I still cannot understand this whole "we don't want you to paint the walls" thing that landlords do. You can paint back over it -- and if it's not right, take it out of the renter's security deposit! I always make sure I can paint walls -- white walls drive me bonkers!

Laura
http://www.justalittlebit.net

Laura, one reason many landlords don't permit renters to paint is because many renters (probably most renters) aren't at all good at painting, or at least not at all good at doing a GOOD paint job. Drips, runs, and overpainting on baseboards, floors, ceilings, etc. can't always be easily fixed after the renter moves out and can actually result in the property being more difficult to rent to the next tenant. This is why I'll NEVER permit a tenant to paint. I've invested a lot of money into my property and don't want a single tenant to devalue my investment with a sloppy paint job. And despite what you may think, the cost of fixing a bad paint job can easily exceed the value of the security deposit!

I can understand why they don't want people painting: not everyone is careful when they paint, which means not only the potential for hideous paint (that then has to be painted over), but also the potential for ruined floors or messed-up appliances from careless painters.

Hmm.. This is true -- I suppose I think everyone paints well, when I should know that's not true!

Laura
http://www.justalittlebit.net

I own a rental property and I've always permitted tenants to paint. Actually most have done a great job and really improved the property. I do ask them to consult with me and most of them have great taste. They know I care about the property and take good care of it. Maybe I've just been lucky.

I actually really like our white apartment walls because we have a lot of colorful things and a lot of art and I think painting would probably just totally distract from that, and we'd be in a bind if we wanted to buy some new art and it clashed with the paint color.

I lived in an apartment once that had a whole wall in the living room covered in cedar shingles. There were no cedar shingles anywhere else in the building. No clue how they got there. I stewed over what to do with that wall, then finally realized that it was a feature in itself it treated correctly. I found a single GREAT piece of art with a frame that worked well against the shingles and hung it centered on that wall. Nothing more. It didn't need anything more.

My house has one element I can't stand: popcorn ceilings. They're ugly and uneven, and make the rooms look small and the ceiling dirty. They are throughout the whole main level, except the kitchen, but it's not in our budget to have them redone.

I'm moving into a turn of the century four-square style home and it has DROP ceilings in the living room! Ugh. It looks like my office in there!

i have 3 different kinds of cabin-esque wood paneling and four different ceiling treatments (most are drop ceiling tiles, but ALL different styles) in an 800 sq ft space. most days i just dismiss it, but when i think too hard it kind of drives me crazy!

Wall decals, 3M velcro picture hangers (WONDERFUL), string with postcards hung by clothes pins. Learn to love the white walls. The last place I rented had wood paneled walls in one room, plaster walls in another, green plastic paneled walls in the bathroom with gold flecks, grapes wallpaper in the kitchen (with bright yellow counter tops), tiny flower wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom, and striped wallpaper in half of the upstairs room and faux-wood plastic paneling in the other half of the upstairs room. The landlords had previously lived there and refused to let us paint anything, even white. The whole time we lived there, I ached for plain white walls. Sure, I'd love a beautiful gray or green...yellow, something in my new rental, but I'm much more appreciative of the white walls now.

White walls aren't that bad - it's BEIGE walls you have to watch out for. Like living inside a giant bandage for a year. Ugh.

i understand not having all renter's paint, because i have been that renter coming in after their mess. BUT, why do the wall HAVE to be white, then? at least a little color?

what tequila red says. My flat has beige carpets and beige walls... I really like modern style and bright colours but nothing goes with beige!
The flat has a lot else going for it but it's the one thing that stops me being happy with the look of it. The next place I live WILL have wood floors and white walls :)

@diydame:
None of the walls in the apartment I rent out are white. They all have color. BUT the negative to that is a potential tenant is either going to like those colors or not, thus limiting the number of potential renters. A lot of landlords probably go with blah white, beige, whatever throughout the entire apartment specifically so it will be more monotone and thus more appealing to a broader range of potential tenants. Thus more landlords probably (unfortunately) see blah white/beige as a necessity to get the unit rented as quickly as possible.

