Home Projects

You might not always be allowed to paint the walls of a rental apartment, but if you are, it can make a huge difference in how the whole space looks. Plus, adding a just-for-you color to the walls can make your place truly feel like home.Take it from renter Juliana, who has a 600-square-foot one-bedroom in San Francisco that was filled with white walls when she moved in.

Green is a great color to use in interior design because it’s so versatile. Muted sages make for calming sleep spaces, and bold or dark greens can create statement-making bookcases.Brandi Katherine Herrera (@alivelymanner) went with bright green in her Omaha cottage’s dining room makeover. But the space when she bought it had a “palette of gray and white builder-grade finishes.

For an interior designer, there’s nothing like having a blank slate to design and a client who puts their full faith in your process. Sandy Baisley and Natasia Smith, co-owners and principal designers of Re-Find, had found that exact dream scenario with Julie. “Our client was moving into this home with no previous items for a fresh start,” Sandy shares.

When it comes to choosing a dark paint color, DIYer Danie Berger (@diyinprogress_) says, “Transitioning a space from bright and airy to dark and dramatic can feel intimidating.”But she says it can be rewarding, design-wise; the key is “layering tones within the same family so the space [feels] cohesive rather than chaotic.

If you’re a renter wondering where you should spend your budget on decorating your apartment, take Alli’s (@actuallyalliDIY) advice: “I like to try to save as much money as possible on the removable renovations,” she says. “I tend to invest more money into the decor items because those items can move with me and be used in future spaces.

Older homes have unique charm because the layout includes special details that, typically, aren’t seen in modern builds today. Historic homeowners Alexander Rigby and Bobby Naugle, who live in a Pittsburgh townhouse built in 1900, have a gorgeous parlor room. The front room has a fireplace with an original wood mantel and green tiles, plus large stained glass above the front window.

I love fireplaces for their cozy ambience, but there was a time when they were more utilitarian than aesthetic. In my 1895 rowhouse, for example, there were originally fireplaces in every room for functional heat.Once radiators were installed, those fireplaces became unnecessary, and previous owners decided two fireplaces were plenty. But instead of leaving the other six fireplaces open to admire, they simply covered them up with drywall. Horror of horrors!On one hand, I get it.

For better (see: these 20 incredibly chic studios) or worse (see: not being able to fall asleep due to a light coming from a random kitchen appliance), studio apartments famously do not have a distinct sleeping zone. But that doesn’t mean they have to stay that way. Renter Ashley Buchanan (@historyinhighheels) created a cozy bedroom with plenty of clothing storage in her 480-square-foot studio apartment in D.C.“Technically, there was no bedroom before!” Ashley says.

A crisp white color scheme can help rooms feel bigger and brighter—but in some spaces, that’s just not enough. The only upstairs bathroom in Alli Devlin’s home suffered from an always-cramped feeling, thanks to the tiny windows and poor layout.Another drag: The 1978 home had seen few updates over the years, and the bathroom was no exception.

Blank white spaces, given their expansiveness and endless potential, can be tricky to decorate — especially if it’s a long hallway. But luckily for plant enthusiast Paige Tailyn, she knew she wanted to create an experience for her hallway that would make guests “feel suddenly engulfed by their surroundings,” she says.

Hillary and Johnny Musselman weren’t looking to buy a house when they went antique hunting at an estate sale a year ago… but when they saw that this space hadn’t been touched since the 1960s, they jumped at the chance to purchase this architectural gem.

Courtney Hierath had a lot to love about her little bungalow, but the kitchen, with its buttermilk-yellow walls and dark wood cabinets, wasn’t on the list.“I despised it from day one,” says Courtney. “But the idea of tackling this huge project was daunting, so I kept putting it off as long as I could.

During Meredith Svoboda’s final walk-through of her Nashville home, she photographed the dining room, “dreaming of the life I could bring to this room,” she writes.She, her husband, and their three children moved into their new house this past April, and Meredith decided from the get-go that she’d have to make some changes.“The room was so dark and always had a yellow hue to it,” she writes.

