Giving Your Rented Property Some Personality.

When you move out of your family home, it’s not likely you’ll be buying a house or flat immediately. If you are one of those people, congrats, but stop bragging now okay. But for the people that are moving into a rented place, no matter the size, decorating can be a bit difficult. There tends to be a lot of rules and restrictions to decorating. No paint or wallpaper on the walls, and definitely no nails in there either.

At this point, you think you’re going to end up just sitting in an empty white room, with no originality to make it your own. This is what I struggled with when I moved out, and after a couple of months of not knowing what to do and not enough money to pay somebody else to figure it out for me, I trawled the internet in the hopes of the perfect plan. My place needed to be a perfect combination of cheap, flexible, and interesting. I didn’t find that exactly, but I started working on it and after five years I’ve started to figure out what works best for me. Hopefully, some of the ideas and techniques I use for my place could help you with yours!

So the basis of most rented places, are just white walls, and ceilings. If you did get a furnished place, then most likely I’m going to assume that is all white IKEA furniture too. With all of that in mind, you’d immediately think to jump to a bold bright colour to contrast the white, but at the end of the day you’ll end up being sick of that colour and not much option to change the whole room again. The reason I say that is because it’s exactly what I did... with a bright green. The best bet to contrast the white is a light grey, but don't use it for the hard furniture. Only use a grey on the soft furnishings, so cushions, duvets, throws, and rugs (if you're really splashing the cash). Anything you're planning on buying, get it in a light grey because it’s not an incredibly harsh contrast from the white.

This is not the end of it though. Depending on the season or the colour scheme you are going for now use one more colour. So for Summer maybe use a bold yellow or soft orange colour and in winter go for a blue shade. You can either buy a few pieces in these colours. Maybe an ornament, picture frames, or candle holders. But doing this isn’t exactly cost effective, especially if you want to change up the colour frequently.

Here are some tips for what I did to change the colours, on a small budget. I bought a bag of tealight candles, then bought some washi tape in my colour scheme, it is pretty much the exact width to cover the edge of the candle. Then I placed those candles in some clear glass holders. You can get them quite cheap online. You pretty much couldn’t tell that it was tape and it added a nice colour to it. You can put them anywhere in the room, and add a pop of colour. Who doesn't like candles? Other uses for the washi tape are lining picture frames or putting patterns on them. I don't suggest covering the entirety of any objects with washi tape as its difficult to get it to look clean, and not like tape just wrapped around everything. If you have blinds, you can also line the blinds with the tape as well. The best thing about the tape is that it’s not final, you can change it whenever you like. Another tip I’d suggest is that if you have curtains, buy some cheap fabric, fold it in half and sew. You don't need to be skilled to do this, turn it inside out and you can use them to tie back your curtains.

I hope these tips were helpful for you. I’ve read so many articles that end up looking like they cost more than what they're worth, so you should definitely be able to keep a small budget with these ideas. There are so many options with colours as well, so it's not restrictive at all. If you do use any of these tips make sure you tweet us with the tag #cityroomsblog so we can have a look at your rooms.