I’m back with another request post today, ‘How To Decorate Your Rental On A Budget’. Having a beautiful home has always been important. Yet, for many people, (think single people or young couples who work 16 hour days) home has only been a place to crash out at night. Even for a family like mine, with hubby and kids away at work and school all day, our home would fill up only at night for dinner.

With the lockdown this has entirely changed. Everyone is home all the time. It is not just your place of rest for a few hours, but also your place of work, entertainment and your weekend getaway. Having a beautiful home is now more important than it has ever been.

How To Decorate Your Rental On A Budget

If you’re living in your own home, you’ve most likely already put in a lot of time effort and money to make your home beautiful.

Living in a rental though, is usually a different story. Knowing that it’s a temporary home, most people don’t want to put in too much time or effort… and certainly not too much money… into decorating someone else’s home.

While it isn’t practical to get too many permanent changes made in a rental, there are a lot of little things you can do to make your home not only comfortable but also beautiful.

There’s one important point to keep in mind though. Since you are living in a rental, the home does belong to your landlord and you will have to return it to him some day. I would suggest taking him into confidence before making any changes.

During our rental living room makeover, the landlord was more than happy to have a designer involved in the changes and gave us a free hand to go ahead with them. After all, an upgrade to their home only helps them the next time they have to rent it out!

So let’s begin right away.

Start With The Walls

The single biggest canvas in your home are its walls. So starting with the walls seems like a great way to decorate your rental.

1 – A Fresh Coat Of Paint

This before after from our Rental Living Room Makeover is a great example of what a big difference some colour on the walls can make.

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Use paint to add colour and drama to your walls.

All your walls can’t be pink though. Even otherwise, nothing brightens up a home like a good, fresh coat of white paint.

2 – Use Wallpaper

This before after from our Rental Office Makeover is a great example of the magic of wallpaper.

Wallpapers are available in so many different colours and patterns and so easy to use. While painting can involve a few days work and a lot of dust and cleaning at the end, wallpaper takes just a couple of hours to install and causes no other inconvenience.

Use wallpapers to create a dramatic highlight or even all over as a substitute for paint.

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3 – Artwork

Though this home was not a rental, our situation here was quite similar to what it would have been in a rental. All the furniture was already in place and we couldn’t change any of it. Artwork was one of the decor elements we use to upgrade this room.

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You can see another example of this from my own home. The first pic is from a few years back when I first revealed our living room on the blog. The second more recent. The artwork we’ve collected over the years is all on display now, and makes for such a pretty pic.

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Read this post on 7 Easy & Affordable Ways To Stunning Wall Decor for lots more ideas on how to prettify your walls.

Wardrobes And Cabinets

Once your walls are taken care of the next big element to deal with is the fixed furniture. You’ve most likely inherited some wardrobes and cabinets with your rental and want to upgrade how they look.

Unlike walls, which you can always paint over again, changes you make to furniture might not be so easily reversible. So once again, remember to take your landlords permission before you decorate your rental.

4 – Paint Your Furniture

Remember how a coat of paint worked wonders in this teen bedroom makeover?

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We used matt PU paint here, which is certainly not a cheap option. But there are many ways to use regular paint on furniture. You can read how in this post here and make a family DIY out of it.

5 – Use Wallpaper On Shutters

I’ve used wallpaper on the wardrobe and cabinet shutters in my daughter’s room to make a jungalicious room for her. She was ten years old when we designed her room. The idea was that she might outgrow it as she grows up and we can then easily change it. The very reason makes it perfect for a rental too.

(Since I knew we were going to put wallpaper here, we didn’t put any laminate or veneer on these shutters. Make sure the laminate or veneer on the shutters will not spoil with the wallpaper glue before using it.)

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6 – Upgrade The Hardware

The client didn’t want to change the wardrobes in this bedroom. And I didn’t want them looking the way they did.

A fresh coat of paint and new handles gave the same old wardrobe a spanking new look.

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Small things like changing handles and knobs on existing furniture can help give it a fresh, upgraded feel.

How Can We Forget The Floor?

Something as basic as the flooring can be such a game changer.

7 – Polish The Marble

Take another look at the before-after pics of the wardrobe again and notice the marble flooring this time. Can you see how the wardrobe reflects into the floor in the after? Something as simple as getting the marble polished can make the home look new and well finished.

This becomes even more noticeable in larger spaces where you have more exposed flooring.

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8 – Use Wooden Flooring

This is not a very budget option, especially since you can’t really carry a floor with you when you leave. But it’s a great option to hide an ugly floor quickly and so you could consider it if it’s a long lease.

We used it in our own first home. This room had a horrible tile flooring provided by the builder and we didn’t want to get into breaking and redoing the flooring. We selected this laminate flooring instead, which took just a few hours to install and lasted us well during the decade or so that we were there.

9 – Use Vinyl Floors

I like to think of this as flooring wallpaper. It’s just as cost effective and easy to install.

Let’s go back to our rental office once again. It had a kota stone floor which was patchy with tiles of different shades laid next to each other. We selected a vinyl flooring in a wooden print to match our laminate. The result was a warm and rich look to the office at minimal cost.

