Simple Ways to Upgrade Your Rental Apartment
There are so many ways to upgrade a rented space that really don’t cost a lot and my philosophy is why wait to have your dream house until you own property? Turn the space you’ve got into a space you love right now!!
When it comes to spending money on a rented home, I would say the number one aspect that you should focus on investing in are timeless pieces of furniture & decor. And that is for the simple fact that these pieces can travel with you wherever you may go. So while you can’t exactly pull out your beautiful shower tiles to take with you, you can most certainly pack up your sectional or coffee table to move to your next place.
While furniture & decor is an obvious option, it’s certainly not the only one. I’ve put together a few ideas below on other ways you can upgrade your rental apartment to give that blank box a more home-y designer feel. Enjoy!
SIMPLE WAYS TO UPGRADE YOUR RENTAL APARTMENT
WINDOW TREATMENTS
In my opinion, the number one thing that makes a rental look like a rental are the window treatments. My apartment came with the dreaded vertical blinds that give off that creepy motel vibe. Not cute. No matter how much decor, paint color, or artwork you add to the space, those blinds will always scream cheap apartment. So the first thing you should do is remove those blinds immediately. Like as fast as you can.
You could always store these vertical blinds under your bed or under your sofa until you move out if your landlord won’t take them off your hands. They should be pretty simple to remove, you can easily unclip each vertical piece. And then the horizontal bar should easily unscrew from the wall. Hold on to any screws from the blinds (tape to the blinds in a ziplock bag) for ease when re-hanging them at move out.
Once you remove the vertical blinds you will even have holes in your wall that you can use to directly hang your own curtain rod. Or go ahead and patch up those holes with a little spackling paste and paint. Then my biggest tip would be to actually hang your curtains as high up as you can go to give the illusion that you have taller windows. This will make your space feel larger and will highlight your windows more!
I love how our curtains turned out in our living room. Here are the links to the curtains and hardware we used:
Velvet Curtains - these look super high quality in person and are fairly inexpensive as far as curtain prices go! They come in a bunch of color options as well.
Curtain Rings - I prefer the look of a curtain hung from curtain rings, I just think it adds some elegance and it also gives you a few extra inches of curtain if you can’t purchase the exact size you need.
Curtain Rod - You will want to make sure your rod is long enough to hang to the sides of your window by about 6 inches.
LIGHTING
Another hardware element that is possible to customize in a rental is your lighting. Lighting plays such a huge role in the general vibe of a space. Especially in the evenings when you’re home from work and looking to set the tone for a cozy night in.
The first thing we did with any built in lights was to swap out the lightbulbs for the Philips Hue bulbs. Since Daniel is obsessed with all things tech, he setup our apartment into a smart house with all our lights, dog cameras, thermostat, and Apple HomePods to be easily accessible from an app on our phones. The best part about these lights are you can dim and adjust the color temperature to whatever you want, so we can have dimmer lights in the evening that give off a warm cozy glow.
My next tip would be to fill your home with as many lamps as possible. Julia from chrislovesjulia.com loves to say “it’s lamp o’clock” which is the time of the day when it’s getting dark outside and she goes around to turn on all the lamps around her house. Lamps are a great investment piece because they are fashion and function. They give off that soft, warm glow and they are a great way to add your own decor style into a space. They are also an item that can be taken with you wherever you move next, so no shame in saving up for that perfect lighting fixture or lamp because it may be something you keep for a long time!
If you’re super handy, you could even swap out any pendant style or chandelier lights in your rental apartment for something that fits your style better. I keep trying to convenience Daniel that we need to watch a Youtube tutorial on how to do this so we can swap out our dining room chandelier for something that fits our style better. Obviously, this task includes electrical wiring so advance with caution (& make sure you turn off the circuit to whatever light you are rewiring before attempting!!!!).
I love these new lamps I got from Urban Outfitters. They are not available anymore, but be sure to check out the lighting section of Urban Outfitters Home for some great inexpensive lamps and lighting options.
PAINTING & WALLPAPER
Depending on your lease, you may or may not be able to actually paint walls of your rental apartment. If you are not planning to stay in your current place for long, I wouldn’t recommend this option because you may have to paint it back after a few months which is kind of a waste of time. But if you see yourself staying put for a while, some apartments do not even require you to paint back the color since they are going to repaint and clean up the apartment for the next resident in the future.
Paint is the least expensive option to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to decorating your space. It does require the investment of your time though because you will need to tape off your wall, cover your flooring/furniture with plastic, and patch up any holes before painting. But it is worth the time in my opinion and adds so much personality and interest to a room.