@tequila red - I echo that. I was apartment hunting a few months ago and there was one unit that had a weird yellowy eggshell color on the walls. I asked about whether they were supposed to be that color and they looked at me like I had sprouted three heads. Since when is a weird offputting yellow color supposed to be good? And these were supposed to be pretty upscale apartments! Ugh.

@yellowstripes - I have popcorn ceilings... I've gotten over it, really. They're not that pretty, and sometimes I get wishful thinking about the 1930s apartment we thought of moving to, but then I remember that as nice as that place was, it lacked in so many other areas that were absolutely vital. So I'd rather have an apartment that has little irritations like popcorn ceilings, but get the actual necessities I need, like subway access.

i bought a house where everything is grey. i'm talking carpets, trim, walls and ceilings. seriously 8 different shades in the whole house. it has been project #1 to get it warmed up!! but holy cow it's a slow process.

i forgot to mention i had my years in beige/white/tan and even butterscotch colored apartments i could do nothing with. super cheap carpet is the worst thing in rentals!!!!

I have an old milkbox ( a holdover from the days when milk was delivered to your home) that sits out about 2cm from the wall beside the entrance door and across from the kitchen door. I've hung a mirror that now partially covers the milkbox and placed a vintage server beneath it. A couple of antique boxes stacked on the server fill in the space between the server and mirror and hide the rest of the milkbox. I now have a great landing place beside the door, and the server now hides the microwave inside so that I have a little more counter space in the kitchen. Bonus.

Paint the darned walls - They can always be painted over later.
Just be sure to do a good job and don't do something dumb like letting paint in the carpets and wooden floors.

Meanwhile - Your place would look lots better immediately if you straightened that lampshade and hung the picture on the wall...

I'm suffering with old built-in storage that was made of low grade wood that has developed an orangy-tone and that I'm not allowed to paint. Heck, even if I could paint it, it would either cost a fortune or require a hella lot of elbow grease (it's covered in multiple thick coats of super glossy oil-based finish). I hid half of it with wall-to-wall curtains, but the other half is out in the open.

@bepsf - some landlords won't allow renters to paint at all, though. Surely that's a rule that is spelled out ahead of time, and renters who agree to it should be able to live with it.

Inflexible landlords was the #1 reason for me to save and buy a house; took me 13 years and it was worth every penny. I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who has to rent from these property owning control freaks.

@Renngrrl:
It IS the Landlord's property, NOT the tenant's, so he/she has EVERY right to control what is done to it. A tenant is just that, and doesn't have the right to do just ANYTHING they want to the property. It's the people who say "just paint it and to heck with the landlord" who anger me. Any landlord who cares about his or her property will check in on it from time to time. And it is acceptable for the landlord to do so for a legitimate reason (having the heating and air conditioning system serviced, for instance) and with reasonable notice. If I walked into my rental unit to find the tenant had painted ANYTHING in it, when the lease we both agreed to CLEARLY states that painting is NOT permitted, I'd slap a fine on them right then and there and threaten them with eviction for violating the terms of the lease. As Pi noted above, when this is something that's spelled out ahead of time in the lease, it is something the tenant SHOULD be willing to live with.

*Sometimes* it's best to ask forgiveness than permission.
Use this advice at your own peril. Thankfully, I'm an excellent painter, so I've never been burned.

White walls are fine by me. I'm moving next month and WISH the new place had white walls. It has these awful yellow walls that to me look like urine yellow when the light dims. I am so over yellow walls. They're not "happy" or "cheerful" to me. I am going to ask if we can paint over in white. I will hire professionals if it would convince the landlord.

i feel that "land lords" are the ones that are REALLY bad at painting (or hire a really cheap crew that is bad at painting).

My landlady is the ultimate hands-off gal. She doesn't mind if I paint or do whatever. In fact, when leading me on the original tour of the apartment, she mentioned offhandedly that I could knock a couple walls out and fix the bizarre closet. I was floored!

So far, I've kept it to painting and replacing light fixtures. Bless my landlady's heart...I have five rooms and a tiny hallway, and six different colors on my walls. I love the brightness!

