How We Did Our Rented Kitchen Makeover For Less Than $500

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When you relocate often and live in a rented property, you probably face such a dilemma on how to make your new home look pretty, without spending a fortune on major renovation. We also recently had it when we moved to Paris, France. To find and rent a house is not easy here, so very often you compromise on many things, if you find a property in good location and with decent square footage.

Our one bedroom flat, had many advantages, including spacious living room, little garden where Chipi could walk and location in private and quite area.

The biggest con was the kitchen, which in the beginning looked as disastrous as this:

However, it didn’t stop us from renting it as we knew, with a little bit of creativity and some DIY skills we could convert it into something which actually looks nice. So here we want to share the results of our efforts:

First of all, I got rid of horrible old-fashioned wallpaper, which took me almost two days, as if it was sticked to the walls with super-glue. After preparing the walls, cleaning them and repairing little scratches and holes, we painted them in two colours: white on the top, and dark teal blue on the bottom. With wooden skirting painted in charcoal grey we made a nice separation. We kept the old tiles, which I think were here since the house was built in 1970s. However, white square tiles backsplash will probably never loose its popularity, so together with newly painted walls it actually looked okay.

We bought two black laminated worktops in IKEA: one was attached to the wall below the window and became a bar/dining table, another was used as the actual worktop. With jigsaw we made a hole for the sink, two feet made it more stable and safe (although we used several metallic brackets to attach it to the wall).

We had these wooden wine boxes so we attached them to the wall for decoration. Apart from that we bought several posters from flea market in Paris and used them as wall decoration.

We decided that we don’t need lot’s of upper storage, that’s why we only hanged two open shelves for displaying glasses, plates and other utensils, which we mostly purchased in IKEA.

Large bamboo chopping board was the best find for me in 2019 – I can’t imagine how I lived without it before!

We looked for bargains and discounts when shopping appliances, and of course we were looking for inexpensive brands. However all in black they look very organic and stylish in this kitchen.

To make some extra storage we attached a couple of open shelves underneath the sink. There I put all the cookware and some food supplies. To make them look discreet and neat, we used two black curtains to disguise them.

I love my new kitchen! I don’t think that the decoration process is over, I would love later to add some more details and cool finds such as these ones: