Life Kit - DIY home hacks that your landlord probably won't hate

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Just because you're not a homeowner doesn't mean you can't put your stamp on the place. Three home décor experts share their tips to make your rental homey for the long term. This episode was originally published on July 16, 2024.Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekitTo manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit. From NPR. Hey, it's Mariel. A couple weeks ago, I bought something at an antique store. It was labeled as a vintage Japanese porcelain stool and set up next to a makeup table. And it's gorgeous, white with a blue and pink floral design. Now, though it was labeled as a stool in my apartment, it's an end table. I put down drinks and snacks on it when I'm watching TV.

That's what we call repurposing. And if you rent your space, repurposing is a great way to go, especially if you start with the stuff you already have. Don't get hung up on what something is supposed to be for. Think about what you could turn it into instead. This is how breadbaskets turn into side tables and tomato cages can become plant stands. Like many Americans, reporter Adjua Jemabrempong rents her apartment. And she says, just because you don't own your home doesn't mean you need to accept drab walls and harsh lighting. There are lots of changes you can make that your landline.

Lord probably won't hate and that won't require you to invest buckets of money into a space you're going to leave. On this episode of Life Kit, how to make your rental feel like home. Agua's got lots of tips for us. By the way, she first reported this episode in 2024 when she was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon, Portugal. She's since moved to Porto and tells us that she's loving her new rental and is thinking about buying a base for her coffee table that's shaped like a Black Panther. So what's a forever renter to do?

A tiny kitchen that might not bother you in a six-month lease. Maybe a lot more frustrating after two years. And you may not be overflowing with cash to solve the problem. Enter DIYs. My current apartment has bright walls, a ton of storage, and plenty of places to hang plants, bags, and lighting. None of that was here when I moved in. I did it myself.

I spend a lot of time in this space, so it's important that it feel good to me. The first thing is really understanding your space. It's better to kind of understand and appreciate what your space can give than to try to force it away. That's Cliff Tan. He's the architect, author and feng shui practitioner known as Dear Modern on Instagram and TikTok. Cliff says it's important to use your senses to figure out what a space has going for it.

Where is the nicest part of the space? Where is the less nice part of the space? most of the time the best part of the space is where there's a window, nice fresh and nice natural meditation. The worst part of the space is probably like far, far away in the darkness or something like that close to the entrance way. So take away one, get to know your space. But it's just as important to get to know yourself.

How do you want your home to support you? So what you want to do next is to understand what activities you spend most time doing. If you spend most of your time on your couch, watching TV, you want to be close to the window. If you spend most of your time working from home, you want that close to the window too. So it's about placing your most frequented activities closer to the nicest part of the home.

I work from home and I'm a homebody. A big cozy couch is more important to me than a desk or formal dining room table and I didn't have room for both. So I installed a cute little gateleg table that folds down against one wall. Now I have a working surface when I need one and a place to hang out the rest of the time.

Cliff says it's also important to understand not just where things are placed in your home, but how that feels. Energy makes its way through your home based on how you flow through your home. So this is why the same home can have different energy paths depending on who lives in it.

And that's why it's important to start your arrival off right. The front entrance is the most important part of the home because that's your first impression. Not just for new guests who come, not just about showing off how beautiful your home is, is also to yourself, you need to feel good every time you come home. Even something as simple as having a part of recycling bags right by the entrance that you have to kick

every time you open the door. You have to push the door, to shove it in, to go through. That is enough to minus two points every time you come home, which compiled over 10 years, you will hate your home. You can't wait to move. When I first moved in, my home had no storage in the entryway whatsoever. I was always putting my purse on the ground and forgetting gym supplies across the house. So I installed hooks for my bags, keys, and even a hand fan.

Then I upcycled an IKEA shoe cabinet that now does triple duty as a linen closet, workout supply storage, and a gathering point for my electronics. That brings us to takeaway too. Don't get hung up on what something is supposed to be for. Think about what you could turn it into instead. This is how bread baskets turn into side tables, and tomato cages can become plant stands. I think so many times renters,

feel really restricted by the exact thing that they have in their home. And I think there's a really easy way to look around and say, what do I really wish this apartment had? And see if there's a way to make that happen. That's Amanda Poe. She's an attorney by day, and she also runs the Home Decor Instagram page, Boho Frisco. The project grew out of her frustration with beige, white, and neutral-heavy home decor stores. The desire to do you. DIY really came from not being able to source the colorful things that I wanted, and so making them on my own was the best way to bind them. You probably have at least one interior design dream. Some people want a clawfoot tub. I would love a lofted bed one day. And for Amanda, that element

was a fireplace. I was always so jealous that people were decorating seasonally for their mantles, you know, they were putting their garlands or their wreath above it. And then I realized, like, Oh, only I had a fireplace. And so with a couple of pieces of wood and a weekend, we built one. So you're gazing around the house, an ongoing list of projects dancing in your head. Where should you start? I would say you start with the ugliest things in your home then. It sounds funny, but look for the things that are actually ugly in your home, like the shoe rack.