Its a bummer that you can't paint your white walls. I wasn't allowed to paint my beige walls. But who says that white has to be boring? Check out this blogpost on beautiful white walls.

http://designvie.com/2010/04/white-doesnt-have-to-be-boring/

Daily Nuance... have you ever heard of the phrase "the customer is always right?" Landlords should realize that their tenants are the reason that they have positive cashflow. Granted, landlords want to preserve the value and cleanliness of their properties. But the holier-than-thou attitude some landlords have (and is displayed here) is the reason I'd never rent from an individual, only from a company or co-op.

And I agree with the poster who commented that usually the landlords can't paint. My rental company must have hired a blind man to paint my place. Drips everywhere (countertops, sockets, floors, doorknobs) and they used beige primer that gets dirty if i even glance at it.

I'm a landlord who allowed my tenants to paint the walls - but NOT the woodwork. I wouldn't say either of them did a truly professional job (not surprising, since they aren't professional painters), but since I would have to repaint anyway when they move out, it doesn't bother me at all. For the same reason, I'm even okay with the atrocious Easter egg colors one of them picked! I figure, if they are willing to invest the time and money to paint, they are more likely to a) be good tenants, b) treat the place as their own, and c) stay a while!

The mid-1950s house I rent has old green carpet. It's actually more of a blue/green/grey color, but green nonetheless.

But here's the kicker: This carpet is covering beautiful original hardwood (oak) floors. Both bedrooms, the closets, the living room and the hallway all have them and they are all covered with the carpet.

I heard creaking when we were moving in so I decided to investigate. I pulled back the carpet and padding in all the rooms and there they were in all their glory: oak floors.

I asked the landlord (who lives in a smaller house on the property) if I could possibly take the carpet out. I even told him I would do any work necessary to get the wood floors into pristine condition, but he said no. (This is the same guy who got mad when I took down mini-blinds to put up curtains...)

I've been here for 2 years and I can't stand it! Just knowing they're there... it's all I can do to keep from going ballistic on the carpet. Some days when I have a bit of extra time I pry back a corner or two and stare longingly. This is why I'm looking at houses to buy now.

Oh, I got distracted and forgot to respond to the original question! In our apartment, which I love, the light fixture in the kitchen over the dining area was a floodlight, the kind people put on the sides of their houses to light up the driveway if a burglar approaches. The quality of light was horrible, both harsh and dim, which doesn't even seem possible. So we replaced it with a pendant fixture with a beautiful linen drum shade. We decided to go with the "ask forgiveness after" approach, but the manager has been in the apartment several times since and hasn't said anything, so I think we're okay. And it really is a massive improvement.

The apartment I lived in had horrible grey-beige walls when I moved in. Not just the walls, but the doors, moldings, window frames. It was light and soul sucking. The property management rep that showed me the place said that the colour would stay, but once I moved in I wrote them a proposal with what I intended to do, including paint colours (some were quite dark) and inspiration pages from magazines. They not only approved it, but paid for the paint and new bathroom fixtures. I ended up doing a lot of extra work (moldings to cover crappy wall seams, closet shelving etc), so I wrote them asking for a rent increase exemption. They agreed on the terms that they could keep the bathroom cabinet and kitchen lighting I had purchased. When I moved out they gave me extra money with my damage deposit for the window dressings I left, even though my lease said that the original ones (really crappy plastic blinds and grandma sheers) had to be reinstalled. They ended up with a much nicer apartment, and are now renting it for much more than I was paying.

It's worth asking for what you want, and developing a relationship with your landlord / property manager. And their reception staff. Totally key. Putting it in writing and giving a visual reference for what you want to do and allowing them to really envision the space as you see, and the potential benefit to them, can turn around a resilient landlord. It might not, but it's always worth trying.

In the building I'm currently living in, tenants may NOT paint the walls (only very very nice apartments in St Paul allow tenants to paint) BUT the rental company repaints every apartment between new renters, so that it always looks fresh. They came up with the compromise that the company picks 3 colors, and the renter can pick any one of the 3 for the bedroom, and any 3 for the living room. The kitchen and bathroom stay white. We had our choice of taupe, sage, and white, and picked sage for both bedroom and living room. This way I get to feel like I had a say, my apartment has character, and they can insure their painting is always top notch.

As for the original question-

my apartment has 2 doors, for some reason to do with fire codes. Their 12 feet apart from each other. While I love not burning to death, having 2 doors you can't block in a 2 person, oddly laid out, 500 square foot apartment was a major irritation to me. BUT when we got one of those hanging shoe storage thinngies, and used it to store all kinds of useful other things, I got to both use the space for helpful storage, AND maintain fire codes. It just loops over the top of the door we never use. Win- win!

Our old landlord- well, we never even met the guy. Rented it through a property management place. They said no painting. When we moved in (it had been vacant since it was built except for 3 months), we found smears of grease on the walls, drip marks in the kitchen, dirty white walls, holes in the wall- still the management place, even after I emailed them pix of it, said NO PAINT. So I told the lady to piss up a rope and painted the whole house- all 3 floors. It took a ton of time, but it was gorgeous when it was done. When we moved out, the management lady flipped her freaking lid about it. I again showed her pictures, and she demanded we paint it "back to how it was". Um, so you want me to paint it white, smear oil and grease on it, and throw kraft dinner against the kitchen walls?! AND I had painted it very neutral. But this is also the lady who, when we called about a bat in the attic, asked "Do you have a tennis racket to kill it with?" We also found out later, that it had been a drug house. That's why the front door had looked like it had been kicked down- because the cops did it. We framed in and drywalled the basement, for more space- and they asked that we take it down when we left. I mean, what?! You don't want a finished rec room you'd rather a cinderblock basement?! Insanity. Especially since when we left they put the house up for sale. They also screwed shut the patio doors since they didn't feel like building stairs- which violated fire code to have a main entrance/exit inaccessable. The owner also put in white carpet and tile. White! In a rental! I mean, I am a VERY tidy person, but we have pets, and 2 kids. WHITE is NOT rental friendly people!
Argh frustrating.
We have a 2 bedroom apartment in our basement of our (owned) home now. The tenants have to show me their planned colours, but I'm pretty easy going, so if it's not black or purple or something insane, I'm fine with it.

I once had an apartment that was 440 sq ft. I was a single mom with a 2 yr old son. I turned the teeny bedroom into his room, and the dining room was my room. It was actually a fabulous little apartment. 440sq ft, not so much space with a kid, but it worked well for us then. The kitchen was 5'x5'. I painted one whole wall with magnetic paint, for a message board. I bought a drop down table from Ikea that folded down when we ate. In the living room, I had my bike hung on the ceiling, which looked pretty cool. We only had a bathtub, no shower... which to me, is better than only a shower and no tub!

I'm a renter who loves the fact that my landlord cares enough to lay down rules. It's his property! It's his right to do what he needs to protect what he owns! A renter who can't handle a few rules should be replaced by someone who can. To think that you can do whatever you want with something someone else owns is childish.

Our duplex has ugly, photo finish particle board-style cupboards. They're salmon pink with bits of grey/blue high lighting them. I've put paper down on the inside, but that is as much as I can think to do with them. I'm not even sure we can paint that style of cabinet, but I'd dearly love to replace them - they're not even well arranged!

And we've finally started doing more to fix up the place - new faucets, lights and paint. We've been excellent tenants so far, and we're lucky to have pretty hands-off landlords - they approved a small deck even. Making these changes makes us want to stay there longer...we get to make it a home.

At least they're white walls. All my leasing company's properties have walls painted in their own formulation of pinkish beige and charge $400 in damages per room that needs repainting when you move out.

ugh... when we moved in the walls and all the ceilings were stained, im thinking the former tenants were smokers, after a good scrub the walls are now cleaner but still beige unfortunatley.. we still have to live with an awful driveway we cant even drive our car on, carpet from the 70s, damaged vinyl from the 70s, weird wood panelling that is coming off the walls in the kitchen and dining room, weird BLUE CARPET in the BATHROOM with weird pink wall panelling, the exterior of the house is covered (or not covered...) with peeling paint and im thinking a boxer used to live here because there's damage to the walls that looks like someone just went on a punching rampage... lovely! thats what you get for first time renters for a family of 4 living off one income in this economy and competitive rental market.

