Home Projects

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Even when an older, outdated room DESPERATELY needs updating, it can be a bummer if the remodel doesn’t retain any vintage charm.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.