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Living in an apartment & renting is a great way to start your life on your own away from your parents.
But it doesn’t come without cons.
Renting normally means you can’t paint, put any holes in the walls – really not changing a single thing. Not to mention apartments usually have little to no storage space.
So how do you make your living space yours, as well as finding space for all your stuff!?
Here are a few hacks and tips I’ve picked up along the way in living in a few different apartments over the years.
Apartment Hacks For Decorating
The most fun part of living in your own place is making it your own! But when you can’t paint the walls, sometimes its hard to get over having boring blank walls everywhere.
One hack I’ve seen floating around are stick on wall decals. They’re a great way to spice up the colour on the walls without wrecking them. Adding fun characters and designs
To add a little something more into your living space, decorative pillows can add a splash of colour or pattern to really show your personality in your home. Switching them out for the seasons is always fun too! I recommend getting pillow covers or slips instead of getting new pillows each time; that way you can just switch out the covers on one pillow – small pieces of fabric are much easier to store than a bunch of different pillows!
One of my favourite things to decorate with is plants. They add such a nice pop of colour, as well as just give such a nice vibe to the home. Real or fake, that’s totally your call, but I love having a big (fake) plant in our living room as well as succulents and cacti around the apartment. Plus you can dress them up in a cute pot! Our cacti live in little tins I found from IKEA, or you can DIY some clay pots for a little succulent or two!
If you can trust yourself with a little DIY, I highly recommend trying out some of these home decor projects. They’re all fairly simple, and a super inexpensive way to add some decor to your home.
Apartment Hacks For Storage
Apartments are great and all for a first home, but man are they small and lacking of one important thing – storage. Finding room for all of the “stuff” you collect over the years can become very irritating. Not to mention even when you do find the room, it looks cluttered and junky.
Through a ton of trial and error, I’ve found a couple of ways to hide and store your stuff when you live in an apartment.
Utilize closets! Closets in our apartment are stuffed to the brim. Yes, it’s definitely not pretty when you take a peek inside, but that’s what doors are for! Work on your tetris skills to fit as much as you can into those closets.
Put the items you don’t use often in there to avoid a daily avalanche. Out of season items such as pool toys, the air conditioner, and Christmas decorations are stored in our spare bedroom closet. The top rack is used for extra towels, blankets and paper towel type items that are easier to access and used a little more often.
When you’re looking to furnish your apartment, look for furniture with storage components. Our couch pulls open and has a compartment for extra storage – perfect for extra blankets and pillows. We diy’d our coffee table, which now holds the abundance of movies we have. Beds with storage underneath, shelving units – all of these furniture items can double as extra storage, which is always needed.
I put together an entire post on home organization hacks that work for any type of home you live in. One of my favourites is definitely using command hooks to hold baskets on the inside of my bathroom cupboard doors. It’s been a life saver for getting ready in the morning.
Moving out can be a super intimidating experience, but it definitely doesn’t have to be. Using what you’ve got, doing a little research, and eventually getting used to having to basically throw all your money away at the end of the month (hi rent) becomes second nature in no time.
Now if only this whole “adulting” thing came easier, then we’d be in business.
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