6 Apartment Projects to Tackle This Summer

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Everyone’s heard of spring cleaning, but why stop there? With summer here, now is a great time to take a look at your apartment, think about all those little projects you’ve been putting off for months and months, then roll up your sleeves and get to work. While a lot of home renovation ideas aren’t really possible in a rental (knocking down walls is usually frowned upon by landlords) there is still a lot you can do to make your apartment feel more like home. To help you with that, here are six ideas for summer projects you can tackle in your apartment.

Photo via Pixabay

1. Decluttering Rooms

Before you start throwing paint and furniture all over the place it’s important to think about what the best use of your time is when it comes to improving your living space. The number one difficulty most people deal with in an apartment is a lack of space, so your first goal should be to maximize the space you have and work on projects that will take advantage of what you’ve got. To that end, we recommend you start by decluttering your apartment and getting rid of all the extraneous stuff you’ve been collecting for months or years. Once you’ve cleaned things out a bit you’ll have a much better idea of how much space you actually have to work with, and can start other projects that best utilize that space.

2. Painting the Walls

Nothing refreshes a room like a new coat of paint, at least in our opinion. If your living situation is starting to feel stale then we think a new color on your walls may be just the thing to liven your apartment back up. Pick out a fun shade, clear out all the furniture in the room, and have a great time bringing new life to your rooms. While some landlords may have rules about repainting your apartment, most won’t mind so long as you cover whatever painting you did before your lease is up, so go nuts and have fun!

3. Replacing Fittings

The hard part about renovating an apartment is navigating your lease. Landlords usually have pretty clear restrictions on what you’re allowed to change about their property, which leaves you — the renter — with the difficult task of trying to find a way to make a space your own while still listening to someone else’s rules. Luckily, there are still projects you can take on that will make your apartment feel like your own, and one of those is changing the fittings. Handles on drawers and cabinets, light switches and socket covers, even faucets and knobs in the bathroom, replacing your fittings can inject a lot of personality into a space, despite how small a change it is. Additionally, so long as you keep the old fittings and replace them at the end of your lease you’ll be in the clear with your landlord, so there’s literally nothing stopping you.

4. Cleaning/Replacing Your A/C

If you live anywhere where it’s warm (which with climate change is most places) you probably have A/C. If you also live in an apartment without good central air you might have a window-mounted A/C, which means you’ve got filters you can clean out. You may not even know it, but your A/C unit has a filter that catches dust, pollen, and other particles in the air, and it’s something you should clean out every year. Find out how to access those filters and clean them out to get this summer started right.

5. Window Boxes

One of the big downsides of an apartment is you don’t have much outdoor space. Residential homes can have lawns and gardens but that’s out of the cards for a lot of people living in rental units. However, one great project you can still start this summer is setting up a small garden in a window box. Whether it’s flowers or herbs or just something green that makes you happy, getting a window box is a great project to start this summer that’ll bring new life to your apartment.

6. Light Fixtures

Lighting is one of the most important ways you can affect the mood of your living space, which means replacing your light fixtures is a great project to tackle this summer. Most landlords aren’t willing to shell out much money for high-quality lighting, so this change could be as simple as replacing some old bulbs, or as complicated as mounting new fixtures into the wall. Regardless, if you’re going to tamper with anything electrical, make sure the fuse box is off and no power is running through the circuit while you’re working. Electrocution isn’t on our to-do list this summer, and it shouldn’t be on yours.

Renovating an apartment is a tricky line to walk, but the summer is still a great time to get rid of the old and make some changes for the better. With this list, you have a few great ideas for improving your apartment in ways that’ll appease not only your landlord but yourself. Have fun!

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