I have dark wood paneling throughout my entire house. Did I mention that they're unfinished planks? Atleast the walls are super clean. If anyone touches them, they get splinters. Ouch! I am forbidden to paint them, which would have been so much less expensive than the alternative to cover them up. I collected nice frames and made art gallery walls. Expansive mirrors are in every room. And long cool white curtains that stretch across the entire wall, and not just stop at the windows, have made the house bearable.

I live in an apartment with cinder-block walls that are painted the cheapest glossiest shade of cream. Painting them white or dove gray would be wonderful but against the terms of my lease. My solution has been to invest in large scale artwork (mostly from Etsy). It draws my eye directly away from the horrible walls. Not to mention whoever came up with the velcro wall tabs a 3m needs a medal.

Maybe this is picky, but our rental kitchen has white floor tiles, light beige counter tops and cream cabinets. It as clearly done up by a someone who didn't realize there are dozens of shades of white.

Plus, the last people who lived here tore the place up and whoever fixed it painted right on top of drywall screws, nails and wallpaper. Not a nice look. And it's kind of impossible to fix those kinds of problems.

One of the biggest challenges we face is that of living in an older property. Beautiful hardwood floors and many windows, but one little rule that's killing me--no nails, screws, hooks, or sticky tack. I would love help finding creative ways to decorate or display artwork. HELP!

My new apartment (1920s adobe house) has two challenges:

1) My kitchen has dark hardwood flooring. Yes my kitchen. And 1/3 of that, the part near the fridge, sink and counter, is painted a teal blue. The other part is where the kitchen table goes. The kitchen is pretty small so it actually works well to delineate the space, it's just odd looking. But it gave me an idea for a new color scheme: teal and chocolate. I bought a painting set from Home Goods with teal/chocolate/white colors which matches the color scheme of the kitchen beautifully.

2) The beautiful vintage white tile in the bathroom has been covered with a weird pebble tile covering. Now you can google "pebble tile" and come up with beautiful images. Mine doesn't look like that. Imagine if you took the little rice-sized pebbles from your backyard and threw them on your floor without regard for shape or color. That's what it looks like. But I decided to run with and make the bathroom a "natural theme". Again HomeGoods to the rescue. It's a wood/rock theme in the bathroom and I have a large photo print of a closeup of smooth beach rocks on the wall. The shower curtain is teal/white/chocolate to match the kitchen. I found a chocolate wood garbage can with a pebble border around it, almost like my floor. I also bought the matching display tray and filled it with decorative rocks and a plant and put on the toilet tank. I looove my bathroom now.

@Terry in Silver Spring, cedar shingles on one wall? I think I lived there, too! No, actually I lived in a place that had one wall covered in thin cork, not thick enough to put push pins through & be utilized as a giant cork board. Completely bizarre wall covering. But your cedar shingles? Ooooh the potential for making the room look like an out door garden patio!

@view happyleaf- I also moved into an apartment that was painted all gray walls, trim, cabinets... Later my boyfriend in I found cans & cans of paint in the basement all labeled "Battleship Gray"! No kidding. The landlord was in the Merchant Marines. He let us paint the apartment with the stipulation that we re-paint it Battleship Gray when we moved out.

I refuse to ever live in an apartment that has drop panel or popcorn ceilings. And, the bathroom MUST have a window. Won't consider anything less. I can deal with a lot of bizarre design elements, but I have to set some sort of standard for myself!

Every place I have lived in has had something wrong with the kitchen (at the moment I've been living in a place with no kitchen!):

Blood red indoor/outdoor carpet (super smelly) in a kitchen. Tore it up, scraped off the glue, & exposed beautiful wide board oak floor underneath. Later the landlord asked: "Did you put down that floor in the kitchen? It looks great!" (He had bought the place "as is" & never did anything to improve it).

