So, you’d love to spruce up the kitchen to make your day-to-day functioning a little easier or more beautiful, but you’re a renter, not a homeowner. Does that mean you’re stuck with what you’ve got?
Not necessarily. The Very Cool Guys have come up with this list of landlord-friendly kitchen upgrades for renters. These are low-cost improvements that don’t require big-time destruction to complete, though you should probably still run them by your landlord beforehand:
1. Enlarge Your Food Prep Space
As a renter, you can’t exactly install new countertops. No worries! If you need more space for slicing and dicing, there are always fold-down countertops. Mounted on the wall, these flip down when you need them and flip back up when you’re done. No permanent changes or extra floor space required!
If you do have floor space to spare, another option is a rolling kitchen island, which you can find in endless varieties these days (and usually with some extra storage space underneath). Best part about this upgrade is you can roll it out with you when you get your own place.
2. Upgrade Your Cooking Hardware
Installing a new stove isn’t ideal for the renter in need of better cooking hardware. Who wants to spend that kind of money for a home you don’t own? But renters who want to remodel can always invest in a quality induction cooktop, which increases the amount of surface area you have to get food sizzling. These go for anywhere from $60 to $200, and they heat up extremely fast! If an ancient stovetop is all you have to work with right now, this would be a major improvement.
3. Make More Storage Space
A homeowner might install new cupboards for more storage, but a remodeling renter has to be a little more clever. A few options are pot racks you can mount on the walls or ceiling, which would only require you to drill a few half-inch holes and which would free up some of your existing cupboards. Another possibility is a pegboard, used to hang your pots, pans, measuring cups, larger utensils, and more.
4. Brighten the Place Up
Sometimes, the problem with a kitchen isn’t necessarily that it’s too small, just too dark and dreary. Reinvent the look of your kitchen by upgrading the lighting, a landlord-friendly improvement you can do in a number of ways: through under-cabinet lighting for better countertop illumination, LED light strips, or even some stick-on lights that run on batteries. Furthermore, make sure the bulbs on existing fixtures are as bright as the fixture safely allows.