I am obsessed with all the paint colors from the brand Clare Paint. Every shade is perfectly curated and delivered right to your door. You can even purchase all the painting accessories you need to be delivered with your paint (plastic tarp, painter’s tape, paint brush, roller, etc). I currently have the Make Waves color as an accent color on our bedroom wall. And Meet Cute as an accent in our dining room.
If you find painting a whole room a bit intimidating, like me, I would recommend starting with just an accent wall. This is typically the focal point wall when you walk into a room (so across from wherever the door is located, behind a bed, to highlight a bookshelf, etc).
Another option could be to accent a wall with some removable peel-and-stick wallpaper. I haven’t used this option yet, but I know tons of DIY blogs that swear by removable wall paper. This does take a bit of time and patience though, so I would recommend doing it on a small wall (at least to start out). Another option to add some texture/pattern to your space is to create your own faux wallpaper using paint. A Beautiful Mess has a ton of good painted wallpaper ideas here!
SHOWER CURTAIN
Here is an easy and inexpensive way to upgrade your rental bathroom! Our apartment came with the super ugly and nearly impossible to clean glass shower doors. You know the ones…ew. We ended up being able to convince our landlord (finally!) to get rid of these all together after a few years of living in our apartment. But before that, I had to cover them up because I just really hated how they looked. A super easy solution for this is to add your own tension shower curtain rod (something simple like this works perfect)! Depending on the layout of your bathroom this can go directly in front of or above your existing ugly glass shower door and you can hide the glass door with your favorite fabric shower curtain.
I think a shower curtain is a great spot to add a fun pattern or something more busy because it is a large blank space so the look of a busy shower curtain can kind of mimic the look of a wallpaper accent wall.
I love all the shower curtain options available on Urban Outfitters Home, I am actually thinking it might be time to switch out our curtain pattern for something new, and I’m currently loving this floral one. This is such an easy way to make a big accent for little cost. We love.
OPEN SHELVING
While this can be a controversial topic (since this does require a more consistent dusting schedule), I think the pros outweigh the cons here. If you have been inside my apartment, it’s no secret that I LOVE an open shelving moment. I have a set of open shelves in almost every room of my apartment and I think it adds so much design style and personality.
I think a very important tip is to not think of open shelving as a storage option, think of it as a display/decorative moment. Because if you use open shelving as “storage” — just as another place to keep junk, it’s not going to be pretty. Think of it as more of a display shelf for your pretty things or collectibles.
If you’re able to drill into your rental walls (and patch them up when you’re ready to move out) I think this option is the best way to add some wall shelving. I love these inexpensive shelves and the picture ledges from Ikea. I also recently bought these picture ledges for our bedroom and I have been loving styling these since they are more narrow on the top shelf and progressively get wider and wider.
Wall shelves are a great way to add some architecture to a normally blank box space. So the best place to put them is to fill in a blank wall (like how I added these smaller shelves between my doorway and fireplace). You don’t want them to seem random or out of place, you want them to look like they belong in that location, like it was an architectural desicion in the room.
If you’re not able to drill into your walls, you can totally get the same look by finding a stand alone shelving unit that fits nicely against the wall of your choice.
Some tips for styling an open shelving moment:
I like to do an assortment of item shapes/sizes. Some flat items like framed artwork, picture frames, etc. Some tall narrow items like flower vases, candle sticks, etc. And some shorter and wider items like plant pots, candles, bowls, stack of books, decorative boxes, etc.
You can always stack items to add height (like setting a decorative candle holder on top of a stack of books)
You can help coordinate the shelves by using an item that is a similar color on a higher shelf and again on a lower shelf. This will help tie the shelves together.
Always add a plant (or a fake plant) — I can’t explain it, but it just makes any shelf look better. I think it breaks up the hard lines with a more organic shape and just adds some life to the space.
If you made it this far, thank you thank you for reading!! I feel like I have barely scratched the surface when it comes to rental upgrades — I didn’t even mention all the plethora of removable tiles, vinyl, etc. that there are out there. So we will have to consider this just a PART ONE for now, but I’ll be back with more ways as I continue to experiment on my own rented apartment.
In the meantime, check out some ideas from the apartment rental QUEEN herself, Cyn from @hotpinkpineapples. She does the most AMAZING rental apartment DIYs. She even made her own faux fireplace so she could have a mantel to decorate for the holidays. She truly blows my mind!
If you rent, what are some of your favorite ways to decorate your space?
xo Rachael