Jenna Schreck, a holistic nutrition consultant, shared her pivotal living room makeover with Apartment Therapy. She was able to rediscover her design style after a breakup (and the ex moved out).This time, Jenna reveals her recent hallway-turned-home office makeover (which she had help designing with Annie Mueller of Currant Design), and it’s great inspiration for anyone looking to carve out space to be creative and productive in an unconventional spot.

Tired of all-white? Honja‘s kitchen remodel proves the trend still has legs, especially when paired with cheerful spring pastels. Their kitchen was blessed with good bones, but also cursed with a purple laminate counter — and swinging saloon doors.“We knew it had all kinds of potential down the road,” she says.She saved for three years to afford this streamlined $10,000 remodel, and elected to do a do-it-yourself renovation.

“That feeling of scrubbing a bathroom until your arms ache, only for it to still look kind of grimy, is the ultimate motivator,” DIYer Joe Bergantino says. Joe is one half of the DIY duo @HomosWithHammers, an account he shares with his husband, Ricky Gonzalez. They’ve slowly been restoring their 1800s Chicago home, and that grimy feeling was the couple’s inspiration to make the tiny powder room “pack a giant punch.

Even when an older, outdated room DESPERATELY needs updating, it can be a bummer if the remodel doesn’t retain any vintage charm. It came time for Hilary Alexander — a singer with an internationally renowned swing band — to update the 1906 Craftsman house in Los Angeles she’s owned for 18 years and shares with her boyfriend and her two young boys.

This isn’t the first sad studio apartment that architectural and interior designer Francis Dominguez has totally transformed. A few years ago, Apartment Therapy featured his 365-square-foot studio apartment in Miami, and I was wowed by his ability to create so many different functional areas in one small space, especially after seeing what the space looked like before he updated it.

Historic homes often come with complicated maintenance and renovation challenges — like uneven foundations, tricky electrical or plumbing, and even health concerns with lead paint and asbestos. And sometimes the problems are significant enough that there’s little left to salvage. For Christine Urbanek, her 1890s Victorian was one of those instances where it was better to reconfigure the interior layout completely.

My 1940 rowhouse has great bones, like a beautiful brick fireplace and original hardwood floors, but it’s been up to me to add architectural details — all those charming, characterful touches that I love in a space. So when I moved in (with my new homeowner’s zeal for DIY and too many boxes of books), one of my first projects was to create a faux built-in using an IKEA BILLY bookshelf.

A functional, well-designed bathroom just might be the most important room in a home. After all, everyone in a home uses it — especially if it’s in a high-traffic part of a house or apartment. Homeowner Kiley Cutler wanted to make her main-level bathroom look and feel like a put-together space for her husband, two kids, and guests, so she opted to give the yellow-toned space a much-needed makeover.

Red paint is sometimes difficult to work with and style, but — when paired with the right colors and in just the right shade — it can elevate any room. (Have you heard of the unexpected red theory?)A rust-meets-red paint job in Abigail Rogers’ (@abigailrogersinteriors) bedroom is the perfect, rich color choice for her Victorian home — but that’s only one great element of her bedroom redo, which includes an IKEA hack, a DIY headboard, and more.

Guest rooms are traditionally used to host out-of-town visitors, but because friends and family typically stay for only short periods, it can feel like a waste of space when no one is there. Project Lead for Mira Jean Designs, Jessica Viator, had clients who wanted to make the most of their extra bedroom. “They were craving a space they enjoyed walking into and one that reflected their personalities and flowed better with the rest of the home,” Jessica explains.

Renovating a dated part of your home poses a difficult question: How do you strike the right balance between making some much-needed changes and preserving the original character of the room? As DIYer Ericka Gularte (@oakandmarsh) found, giving some elements of the room a modern makeover and redoing others entirely made a world of difference when it came to updating her kids’ 1991 standard-build bathroom.

