Making A Rental Feel Like Home: Living Room

As you all know, we moved to Denver in June of 2017 and started renting our 1,000 sq ft 2 bedroom 1 bathroom home just 15 minutes from downtown Denver. You can check out more of our entire process here from when we first moved to the area and picked a home.

Now, since then, we've been fortunate enough to be able to work on different elements of the home to make it more "homey" and somewhere we feel like we could be awhile. We already talked about the kitchen and dining area, the master bedroom and lone bathroom, and if you've been following along with the blog we are currently working on converting the second bedroom that was once the guest room and office to the nursery (with tiny corner office area!) through the One Room Challenge. So far it's going well! Check out the week one progress , week two, and week three!

The only place we haven't talked about much is the living room space. Here is a reminder of what it looked like when we walked through it the first time last May:

A pretty great space with room for larger sized furniture and to have a bunch of people over. Something that we definitely enjoy being able to do!

Let's talk about what we did to take this peanut butter living room and transform it into something more cozy and that reflected our style. Thank goodness for our amazing landlord who has a lot of faith and trust in us!

Making Our Rental Feel Like Home: The Kitchen & Dining Room

We spent a lot of time after we moved in making the house cozier for us. We love the kitchen and dining room area, but it definitely lacks in storage and the washer and dryer are in the kitchen right there. That was a compromise, for sure. At our old house it was off of the kitchen but separate enough that it worked. I wanted to make sure that it was at least as attractive as it could be. Having a place with a washer and dryer hook up was big, so dealing with it in the kitchen and not having shared laundry seemed a fine trade.

Finding a Rental in a New City

After owning a home for nearly 10 years, it was super weird and super hard for me to transition to being a renter. I spent a ton of time looking into different places, locations, and types of rentals.

A few key things I realized about renting in a city, specifically Denver, Colorado:

1. It is very expensive. Full stop. We pay $1400 for a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom duplex 15 minutes from downtown Denver. It has a giant yard, garage, and fireplace. Our mortgage in Grand Junction was $870. Ouch. Some things we lost in this rental: A/C, 2nd bath, 3rd bedroom.
2. Private rentals seem to be better. They are more willing to work with you, are friendlier, and much more accessible for maintenance. They want to protect their investment. I eventually found ours on Zillow.com.