Turn Your Space into Something You Love

My first lease was eleven pages long, and I read maybe half a page of it before signing, which meant I spent the first three months in that apartment genuinely unsure whether hanging a single picture frame was going to cost me part of my deposit. I know now that a lot of what I…

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I did my first peel-and-stick backsplash project with a butter knife standing in for a proper smoothing tool and my phone’s flashlight standing in for actual task lighting, and the result looked exactly like you’d expect from that description — bubbled, slightly crooked, and not something I was proud of. It wasn’t until I actually…

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I trusted a regular pack of Command strips with a mirror that turned out to weigh close to 12 pounds, and I found out they weren’t up to the job the exact moment I heard a soft peeling sound at 2am and had to catch a falling mirror off my bedroom wall in the dark.…

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I lost $340 of my security deposit over grout. Actual grout. Not a hole in the wall, not a broken blind — grout, because I thought “renter-friendly backsplash tile” meant literally any tile I could find on clearance at Home Depot, and I glued it to the wall with construction adhesive like an absolute menace.…

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The first time I hung removable wallpaper, I got about four feet into the strip before I noticed a bubble the size of a silver dollar sitting right at eye level in my kitchen. I pressed on it. It moved three inches to the left and got bigger. By the time I gave up and…

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I lived under a popcorn ceiling for two years before I figured out I wasn’t allowed to touch it. Not “shouldn’t” — couldn’t. My lease had a line buried in the maintenance section about “no alteration to ceiling surfaces,” and when I called my landlord to ask (innocently, I swear) whether I could just scrape…

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