Older homes can sometimes become a hodgepodge of design styles as updates get added over the years. That was the case in Jess Bond’s (The Bond House) bathroom, which was partially original to her 1962 home — but was also partially updated with ’90s upgrades that included a vinyl floor and a dingy, yellowed tub insert.

Staying in your old childhood bedroom doesn’t usually mean stylish or luxurious accommodations. For most of us, it tends to be a hodgepodge of dated bedding and mismatched decor — and for Amilia James (@rosedoorhome), it was no different.So after redoing her sister’s bedroom at her parents’ house earlier this year, Amilia decided to tackle her own, which her parents had converted into a guest room.

Sure, there’s a lot to be said for minimalist decor—but there are places where blank walls just don’t work. One of those is a laundry room. When Ten V (Delish & Decor) and her family moved into their home, for instance, the laundry room was pretty much empty.“When we moved in, we just quickly got a wall organizer to hang all the cleaning tools and a cheap shelf for detergents and fabric softener for our laundry room,” Ten says.

Just because a bathroom is tiny doesn’t mean it has to feel cramped or uncomfortable. With some light colors and thoughtful décor, small really can be mighty.That was the approach Jasmin Robertson of Brick Dust Baby took when she decided to renovate the only bathroom in her new home.

Even rooms with tall ceilings and large windows can feel dark if the color palette isn’t lending itself to an airy vibe. Pamela Stewart’s kitchen looked “dated, dark, and dreary” — despite the 9-foot ceilings and amazing views of the Arizona landscape. While the walls were white, the floors, cabinets, and countertops were all shades of brown, which made the space feel darker than it actually was.

There’s no better test for determining whether you really love your home than suddenly having to spend all your time there. Rebecca Bishop started rethinking her decor when this exact scenario happened. Rebecca Bishop and her husband’s 109-year-old house had been updated several times over the years, with the last update coming to the kitchen in the 1990s. “We needed something new to look at,” Rebecca says.

We love color. Love it! But sometimes moving into a new place means you’re working with colors you’re not wild about — like, say, the lime green and black tile in Lissi Walker’s kitchen in Leicestershire, UK.Although the size and layout of the kitchen were on point, the design wasn’t exactly Lissi’s taste. Aside from the checkered tile, the kitchen also had blah beige floors and orangey wood cabinets.

There’s something so special about a neighbor-to-neighbor bond. Neighbors are like a nearby safety net — watering each other’s plants, checking in when the power goes out, or shoveling each other’s walkways in winter. Or, for Holly Saulie-Rohman, giving her neighbor Jackie a ride whenever she needs one. “We support each other in all the neighborly ways,” Holly shares. But the neighbors’ bond goes beyond helping with admin tasks.

Sometimes a renovation isn’t a choice—it’s a total necessity. That was the case for DIYer Johanna Beach of At Home with Howie and her current Chicago rental kitchen, if you could even call it that.When she first moved in, the space (which is just inside the entrance of her apartment) had a fridge, a sink, a stove, and some sad, small shelving, but no counters and zero cabinets. “It was… not workable,” says Johanna.

It’s easy to look at a room and design it as it was intended: a kitchen as a kitchen, a bathroom as a bathroom, an office as an office. It’s a lot gutsier to look at a room and envision something else entirely — but that’s a risk that can bring lots of rewards.Conor McFarland saw potential in the living room of this 1880s house to be something more.

Sometimes all a space needs is a few small tweaks to pull it out of a rut. Case in point? A beige (very beige) bathroom in Desola Balogun’s parents’ home, which was majorly transformed thanks to a few of his fresh new additions.Desola spent an extended stay and wanted to do something for them.

In today’s world of technology, it’s not uncommon to find your next living situation on social media. As a New York transplant, I’ve heard stories from friends who have found apartments on TikTok or who have stumbled upon a group needing another roommate on Instagram.

