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Living Solutions blog

Ideas & Inspiration

Tuesday’s Tips ~ Love Your Rental… Part 1

January 3, 2012 By Living Solutions Interior Design

I hope every one had a wonderful holiday. I am embracing 2012 with open arms.  Bring on the new year!!! 
…………………
This is the 1st post of a series called Love Your Rental.  (Finally, I know! I threatened posting this series a while ago. The holidays crept up and took over, as usual.) 
Just because you rent your home doesn’t mean that it needs to look like your temporary residence.  This is the 1st of several posts where I will share some tips on just how to overcome rental home design dilemmas.
Since I’ve just begun taking down the Christmas decorations, {aye – such a hard project to start, but feels so good and clean when it done,}  I’ll start this series in the room that Christmas didn’t touch… the bathroom.

I live in an area where the majority of the homes were built between 1920 and 1970. This usually means that the kitchen and bath counter tops, showers and flooring will have at least one “funky” color. By “funky” I mean colors like mauve, pastel blue, turquoise, yellow, and even any combination of these colors. Since I am a renter there is no chance that I’m going to invest in remodeling the bathroom to change the colors. So if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! Case in point… when Josh and I moved into our 1st home together I had my heart set on a red bathroom. I went to the store and purchased an entire set of beautiful fluffy red towels & bath rugs. When I got them home and put them up, it was clear that the home had other things in mind. The red looked horrible with the existing tile. Being the super stubborn woman that I am, (my husband will definitely vouch for that,) I tried desperately to make it work & had no success. I finally gave in to a much calmer, white bathroom.

So when we moved into our current home and were blessed again with strange bathroom tiles,-baby blue, pastel yellow and turquoise-I had a better handle on how to deal with it. 

The question is not so much about what I want, it’s really… what does that bathroom want?

This bathroom is definitely not a candidate for red, again.

It’s kinda hard to see the exact colors so I pulled paint color swatches so you could get a better feel for them.

If you haven’t noticed from the pics, this is a very small bathroom. To save space I used this cute garden pale to store/hide my make-up. Coordinating fabric camouflages this handy storage as an accessory.  

I was lucky to find a shower curtain with all the colors that really tied in the colors already in the bathroom that I couldn’t change.  I pulled out the green and the blue for my towels and accented with white bath accessories.

The results: A fresh updated bathroom with modern touches that coordinates with the existing tile. 
And if you happen to have an even funkier color combination that you can’t change, pulling in whites or neutrals in a bathroom can give it a more uniform, cohesive, clean look. 

So, this concludes part one. 
Until we meet again… Love Your Rental!

You May also Like:

Love Your Rental – Part 2 Love Your Rental Part 3 – Window Coverings Tuesday’s Tips ~ Renter’s Guide to Home Decor Tuesday’s Tips ~ A Clean House is a New House

1 Comment Filed Under: Design Tips Tagged With: Before and Afters, challenges, Design Rules, Design Tips, Home, Home Improvement, Moving

Comments

  1. Anonymous says

    January 4, 2012 at 8:01 am

    Very nice design solution!

    Reply

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Hi! I'm Gina and welcome to the Living Solutions Blog! I'm a wife, a mom of 4 little kiddos and the owner of Living Solutions Interior Design. My family and I recently moved from San Diego, CA to Nebraska and this blog is where I share inspiration, design tips and ideas, projects and every day life! Thanks for stopping by!

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