Ways to Make Your Rental Feel More Like Home

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Ways to Make Your Rental Feel More Like Home

You’ve signed the lease on your new place, and now it’s time to decorate. You may have a Pinterest board filled with inspirational decor ideas, but you just found out that you can’t do half of them in your rental. Don’t worry! Here are 5 easy ways to make your rental feel more like home.

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Add color through furniture, rugs and large artwork

Many times, when you rent, you can’t paint the walls. It may seem like a huge bummer, but if you introduce color into your home in others ways, such as furniture, rugs or large artwork, it will definitely make your apartment feel less temporary and more like home. Whether you add multiple bright, bold colors, or you keep it monotone with multiple shades of one color, or you stay neutral with one pop of color, adding a dose of color will definitely liven up the space and make it look less sterile and stark.

Shop colorful furniture, rugs & artwork:

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photo via (Shop exact wallpaper from WallsNeedLove)

Add temporary wallpaper

Another way to make your home feel less temporary is by adding wallpaper, and not the regular kind, the removable kind that won’t cause you not to get your security deposit back when you’re ready to move! One of my favorite sites that offers removable wallpaper is Walls Need Love. They offer so many options – geometric, colorful, boho, stripes – and they also offer wall decals and murals! Also don’t think you have to wallpaper a large space like your living room, you can easily wallpaper a smaller space like your bathroom or an accent wall in a larger room. Temporary wallpaper is also perfect for dorm rooms, so if I have any college girls reading this you’ll definitely want to check this out!

Shop temporary wallpaper:

photo via (Shop exact wallpaper from Anthropologie)

photo via (Shop Chandelier)

Swap out light fixtures and hardware on your cabinets

Lets face it, most rentals have horrible light fixtures and hardware. Most of the time they’re outdated, tarnished, cheap looking and just plain ugly. The upside is that light fixtures and cabinet hardware is SO easy to swap out. Just don’t forget where you store the rental pieces once you do swap them out so you can put them back on when you move out!

Shop light fixtures & hardware:

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Gallery Walls

Thanks to the magic of command strips, gallery walls have become one of my 5 easy ways to make your rental feel more like home. Long gone are the days of nails and screws and patching up holes, because thanks to heavy duty command strips you can now hang all the artwork your heart desires to make your new place reflect you. Whether you go decide to do a gallery wall with your favorite landscape photos you’ve taken on vacation, or of black and white snaps of your family, this type of decor is the easiest way to personalize your new space.

Shop items for a gallery wall:

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Window treaments

Adding texture or layers to any room in your rental will instantly make it feel more inviting and “homey”. If you can I would go with adding a curtain rod about a foot above the top of your window to create the illusion of larger windows (like all of these photos here), but if you can’t you can easily use a tension rod that would be placed into the actual window which leaves no holes!