SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When you sign a new lease, you often have to pay a hefty security deposit, and you might not want to make big changes to your space and risk losing that deposit when you eventually move out. So how can you make your new apartment feel more like you? For Life Kit, Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong has some tips to help spruce up your four walls.
ADWOA GYIMAH-BREMPONG: Big changes to a space can feel intimidating. But there's one easy classic.
AMANDA POE: When you paint a wall, all you have to do is paint it back. That's it.
GYIMAH-BREMPONG: That's Amanda Poe. She runs the home decor Instagram page bohofrisco. Amanda got into DIYs because she couldn't find the kind of fun, colorful decor that she envisioned for her home. Her projects include a series called Renter-Friendly Reality Checks, where she fact-checks things like removable wallpaper or peel-and-stick tiles after years of use. But one of her favorite renter-friendly upgrades is paint. Amanda says, as long as you have a plan to get your walls back to the color they came in, feel free to change things up. You can always ask your landlord for the color that they used on the walls. But if that won't work, you can just bring a chip of paint with you to the store.
POE: Pulling up, like, more than an inch of a swatch, like something bigger than a quarter, that is going to give you the best surface so that you can take it to your local hardware store. And they have a system that will paint-match it with a computer. Places - like, a really common place to grab some paint would be behind an outlet cover because if you peel some of that paint away, you can put the outlet cover back and it - would never know that that paint was missing.
GYIMAH-BREMPONG: Once you have your safety net in place, take a beat before grabbing a roller. I have been unpleasantly surprised more than once when a color that looked gorgeous in the paint aisle was very, very different in my home. Amanda says you need to live with the color for a while, and a tiny swatch isn't going to cut it.
POE: Go big. Get a poster board from the store, spend a dollar on it, paint the whole swatch and stick that on every wall, you know, trying different times - mornings, afternoon - the time you're going to spend in the room.
GYIMAH-BREMPONG: Carting around a bunch of posterboard, forensic archaeology behind electrical outlets, all that time spent up and down a ladder - some people might think this is a lot of trouble to go to for a rented apartment.
POE: I mean, to those people, like, do you spend money on a great dinner? Do you spend money on a concert? These are also things that are not permanent, and they improve our life in so many ways. And to the extent that maybe I'll only love it for a year, that's a really significant amount of time.
GYIMAH-BREMPONG: Amanda signed a 90-day lease on her last apartment and ended up staying for more than 10 years. She says it taught her that time should never be a limiting factor in building a home she loves.
POE: Life is so short, and I think, to the extent that I can decorate a room or paint a wall and make the next six weeks just full of joy every time I walk into my bedroom, I really don't think there's a much better investment.
GYIMAH-BREMPONG: For NPR News, I'm Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong.
DETROW: For more Life Kit, go to npr.org/lifekit.
(SOUNDBITE OF BADBADNOTGOOD'S "LOVE PROCEEDING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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