Our kitchen in this house is the best quality kitchen we have ever had in any of our rented homes. All the other kitchens we have ever had were really dated in their style. My only complaint about this current kitchen is that it is a little too modern for my personal tastes. It is high gloss in the colours black, white and grey with silver accents. When we first moved in my original thoughts were the we would just put in our things, get a new blind and then maybe put a couple of pictures on the wall. I was also resigned to the silver accents although my heart lies with a gold accent (as you will know from my living room). But a couple of things changed my mind about the direction of the kitchen decor so this post is to share with you all our Rental Kitchen Plans.
When you rent, Kitchens and bathrooms can be the hardest to put your personality into because the fixtures and fittings are already there. The rooms already have a certain style based on what the landlord has chosen. I know some landlords are stricter than others, we have lived in properties in the past where our landlords were more than happy for us to use paint, sticky backed vinyl etc to change the look of the built in fittings. But where we are now that isn’t the case so we have to add our personality into our rooms in different ways.
The first thing that changed the direction of how I wanted our rented kitchen to look was our new blind. I had originally planned to go for a simple grey/black pattern but was drawn to this beautiful leaf patterned one instead. I loved the pattern so much that I knew I wanted to add more green and more leaf patterns to the kitchen. I knew what I wanted but we had no immediate plans to do anything in this room.
But once lockdown hit we started a little project on the space under our stairs and I took this shot of the kitchen for instagram. This little view had always been a favourite in the kitchen but I loved it even more now the washi tape feature wall was there. It’s this wall that made me change my mind about just leaving the silver accents in the kitchen. I love gold and I wanted gold! There are some things I won’t be able to change like the cooker hood or the taps but there are some things that I can. Once the under stairs space was completed it made sense to move on to the space next to it so I started to have a good think about the things I wanted to change/add to the kitchen.
This Ikea trolley is directly to the left of the feature wall and I really want to make it over. I want to keep some of the wood tones to tie into the wooden chopping board display. Add some gold to tie it to the feature wall and then some dark grey to make it match more with the actual kitchen fittings.
Our rental kitchen plans also include adding more green to the kitchen using plants. I already have a few in here but you can’t have to many plants! I also continued the leaf theme with these Monstera Leaf Fridge Magnets that I made. This yellow plant pot usually sits on my kitchen window ledge and instead of buying new ones I want to give these a little upcycle to give them a more natural look/colour.
I really want to change out the handles, I’ve found some on Amazon that are the same design but gold so that we can just do a straight swap. We don’t want to be putting other holes into the doors and we can just swap them back to the silver when we leave. The Ikea Fintorp storage that you can just see in the top left of the photo is black and I want to make these gold too. On the back wall I want to add some Popsicle Stick Shelves, I’ve made these before but this time I want to keep them natural to add more wood tones to the back wall. I’ve already added more green to the back with my Wooden Plate Rack and some new utensil pots but I want to add more by adding hanging plants to the shelves once they are up.
Lastly I would like to add some artwork to the kitchen, maybe something with a leaf theme in gold frames to tie in with the blind and the feature wall. I would really like to update all of these utensils to gold ones too but that is something that will be done over time as I can’t really justify replacing perfectly good utensils just because I want them to be a different colour. Maybe I should put gold utensils on my Christmas list! Ha ha.
So those are our Rental Kitchen plans. I hope to have everything done before the end of lockdown but that is budget depending. What rooms have you been working on during lockdown?
Lianne x
*Post Update – It took me so long to put this post together and share it that we have already got started on a lot of the things I mentioned above. I’ve included a full list of the changes/things I wanted to make and have crossed through the ones that have been done.
Makeover the kitchen trolley to fit in with the kitchenAdd a pin board to the wall on the left of the back doorChange out the cupboard handles to brass onesAdd some artwork to the walls, something with a leaf themeRepaint the back wall, still in grey but it needs cleaning upAdd some shelves to the back wall- Find some artificial hanging plants to put onto the new shelves
- Add some more wooden cutting boards along the back counter
Upcycle the existing plant pots to fit in with the colours better- Paint the black Fintorp hanging storage gold
- Find some tea towels with a leaf theme
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All the tips are must-follow! Remodelers should consider this post surely!