If you are renting your home, you might be limited when it comes to how you can decorate and personalise it. While some landlords and letting agencies are fine with tenants decorating a property to their own taste if they are going to be living there for a while, if you only have a short term contract in your rental property or don’t want to deal with the hassle of putting things to back to how they were once you move out, you might feel like you’re unable to really make the house your home. However, the good news is that there are more and more renter-friendly options available these days, so whether your landlord has requested that you don’t make any big changes or you simply don’t want to spend that much money on a house that you don’t plan to live in for a long time, here are some great ideas to consider to make the house feel more like home and personalise it to you.
Display Photos
Displaying your family photos or photos of your pets can quickly turn those boring magnolia walls into something special. The best part is that you don’t have to start hammering nails into the walls or adding fixings to hang your photos since options like Command Hooks have made it easier than ever to hang your artwork without any damage and are easy to put up and remove – just stick it to the picture, then to the wall, and apply some pressure. You can give your home a personal touch by adding photos of your family – large canvas prints are a great way to do this and you can easily order them online from Photobox. If you’ve had a family photoshoot, for example, and have purchased the rights to reproduce the images, you can get high-quality canvas prints to display easily in your home. Photobox offer canvas prints in a range of different sizes to suit every room.
Get House Plants
House plants can be a fun addition to your rental property, adding some greenery and colour to a house that might otherwise be rather boring and bland. Along with this, house plants will help to keep the air cleaner and may even improve your health over time. There are lots of different house plants that are fairly easy to look after, so you can avoid any disasters. Cheese plants and succulents are some great choices, or you can find trailing plants that you can hang from your windows.
Use Temporary Wallpaper
As more and more people are renting their home and many of them want to put their own stamp on the place, as after all, you might be living there for some time, an increasing number of rental-friendly solutions have come on the market, including temporary wallpaper. This wallpaper is usually a peel-and-stick type, which makes it seriously easy to apply compared to regular wallpaper with paste, and can be easily removed, with a good quality option unlikely to cause any damage to the walls underneath. You can use this to create a feature wall in different rooms throughout your home or for blocking areas to highlight things like artwork and photos.
Change the Hardware
When you’re living in a rental property you usually have to put up with whatever you have been given when it comes to your kitchen and bathroom cabinets, unless they’re seriously due an upgrade and you can convince your landlord to get you some new ones. However, before you get on the phone to your landlord, it might be worth considering if swapping out the hardware is going to make you like those cabinets better. Most of the time, the cabinets are going to be with whatever boring, cheap hardware they came with – not very exciting. But all you need to do is unscrew the handles and screw new ones of your choice on, which can absolutely transform the look. Then when your contract ends, all you need to do is swap them back for the old ones.
Use Contact Paper
Contact paper or sticky back vinyl is becoming a popular choice for rentals as it is easy to use and can transform the look of things like kitchen countertops without causing any damage. If the countertops in your rental property are not that great or you simply don’t like the look of them, while changing them for new ones might not be an option, contact paper is a great solution with a lot of different effects to choose from whether you like wood, granite, or marble.
Tile Stickers
Similar to the kitchen countertops, tiles are often something that will be expensive to replace in a rental and some landlords don’t want them to be removed or replaced. However, tile stickers can be an ideal alternative for a temporary fix. While they might not be a great option for doing the full bathroom in since they’re likely to peel off after some time, you can easily use tile stickers for your kitchen splashback or to add little features to bigger tiled walls, changing up the look and making it yours. And, they are easy to remove and should not cause any damage to the tiles underneath.
Upcycle Your Furniture
If you have old, boring, or cheap furniture in your rental home then upcycling it can be a great way to improve the look of the place while investing your money into something that actually belongs to you too. The best thing about upcycling furniture is that it is something you can do several times if you want so the options are endless when it comes to what you can do with one piece of furniture to make it look better, which is great for people who move around a lot and live in short-term rentals. You can use furniture paint, chalk paint, decoupage, and even wallpaper to make your furniture items look completely different.
While updating a rental home and making it your own might have more limitations, there are several damage-free, hassle-free options to consider.