These 7 Rental-Friendly TikTok Decorating Hacks Are Brilliant for Your New Year Home Goals

TikTok has proved to be a wealth of information for the design world, with professional designers and amateurs alike sharing their decorating tips, favorite products, and rules. You can find anything from furniture flips and crafty DIYs to home decor hauls and even house tours there, but one of my favorite things to watch has to be decorating hacks. It’s fun to see how people are sprucing up their spaces for the new year and seeing the clever ways they’re staging shelves, working around rental restrictions, and trying out trends for less. Below you’ll find some of what I think are the most brilliant decorating hacks on the app right now.

Don’t let the fact that you’re renting or aren’t handy with electrical work stop you from installing the sconces of your dreams. Thanks to this TikTok hack from NJI Design, you can pop a sconce onto any wall or nook you want without turning off your control panel. All you need is remote-controlled puck lights. Simply mount your sconce to the wall, adhere a puck light to the light bulb socket, and use the remote to turn it on or off. It couldn’t be simpler.

The only downside to the above puck light hack is that, while these lamps provide excellent mood lighting, they often don’t offer enough illumination to read or work comfortably. If you have a table lamp that you want to use but isn’t near any outlets, Sadie Ann Jensen posted a TikTok on how you can buy a rechargeable bulb on Amazon that makes the lamp light up without a plug. Genius!

If you’re a renter, you might be faced with ugly vertical blinds that you can do nothing about. If there’s a will though, there’s a way. This TikTok from Stephanie Cardenas shows you how to remove the vertical slats and replace them with a curtain to better suit your aesthetic. You can always store blinds and reinstall them when you’re ready to move out, and you’ll still get that security deposit back.

Massive vases make a statement, but they can be tricky to fill up. Do you buy two hundred dollars worth of flowers? Do you clear out an entire meadow to make it look full? TikToker Kimberly of LemonLeaf Home has a budget-friendly solve. She suggests filling the vase with scrunched paper and placing a skinny vase or drinking glass in the center. Pop eucalyptus and other affordable greenery into the glass, and you instantly get a dramatic accent piece without the need for a ton of filler or flowers.

Marble and travertine tables are trending right now, but they also often carry steep price tags. Get the look for less by DIYing your own in about 30 minutes. Brad Canning suggests going to the hardware store (or countertop supply store) and getting three slabs of your favorite stone. Once home, simply glue them together with Gorilla Glue, and you have yourself a chic table.

If you love the look of board-and-batten but don’t want to mess around with power tools and measuring, Decor Snippets suggests getting peel and stick molding to achieve the look. This is a great choice for renters or people who like to change their home decor up frequently.  

Art can get expensive – especially if you commit to a gallery wall. TikToker Lillian has a workaround: She suggests finding digital prints on Etsy stores like HeirloomPrintShop, which cost around $6 or so. You can then take the digital files to stores like Staples or Costco and print them to your desired frame size. The best part is that you can try them out in your house before actually buying anything. Lillian shared that you can virtually place a print in your room through your camera via the Etsy app, allowing you to try out different sizes and pieces until you find one that works perfectly.