcast or read the transcript, we wanted to put our big news into an actual blog post. This is one of the biggest life changes we’ve made in the last decade, so we want to get everyone up to speed. And a huge thank you for all the support and encouragement you’ve shared for this new adventure of ours. We can’t wait to live with less, be outside a lot more, and eat even more fresh-caught shrimp than we ever thought possible. And yes, to everyone asking – we definitely plan to share more about downsizing, moving, renovating, and even things like feeling at home in a brand new area.

Wait, Is This An April Fool’s Joke?!

Nope! We’re officially moving to Florida! Seriously. Like full-time. We know it probably sounds insane and rash, but it has actually been something that we’ve talked about off and on for years.

Continue reading Why We’re Downsizing To A Smaller House In A Warmer State at Young House Love.

Someone asked me the other day for details on how we organized the beach house kitchen, which is something we photographed and filmed this summer to share with you guys, and when I went to send them the link to this post, I realized that we never actually wrote it! So yes, these pictures sat on the camera for months as my tan faded, along with memories of warm days spent with my toes in the sand (current status: toes in my Ugg slippers because it’s freezing!).

Years ago you guys liked having a look inside of our Richmond kitchen cabinets, so John and I had some fun snapping lots of organizing photos for this post last August (and filming what is perhaps the WEIRDEST video of our lives – please watch it if you can because I can’t even really explain what came over me, but John finds it highly amusing).

Continue reading How We Organized The Beach House Kitchen at Young House Love.

BEHOLD! The new & improved middle bedroom at the beach house (*crowd goes wild, people do The Hype, battle rap horns sound, DJ Khaled shouts “DJ KAHLEDDDDD”, maybe Cardi B. is there with one of those t-shirt cannons?*). I hope you enjoyed that mental image as much as I did.

daybed / rug / curtains / gold frame / wallpaper / ceiling fan

ANYWAY, the beach house middle bedroom update is done, and I can’t get over how sweet the board & batten and the wallpaper look together – especially with the old heart pine floors and doors. Those are 115 years old, and the wallpaper and the wall treatment are brand new, but they feel so good together – especially in person. My biggest pet peeve with this wallpaper is that it’s much more beautiful in person and it photographs brighter and busier (in real life it’s muted and soft like a blurry subtle watercolor).

Continue reading A Beach House Bedroom With Wallpaper And Board & Batten at Young House Love.

I’m someone who loves those detailed “what worked & what didn’t” posts where someone looks back on the choices they made and shares what didn’t work out as well as they hoped – and how they adjusted to make things work better for their family (more comfortable/more practical/more beautiful/etc). And since we furnished this house over two years ago – can you believe we did it in the fall of 2017?! – I thought it would be fun to share the changes we made since then in one big rundown post. So here we go.

The Front Porch

• The Change: New front porch swing
• The Reason: The old one was already rotting!

The original porch swing we hung out here was nice and simple (white like the trim, and the vertical pickets tied right into the railing), but it sadly wasn’t up to the job of withstanding the weather.

Continue reading 7 Spaces We Updated At The Beach House (And Why) at Young House Love.

Adding wallpaper to the middle bedroom at our beach house took us just a few hours and cost us less than $100. It’s a whole lotta bang for not much buck (or extra high skill level). Plus it’s 100% removable so if we ever tire of it or want to swap it for something else, it’s no big deal. Certainly less trouble than removing traditional wallpaper! So in this post we’ll show you exactly how we hung it, including a video I took of my lovely husband hanging a panel for you in real-time while I talk and point (you know, the things I’m most known for).

Selecting Your Wallpaper

There were two strategic choices we made that helped to keep this project particularly quick and easy:

1. Choosing a peel and stick wallpaper. Traditional wallpapers require you to apply a separate glue and even “pre-pasted” wallpaper means you have to wet the paper to activate the built-in adhesive (that’s the kind we installed in our second book).

Continue reading How To Hang Peel & Stick Wallpaper at Young House Love.