You deal with the worst things first. That's when the impact is the greatest. Because it's like no point creating a cute little shelf in the kitchen when every time you walk home you see this show and it makes you angry. So Cliff brings us takeaway three. Start with the worst thing first. Once you've improved whatever bothers you the most, the statement pieces can follow.

And he's so right. I hated the overhead light in my place so much. So much. It wasn't until I brought in some funky lamps and could really turn off the big light that the room came to life. So think about what's bothering you about your space, the lack of storage in the closet or nowhere to put all your books, and focus on that first. Contractor lights aside, my apartment was pretty great when I moved in. I have three criteria that are non-negotiable.

Good light, top floor, no carpet. But several people I spoke to told me they took much bigger risks when selecting their spaces, including Shiail Milgram, also known as F.B Market Slut on Instagram and TikTok. She finds gorgeous vintage pieces, as is or for restoration, on Facebook Marketplace. Today, her apartment is lovely. It has huge windows and a ton of cool projects, including painted doors and a glass brick wall. But when she first viewed it, the moment we stepped into this apartment, our eyes burned. It, like, reeked. It smelled like cat feces.

I have, like, old videos on my Instagram of what it looked like previously, but there was, like, green and red walls. There was like fluorescent blue murals somewhere, and it was like absolutely horrific. After cleaning it within an inch of its life, the first thing she tackled was the paint. And Amanda gives us the details on why. That's takeaway four. Paint is a high-impact upgrade. You may be thinking, am I allowed to do that? The official answer is check your lease.

But on a practical level. When you paint a wall, all you have to do is paint it back. That's it. I love paint projects, both on and off the walls. But I don't always get it right on the first try. There's a pink wall in my house that I painted three separate times until I got the color right. Amanda had some tips for me on how to minimize the guesswork.

You really need to start with this watch. You bring those home into your space, not the fluorescent lighting of the store. Then you move on to a paint sample. Also, the different walls even in your room, are going to look different. I found that went out the hard way. My living room faces south onto a balcony, so the space gets very different amounts of light

throughout the year. It's brighter in winter when the sun is low enough to shine directly into the room. So the little patch I painted didn't show me what the whole wall would look like when it was done. Let's go big. Let's not try to imagine the whole room

with a post-it note size swatch. Let's 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. The other nice thing about paint is that it's reversible. Many DIYers will say that for some projects, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. But with repainting, if you're thorough, it will look like that pink wall was never there.

Amanda has a series called Renter Friendly Reality Check, where she brings viewers along on the takedown process of a project. I asked her how she handles paint situation. situations that need a more serious rescue. Some landlords do leave paint in an apartment for minor patches, so you could always ask. But if you're flying under the radar, here's how to make it work. I would say the most important things are the sheen, obviously, and the color.

And so even if you color match perfectly, but you get the sheen wrong, the place that you repaired is going to stick out so bad. I would say when your paint is peeling, like maybe your project has gone wrong, 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.

Then she dropped some wisdom on me that I could have definitely used in one of my first college apartments. Sometimes you can peel up paint from 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. I love this.

This is brilliant. When LifeKit returns, how lighting can transform your space on a budget. So a little paint can go a long way. But there's another element that can completely transform a space. Shiael and Cliff agree. Takeaway 5. Lighting is the key to a room. Lighting is like the biggest thing that affects a space.

I think it's the most pervasive as well as it can be the most eye-catching thing. Because a light is a light, it actually glows, so it attracts your attention. That's for better for worse, as I discovered in my living room. There's an ongoing TikTok trend called We Never Use the Big Light. I don't have many rules for my house, but I do have one. And that is that we never, ever, ever, ever use the big light. The Big Light is that central overhead lighting that is so common in rental units. It can bring a harsh energy to a space.

But even if you draw the short end of the stick as far as lighting goes, Cliff says there are ways to work around it. If you are going to rent for longer, you could change your, let's say you have can lights. Can lights are those recessed lights in the ceiling. They're like a step up from the standard contractor rental light. You could buy can lights that are adjustable, meaning you can point them in different directions. Find the same can light with the same whole size and just replay.

and then you have all these canals that can now point around. And you can shine it onto your artwork, shine it onto your table, and create focal points. Instead of just glaring down the floor, you can create a bit of depth using the lights that you already have. And even if you don't change any fixtures at all, there are other things you can do to make a space feel cohesive. Make sure all your bulbs are the same color temperature, which is like 2,700 Kelvin's, 3,000 Kelvin's.