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Just like wallpaper, vinyl floors are available in many colours and finishes, are budget friendly and installed in just a few hours. This makes them a great option for a quick upgrade to decorate your rental home.

Kitchens & Bathrooms

Given all the permanent civil and furniture work that goes into kitchens and bathrooms, it can seem quite daunting task to upgrade them. This, however, need not be so difficult.

10 – Use Tile Stickers

Wallpapers for wall, vinyl for flooring and now tile stickers for tiles. Yup, a lot of options are now available which are water proof for bathrooms and heat proof for kitchens. You can take an ugly wall tile and instantly change it with a pattern you like. Or you use them on one particular part of your space to create a highlight.

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You can also use wallpaper in your kitchen or bathroom in areas you know are going to remain dry.

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Herrlich makes some beautiful Tileskin, as they call it. You can click here to see their entire range. Lots of options are also available on Etsy and Amazon.

11 – Replace Faucets and Showers

Changing the plumbing in a rental is next to impossible, but changing the external fittings is easy enough. Swap the old shower head for the larger one you always wanted. Change your kitchen spout to one that is prettier and fancier. Make the little changes you want to decorate your rental and make it your own home.

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12 – Upgrade The Mirror

This is another small change that makes a really big difference. Use a large wall to wall mirror in a small bathroom to make it look so much bigger.

Or swap the simple basin mirror for a pretty, decorative one to make your bathroom look well decorated.

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13 – Change The Toilet Seat

This either sounds silly to you, or you can completely relate to it. Putting a spanking new seat cover on your toilet is a quick way to give your bathroom a squeaky new look.

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You can also click here for ideas on making space in your small bathroom and here for ideas on making space in your small kitchen.

Home Lighting

Lighting plays a hugely important part in the look, feel and functionality of your home. You have to especially pay attention to these two aspects.

14 – Make Sure There Is Enough Ambient Light

Ambient light is an even, moderately bright light across the entire room, like you would have in an office for example. This causes the least strain to the eye and is the ideal light to work in. Every room must have good ambient lighting to make it functional at night.

When you put on all your lights, if there are no prominent shadows or dark corners in your room, then your room has good ambient lighting.

In case it doesn’t, make sure to add more lights to your room. If you have a false ceiling, this is more easily done as wires can easily be passed through it. If you don’t, use large surface lights or chandeliers to make sure you have enough light.

You can read more about the what and how of home lighting here.

15 – Add Pretty Mood Lights

Adding mood lights or accent lights is a beautiful way to decorate your rental. These lights add drama to your space by highlighting a work of art here, or a plant there. You can always add some pretty lighting in your room using table lamps, floor lamps, string lights and pendants.

Read more tips on how to glam up your home with accent lights here.

Use Pretty Furnishing

Soft furnishings quite literally add the softness and warmth to a room. The easiest way to decorating your rental is by upgrading your furnishings.

16 – Get Beautiful Window Drapes

This room is a great example of how much change soft furnishings can bring. The curtains and sheers we selected here played a major part in that change.

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17 – Change The Upholstery

This before-after from our rental makeover is my favourite example of the difference made by the selection of upholstery. Can you believe this is the same sofa set in the same living room? Doesn’t it look like the old set has been replaced by a new one?

In this case the sofa set belonged to the landlord, so we obviously couldn’t change it. We did the next best and changed it’s upholstery. The pictures speak for themselves.

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18 – Use Rugs

I’m going to show you examples from my own home of spaces with and without rugs. The earlier pics are from the time of the reveal, when I hadn’t got all my rugs in yet. The later pics are more recent, with the rugs in place.

Our master bedroom, with and without the rug. Can you see how the rug ‘completes’ the space in terms of adding colour and warmth. It also demarcates the seating area from the home office space, which otherwise seems like one continuous space in the before pic.

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Our living room before, when we had only a small rug in the main seating area. We were temporarily using the bedroom rug there because our living rug hadn’t arrived yet. The bar and passage area didn’t have rugs yet.

Now look at the after where the larger living rug makes the area there look so much bigger. The bar rug helps to hold that seating area together and the passage rug helps separate the living area from the dining. All these rugs also add a warmth to the space by breaking the continuity of the cold marble floor.

You can read everything you need to know about living room rugs here and bedroom rugs here.

19 – Plants-Plants-Plants!

And forever I will maintain, that plants are the cheapest, most easily available yet prettiest decor accessories that exist ever! Which makes them the best way to decorate your rental.

And again I will show you two areas from my home with and without plants. Well, I shouldn’t say without. Just that the plants were much smaller years ago when we got them and have steadily grown to be taller and fuller over the years. And that itself has made such a difference to how happy our home looks.

Both the rug and the plants have helped brighten up this reading corner.

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You can also see how plants, both big and small, have brought about a happy change to our living room which has not really changed in any other way.

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Which wraps up this post on how to decorate your rental on a budget. The way I see it, these ideas are great not just for a rental, but also a self owned home where you are looking for a quick refresh without spending too much time and money.

These are great tips to keep your home looking fresh until you want to go the whole hog for a complete makeover.

I hope you found these useful, and I’d love to know what you think. So remember to write in below. Also, keep sending in the post requests and I will get to each one at a time.

Until next time,

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NOTE: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links.