A kitchen that had been all done in brown ceramic tiles on the walls & counter tops, brown linoleum on the floor, & cabinets made from scrap pieces of dark brown paneling. Couldn't do anything about the tiles but a gallon of white paint went right over those brown panel cabinets that had been decorated with orangey decals of 70s style mushrooms!

A kitchen installed by a 6'8" tall landlord, utilizing scrap wood & paneling that he scrounged up from the scrap wood pile behind the property. The kitchen measured 5 x 8 (with a 12' ceiling), the counters were built 43" high (I'm 5'2") and 13" deep. Overhead cabinets were 8" deep (not even deep enough to lay a dinner plate flat!), started about 2' above the counter tops & went right up to the ceiling. The fridge was in the living room! The best I could do with that kitchen was to remove the doors from the cabinets above & below the counters & hang lacy curtains to try to kill the boxy feeling. Built a step box on the floor in order to reach the counter tops comfortably, attached wood strips in the cabinets to stand the plates up... The only good feature about the kitchen was the old farmhouse porcelain double sink. Unfortunately he installed it 30" from the floor (he didn't want to deal with the plumbing to make it flush with the counter tops). Talk about a back breaker when washing dishes. But the rest of the house was so incredible that despite the kitchen trauma I lived there for 6 years!!!

When we first moved into our house, it had literally been repainted two days prior. Everything was white. Now, the person who chose the white did a good job with picking the color, not all whites are the same. But still, white.

With everything we had going on for the first couple of months, we just let it be while we figured out the house and where we wanted stuff to be. Seven years later, two main rooms are still white. Turns out, they suited the rooms and our stuff better than we thought they would. And in the rooms that we did paint, we didn't go wild with color. The flow of the house just looked better with paler colors on the walls and our stuff (furniture, art, etc) all seemed to work better with a plain backdrop.

Another thing I love about the white is that I can really mix it up often with accessories and stuff and it always works against the white.

As for those who advised her to paint against her landlord's permission/contract, ridiculous advice.

Landlords have the right to decree what you do or don't do in THEIR properties. If you can't live with that, find a different rental. OR get on good terms with the landlord and persuade them to let you "improve" their property for them. (Then improve it, don't trash it!!)

I always asked my landlords if they were going to paint between tenents to save me some touch-up paint for repainting holes and scuffs. Then most of the work I asked permission to do just reinforced the idea that I wanted to help them maintain and enhance their property -- I usually got permission and the ability to submit the receipts toward my rent.

As for what I have lived with: cheap hardware store wood paneling, pink bathroom wallpaper with black and white swans, kitchenette wallpaper with sailboats (all three in the same studio!)... solution: I moved as fast as I could!

In another memorable place, ancient vivid orange sculptured pile carpeting with huge black cigarette burns in several places. (It was temporary, we moved from there too.)

Many places I've lived were really pretty awful, but the reason I lived there was lack of money to do better. As my situation changed, I moved on. I never tried to "nest" in those places, they were never "home", they were just places to stay. It was never important enough to me to fix them up, since I knew they were short-term, and I had other things on my mind (like grad school) to distract me. It's lovely having a nice home now, though.

A friend of mine rented a basement apartment from a landlord who rented on 'no painting' terms. She and her boyfriend were ready to break the rules, screw their security deposit, and apologize later, but at the last minute, they stopped at his door (he lived in the building above) on the way back from the paint store and showed him the sample of the paint they'd already picked out and paid for under the pretense of, "would you bend the rules if we got this color approved first?" He reconsidered, drew up an amendment to their lease that allowed them to paint without losing their entire security deposit, and let them paint a second room a different [approved] color six months later!

I don't know if Sieggo will see this, but for her drop ceiling challenge, they now have pressed tin style tiles for those ceilings: a quick search brought up: http://www.thetinman.com/ but there might be even cheaper "faux" options. I saw this at a cafe near my home recently, and I thought it looked great--it completely distracted me from the fact that it was a dropped ceiling.

As for my challenge (http://madmaison.com), I live in my grandmother's old house. We're changing a lot, but money is a constraint. She installed a 1/2 bath on the main level a few years before she passed away, and put in a faux-marble beige sink and a beige toilet. They work fine, but they're awful.