Light comes on a spectrum from cool to warm. Cool light is bright and good for task-oriented spaces like a kitchen. Warm light in the 2,700 to 3,000 Kelvin range is nice and relaxing. Decide on one and make sure your whole house is a safe. It will make your house feel more consistent. My place has a bit of everything. Rewired sconces from big box stores, DIY mushroom lamps, paper lanterns. My favorite is a two-foot-tall table lamp shaped like a my mind.

from the San Francisco Gold Rush. Just like my IKEA entryway, once you start looking at form instead of function, there are so many great places to find things to upcycle. Thrift stores and architectural salvages are a great source of raw materials. When you find a good one, become buddies with the people who work there. Do they get their best deliveries on a certain day? Find out when that is. I have a rule that I don't spend more than $100 on anything other than a couch or a bed. So for online shopping, I'll figure out what I want, set some Craigslist alerts, and wait. Shiaelle has some Facebook marketplace search tips, too, and they do not involve typing out fancy designer names. If I actually did that on Facebook, then it would show me a bunch of people who

know exactly what they're selling and will sell it for those expensive prices, which, you know, good for them. But those of us with champagne tastes on a beer budget are probably better off finding people who just want to get that old piece of furniture out of their grandma's basement. And normally those people will just use very generic language. For instance, teak shelving unit or wood shelving unit. Funky is another keyword that I like to use. If you want to find funky chair, sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll find like an Eames. Keep it generic.

And if you are going to go specific, then be willing to like open your wallets wide. If the photos of that Eames chair look like stock images and the price is suspiciously low, remember to keep an eye out for scammers. Always look at the profile. You can look at their account. You can see when they open their account. For instance, my Facebook, it's been open since 2009 back when I was in middle school or elementary school. It kind of shows you that I'm a real person and I got like real friends and whatnot and like embarrassing profile pictures versus someone who like just opened their account last year and has one picture and no friends.

It kind of shows you who might be a scammer. Also, if they ask for like Zella up front, then they're probably a scammer. You try not to pay anyone anything until you see the item in person. In your DIY journey, you'll likely need to fix something you found on Facebook Marketplace, or maybe want to customize a Goodwill frame. So takeaway six, when assembling what you need, get creative. Whether it's an actual thrift store, a reused market, or an IKEA hack, think big about how to find what you need for a project.

And that's not just materials, but all the tools you need to get your project done. My DIY starter kit has five elements. First, a measuring tape. And I carry a small one with me at all times, just in case I come across something that could work for an ongoing project. Then, a small set of basic tools like screwdrivers, pliers, and a hammer. A level is important for anything that's going to have a flat surface. A drill, drill bits, and drywall anchors are probably my most used tools.

You can use those for anything from hanging something on a wall to drilling a hole and surrendering. to use as a pot for plants. And lastly, those paint supplies. But there are also larger supplies that you may not need to keep on hand. A lot of public library systems have tool lending libraries that members can use. There are also maker spaces with larger things like saws,

and some hardware stores will rent out tools as well. I've done plenty of projects I probably wouldn't try again as a renter, stapling fabric to the wall instead of wallpaper, for example, but finding a beautiful solution to what started out as a process, what started out as a problem can be a real source of pride. Yeah, it's that urge when someone says, where'd you get that? And then you say, I made it. It's like being an artist and people come inside your canvas.

They come over for dinner inside of your artwork. And that feels really cool. And you might be living with that canvas longer than you think, as Amanda and I have both learned. How long have you been renting? Our last apartment, we were there for over 10 years in the same space. Did you expect to be there for that long? Oh, no. I first signed like a 90-day lease.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And when we moved out, I just kept occurring to me if someone had said in that first month, you're going to be here for 10 years. How many more chances I would have taken? How many more times I would have painted the walls or I would have done something that I wanted? Some of you might still be.

asking, why bother to fix up a rental? Why build a fireplace or customized shelving or do anything that would threaten your deposit when it's time to leave? 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. 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. So just a recap, takeaway one, understand your space, which also means understanding yourself. Takeaway two, don't feel limited by an item's purpose, or by what you already have in your home. Imagine what you'd like to see instead, and then figure out how to make it happen.

Takeaway three, when in doubt, start with the ugliest thing in your house. Takeaway four. Paint is a high-impact way to transform a space. Takeaway five. Lighting is the most important part of your home. Turn off the big light and make way for table lamps, sconces, and directional light. Takeaway six.

Get creative with where to find tools and materials. And one less thing. Don't think of yourself as less than, just because you rent. The temporariness of a rental is freedom. It's a gift. You know, if the wall color doesn't suit you, repaint it. But if the whole apartment doesn't suit you, move. That's not a choice that people that own their home get to do.

Forever renters, we have our answer. That was journalist Adjua Jemma Bremong. One last thing. Would you consider rating and reviewing Life Kit on your podcast app? It helps us grow the show. Here's a review from listener Creative KDH. I've changed a lot of things in my life because of things that I've heard while listening, and it's improved my quality of life.

That's really our hope here at Life Kit. Help us spread the word. Leave us a review in your podcast app right now. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sylvie Douglas. Our digital editor is Malika Garib. Megan Kane is our senior supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and

Mika Ellison. Engineering support comes from Robert Rodriguez. Special thanks to Kyle Norris. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.