Even if you use every cleaning hack in the book, it’s hard to make laundry fun. That goes double when you’re surrounded by blah finishes. If you’re getting tired of staring at the walls of your own laundry room, take inspiration from Ela Bobak‘s gorgeous redo—pulled together from a space that was boring at best.After Ela and her husband purchased their home in 2019, they spent about five months renovating a bunch of rooms, including their laundry room.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: You don’t have to spend a fortune to make a huge impact. That’s especially true for bathrooms, which are easy spaces to transform on a budget (and on a deadline). Kelly von Weber had already given her guest bathroom a bit of color and charm a few years back, but as time went on, she realized her tastes had changed.

Bathrooms can sometimes be utilitarian, but they can also be welcoming and beautiful. The guest bathroom at Chelsea Scott’s home was anything but. “The ‘before’ of the bathroom was simply just plain,” Chelsea says. “The sink vanity was a dark brown, and the walls were painted with flat, darker beige paint that did not stand up to normal traffic in a bathroom.

A few things to love from the ’70s, design-wise? Macrame, rattan, funky patterns — even conversation pits. A few things that certainly aren’t missed from the decade? Orange-toned everything, fluorescent lighting, and bland laminate countertops.Unfortunately, Jenessa Weaver’s 1977 kitchen had several not-so-fun-or-funky ’70s details, and she was looking for a change. So she enlisted the help of her childhood best friend, Alysha, designer and owner of Camp Interiors.

A color-drenched paint effect (aka painting the walls, trim, and ceiling all the same color) is not always possible for a renter if there are lease stipulations about painting the ceiling, but Rosaline Elbay got pretty close in her Boerum Hill apartment’s bedroom. “If this weren’t a rental, I probably would have color drenched completely, but I settled for just drenching the closet doors,” Rosaline says.

If you work from home, you might want to create a workspace that inspires and motivates you — even if that means getting a little unconventional. For Sean Matthew Robinson, it made the most sense to turn what used to be the apartment’s living room into his bedroom… and a corner office.

Talk about small-but-mighty.

There are some rooms that just feel extra dreamy — home libraries with wall-to-wall bookshelves and antique lamps, sunrooms with tall windows and lots of plants, or powder rooms that feel straight out of a hotel, perhaps.These are the kinds of rooms you pin to inspiration boards or add to a “someday” list. For interior designer Valerie Darden (@brextoncoleinteriors), it’s breakfast nooks that make a house feel extra fancy.

When my partner Ben’s sister Annie, her husband Joe, and their son Ollie recently moved back to the Midwest, we were all thrilled — not just because we’d get to see them more often, but also because they bought a house that was basically a blank canvas. The bones are great, but every room is waiting for some love. Naturally, I volunteered to kick things off with a dining room makeover (check out the YouTube video version here) to set the tone for the rest of their home.

“The space seemed to have received no love for decades,” Taylor Graves says of what would become her daughter’s nursery. Before Taylor and her husband moved in, it had been a college student’s guest room and was simply used for function — “and it looked like it,” Taylor notes. Multiple layers of paint covered multiple layers of wallpaper, but the room was filled with details that just needed proper attention.

Adding a limewash paint treatment to your walls can add a vintage, worldly aesthetic to even a brand-new space. It’s often used in living rooms and bedrooms, but DIYer and apartment dweller Teresa Rudolph added it to her kitchen — and the result is stunning. When she moved in, the kitchen had crisp white walls, checkered floors, and a basic white kitchen setup on the left-hand side.

Sometimes 1970s wood-paneled spaces are great, but other times they just look old rather than retro. In Katie and Philip Bowling’s home office, that was the case.“We loved the coziness of the small office room, but it was so dark with the old faux wood paneling,” homeowner Katie Bowling (@katiebowlinghome) says. “The carpet in the room was so worn down.

