Renting out a house or an apartment is the phase we all go through.
You know the place may be temporary but you still want to feel like home and add your personality to it for the year or more you’re living there.
Here’s how to do so without losing your bond.
Waikato Real Estate property manager Ksenia Kruchkina, who manages a block of 42 apartments on Knox St in Hamilton, says not one of them looks the same.
Start your property search
Each apartment is about 30sq m each and tenants find ways to make their living spaces unique and homely.
“I often do an inspection for the whole block of flats at once and I see how differently each unit is decorated. Within such a small space people manage to make units into their own homes and you will not find an identical unit,” she says.
One of the tenants in the apartment block is Hamilton chef Karl Bennett, who’s been living in the studio for about seven years.
Bennett says at first he was not ready to settle and lived our of boxes for five years, but is now big on personalising his space as realised the importance of it.
“It took me a while to learn how to cherish that. It’s enjoyable if you are a creative person.”
Displaying personal and sentimental belongings, including artwork and photographs, make you connect with the place more and create the feeling of home.
“I scored some really cool shelves, light blocking curtains, hung bamboo matting on the wall and am working on my art collection to break up all the wall, space as it can look very plain,” he says.
Another way to safely personalise the apartment is to bring in indoor plants or create a potted herb garden on the balcony, both hugely fashionable now.
“It’s made such a huge difference. It made the place a lot cooler. When you lock the door, you lock the world outside.
“In the apartment block you can start to lose your soul a bit. It was starting to happen to me,” he says.
Auckland property manager from Anne Duncan Real Estate, Shane Ryder, says tenants often put requests for a vegetable garden outside, which can do no harm.
Wall art is the most common way to personalise rental space but only if it doesn’t ruin the wall.
Often landlords would attach permanent metal picture hook in places where they want art to be hang, otherwise tenants tend to use stick-on hooks which could tear up the wallpaper when taking it off recklessly.
“We want a tenant feel like it is home. If you don’t have anything on the walls, not even a family photo , it’s going to feel like a temporary stop in life,” Ryder says.
Changing curtains to the ones that reflect on your style and personality is another way to make a rental property feel like home.
Just safely store the old set of curtains and put them back up when you’re moving out, Ryder says.
However, not all tenants feel like putting effort into personalising their rental and often wreck the place instead.
“We find that half of tenants really don’t care about the property and the other half don't want to wreck anything. You wish everyone was reading from the same book,” he says.