My biggest design challenge as a renter is the restriction we have (in almsot all rentals in Australia) that we may not attach ANYTHING to the walls. This means no hooks (even removable ones), shelves, anything... Painting walls - ha! That's a dream of mine.

If anyone has suggestions how to overcome this, I'd love to hear!

Can't wait to buy our own home. I understand that the property belongs to the owner, yet we are excellent tenants and pay good money to rent these homes - but are never really able to 'live' in them, they always feel temporary. Renting in this country comes with so many restrictions that you never really can feel at home.

From the above posts, it sounds as if the rental situation in the us is similar to the uk, where I live. The quality of rental properties here is generally poor, and more often than not properties come fully furnished (badly). It is so worthwhile to save to buy your own place. However, I don't think that this is the case in the rest of Europe.

We have a rent control apt. in Santa Monica, CA, which means it was pretty much a genteel slum until the landlord hired a good property manager last year. The landlord is scandalously cheap, so most of of the repairs I make are better than what his minions do. The new manager and I have a "don't ask, don't tell" agreement where she trusts me to be a good steward of the place and pretty much do what I want until we move out (when she will be "SO surprised!" ).

I think the best rental situation would be one like AmmoniteInk. If the landlord is going to paint anyways, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to offer a choice of colors - even if it's only three neutrals.

I do totally agree that if the landlord says no painting, that means NO painting. Some people couldn't paint for their life and after a landlord pays for new carpet, new appliances, new whatever just because the tenant dripped paint on it, they'd have to start charging much higher security deposits.

In my second apartment, the landlord told us we could go to town on the colors that we painted. The next tenets, who have lived there for a couple of years now, still have the colors. I sort of know them and they have told me how much they love them.

The next place that I lived the landlady told me that I could paint the kitchen but last minute made me paint it when I left...we left on bad terms. But it's illegal to enter our apartment without telling us for no good reason and she never really did fix that leaky roof. Here landlords are supposed to paint after every tenent moves out and if they are there for a year that's an expense that the landlord is required to absorb. Judging by the fact that there were pen marks and holes in the wall when we moved in, I'm guessing that she hadn't painted. If you're not going to keep up your end of the law, at least let me make improvements.

This latest place, I asked the landlords if I could paint when I moved in. In the kitchen one wall was blue-screen blue, the small living room was a dark rust (which would have been nice in a different space but just made this place feel dark and small) and the bedroom was a pukey sage. I told them I didn't care if they didn't repaint if they let me paint. They let me do my thing (I'm a good painter after all the painting I've done) and my apartment is warm and friendly. I'll paint the one green wall in the bedroom back (the rest are white) before I go...but I agree with whomever said that it really would make you feel more at home and encourage you to take better care of the place.

The walls in this place are poor quality and the handyman, while very nice, doesn't really know what he's doing. He attached a (too high) shelf in the kitchen but didn't put anything to ground it and now it's coming off of the wall. I don't keep anything too stupendously heavy on it and I tried moving the supports, but alas...I think I'm going to get them an IKEA counter. The other thing is wood in the kitchen. I cook a lot and put a big rug down to protect the floors, but it doesn't cover everything and I feel like they will be ruined. I'm trying to keep them up...but it's a kitchen! Things spill and break. I would love some tile in the kitchen. Even decent linoleum!

If you want color on your walls and you are not allowed to paint, just purchase a "hospital style" curtain track from Kirsch hardware (9600 series) along with the roller slides with hook #9616. They are super cheap! (I'm talking Ikea prices) Then, go to a discount fabric store, and purchase some fun fabric. Install 1" grommets every 7" on the fabric top edge and voila! a draped fun colored or patterned wall.
Jeannine, Mannigan Design, Inc.

You're all making me feel really insecure about my beige walls. I painted them that color on purpose! Although, I think it's a really pretty color. It's on the continuous wall between my kitchen and living room and is accented with True Teal, and Island Orange. It's Valspar Moose Mousse.
http://www.myperfectcolor.com/Match-of-Valspar-3003-10A-Moose-Mousse-p/mpc0099140.htm
No. I don't sell Vaspar.