When my partner and I bought our 1928 Arts & Crafts bungalow home in Portland, Oregon, at the end of 2023, I knew the kitchen was going to be a project. The floors were painted black and chipping off in large flecks. The countertops were avocado green and streaked with rust stains. The walls were gloomy and gray, and made the whole room feel like a basement. And the appliances? Beyond saving.

While traveling, I always fall in love with the architecture and design style of the places I’m visiting — it’s impossible for me not to become inspired and take a part of it home with me. Lots of homeowners feel the same — like this family home in London, England, that got a major makeover inspired by their trip to Miami, or this Netherlands home inspired by the family’s time in Malaysia.

Two of Lyric and Chantelle’s, of Casa Garnish, favorite pastimes are cooking and hosting. However, their kitchen, which was last updated in 2016, wasn’t proving to be the most inspiring environment for those two activities. “The kitchen was your classic old kitchen with gray walls and wood cabinets and standard granite countertops,” Chantelle and Lyric explain.

Paint plus pattern is a great formula for creating a striking transformation in a room, especially if you love color.It’s a formula Brandi Katherine Herrera (@alivelymanner) knows well, as she’s added paint, paneling, and pattern to several rooms in her cozy, colorful cottage originally built in 1918.In her dining room, for example, she added paneling and painted it bright green with a fun wallpaper to match.

A home — regardless of whether it’s rented or owned — should be a reflection of the people who live there. Content creator Élise needed that to be the case in her house, especially in the kitchen. When she moved in, the room had mint green cabinets and floral wallpaper, which she described as “grandma chic in a cutesy way.” It wasn’t going to work for her.

Look closely at the cabinets in Christina Riley’s kitchen. See anything weird? Yep, those top ones are upside-down.“We thought maybe someone had just flipped the doors as a prank,” says Christina. “But when we removed the cabinet boxes on day two of living in the house, we realized they were installed completely upside down!”That was the weirdest part of their home’s kitchen, but it wasn’t the only thing they weren’t wild about.

When one room in a home gets a colorful redo, it’s hard to look at other neutral rooms and not think about making a change. After Jessie Estes (@jessiegirlhome) redid her daughter’s bedroom in a bright, colorful style, the nearby bathroom started to look a little lackluster.“There are only two words that can describe the before: plain Jane!” Jessie says.

When it comes to bathing habits, there are usually two camps: bath enthusiasts or strictly shower people. Luiza Frediani Oxley and her partner, Chris, fall into the latter group. So in the bathroom of their small London flat, the tub took up unnecessary space. “It felt cramped, lacked proper storage, and had a few underlying issues like worn finishes and general wear that made it feel tired rather than functional,” Luiza explains.

A good indication that a room needs a redo is the realization that you’re not using it to its full potential. For example, Sushma Samonini (@house_on_the_way) can’t really say there was anything wrong with the previous iteration of her UK living room.“But we found we weren’t really using the room well, either, as it was a confused mix of living room, playroom, and dumping ground,” Sushma says.

When Bridgett Shepherd realized the black-wall Instagram trend she originally loved was making her bedroom look less spacious, she knew it was time for a decoration do-over. She and her husband saw the room as “cold and uninviting,” in large part because of the black walls and orange floors (which they always hated).“Nothing about the room made us want to hang out in there,” Bridgett says. Thankfully, paint is an easy thing to change!

When Jessica Archibald and her husband Stephen bought their 1909 home, it was “like walking into a ’60s time capsule,” Jessica says. There was an intercom system, built-in radio, Formica countertops, and carpet.“Sixty-year-old carpet on the kitchen floor,” Jessica says. “It doesn’t get more disgusting than that.

Fixer-uppers need a lot of attention — especially over-100-year-old fixer-uppers. So no surprise that when Liz Elliot moved into hers, a Sears kit home in historic Charleston, she and her husband focused on making the essential parts of the house livable and didn’t pay a lot of mind to the guest bedroom.

