To be honest, very few people have the means to afford their own place, especially with real estate market prices going through the roof in New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, London, and other big cities all over the world. Besides, rental apartments have a lot of great sides, and they can be very convenient when you’re just beginning to live on your own. If you have found a great rental and would like to make it look and feel a bit more like a home without losing your deposit, here’s what you can do.
A fresh coat of paint
This is something most landlords won’t have any problem with: you painting the place. This will take the load off their hands and give you a chance to personalize the space a bit more, but you still have to be careful. You don’t want to use colour schemes or wallpapers that will make the apartment look cramped or bad because this can be a legitimate reason for your landlord to become upset. Stick to neutral colour palettes, paint the walls white, and try to add splashes of colour in some other ways: for example, you could paint a single wall a different shade than the rest.
Wall art
After you paint the walls, it might be a good time to think about making the place look like a home and displaying some of the things you love and are passionate about. We are talking about framed photos of your family and friends, your favourite posters, and antique mirrors that will fit in perfectly with the furniture and the new walls in your beautiful rental uptown Minneapolis apartment. Still, you should be careful and not overdo it: your landlord will likely have something to say about having too many holes in the walls, especially since fixing it can be a bit costly in Australia and the US. Even if you do have a lot of nail holes, you should fix them on your own because it will make you look good in your landlord’s eyes and it will secure that you get your deposit back.
Fluffy rugs
The floor happens to be one of the biggest surfaces in your place, so why not use it? Bringing fluffy, colourful rugs is a great way to brighten up the place without changing anything drastically. If you’d like big and open spaces, you can find house and land packages in Austral that will give you a lot of room to work with and decorate. Rugs can have a huge impact on a room, and what is more, they will protect the floors from scratches and damage, which is important in upstate neighbourhoods and will please even the strictest landlords.
Interesting shelves
Sometimes you want to display all of your collections and memorabilia in your new place, but there simply isn’t enough space. You can easily fix this by buying interesting shelves and placing them around the apartment. Make sure you get the stand-alone shelves because this way, you won’t have to worry about attaching them to a wall and more wall holes. Fortunately, there are many incredibly stylish and interesting shelves you can find that are a small work of art in itself, and when you proudly display all of your books, vinyl records, or collection of vintage and rare toys, they will look like they belong right there.
Rental properties have a lot of virtues and great upsides, and they are a wonderful way to live in a city or a neighbourhood you love without sending a fortune and buying your own place. What is more, you don’t have to worry about maintenance, and it’s always easier to move out of a rental than your own place. Even so, you have to be careful about decorating and renovating because you don’t want to overstep the line and lose your deposit.