Cramped quarters can make it hard to want to spend much time in a kitchen. And plenty of factors beyond actual square footage can contribute to that feeling — dark finishes, bulky cabinetry, and blocked windows, for starters.Van Tuyet (@percivalinbloom) had to deal with all three in her townhouse’s kitchen. “The kitchen and dining area felt closed in, which amplified how narrow our townhouse felt,” Van says.

The 1960s gave the world a lot of groovy stuff—think bean bag chairs, Sputnik light fixtures, and funky colors like avocado and mustard. But some of the decor looked a lot better back in the 1960s than it does today.Case in point: Anna Westbury’s dark wood kitchen, original to her 1968 home. Its dark wood cabinets felt imposing, and the clunky fan made the ceiling feel extra low. Anna had already replaced the old beige appliances (win!

Open-concept living rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens have dominated home construction since the ’90s. But when DIYer Molly Miller moved into her new build in 2018, her family actually wanted more separation between the home’s main living areas. Everything was “lumped together in one large space,” and it made it difficult to have a functional kitchen with the limited storage.

A lot of great things came out of the 1990s — and there are plenty of design trends making a comeback that we love to see. But some of the decade’s looks could use a refresher, like the super-brown kitchen in designer Sheryl Sanders’s home.After living in the home for only two months, she knew she needed to do something to modernize the cooking space.Since the old cabinet boxes were solid wood and in great condition, she decided she could get away with just replacing the doors.

Many of us find living room makeover ideas on social media. But Christina Beck and her husband Colin literally found a house on Instagram.“One of our followers knew his mom needed to sell the house she had spent time in growing up for her dad,” explains Christina, who owns the renovation company Vero Home in Cincinnati with Colin.“It hadn’t been updated in at least 35 years and had a lot of deferred maintenance.

Small kitchens certainly aren’t unusable. In fact, there are plenty of space-savvy kitchen finds that can make tiny studio or galley kitchens work successfully.But sometimes, a small kitchen begs for a total renovation, which was the case for Bri Williams and her husband, Denver, and their 200-square-foot kitchen.

When I first discovered the town of Hudson, New York, I felt like a kid in a candy store. There was so much that I wanted to explore. It’s the type of town that seems to have it all: picturesque streets filled with historical homes, rows of antique shops and boutiques, and scenic drives that lead you to local farm stands, wildflower fields, and nature trails. What more could you ask for?

When interior decorator Katie Woodman and her husband, Joseph, first found their split-level house in Ft. Collins, Colorado, they fell hard for its unique features, including a treehouse-like upper deck, a huge wood-burning fireplace, vaulted ceilings, and a large solarium perfect for plant babies.

”The office didn’t exist before,” Alana Resnick says. When she and her boyfriend, Miles Ronbeck, found their Upper East Side apartment, it had a very long living space. And while they originally were looking for an apartment with two bedrooms (to convert one into a dedicated office), they fell in love with the natural light and the ample square footage.

Meredith Rose’s wedding registry included something not all registries do: power tools, which she was eager to use post-wedding to turn her townhouse into a space that actually reflected her design aesthetic.“My style is pretty classic in all areas of my life, so I wanted my home to feel the same way,” says Rose, who is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sometimes you’ve gotta go big when it comes to a renovation, and that doesn’t always mean in terms of scale. Often, it’s about the scope of the work and taking a chance on layout tweaks and storage changes to find what works for you. That was the case for designer Anita Yokota and her late ’90s cook space, which she shares with her husband, Travis, and three daughters.

Multipurpose rooms, because of the nature of what they are (essentially combining two separate spaces, with their own goals and needs, into one), can easily become overwhelming and a headache. For June Cruz, that room was her dual laundry room and mudroom. It had no storage or organization, which made it a dysfunctional area. “It was essentially a drop zone for our coats, shoes, and bags, as well as our weekly laundry,” June describes.