DIY: Simple Door Update

"It can be difficult in a rental home to make big decorating changes. Often the landlord or letting agent won’t give permission, and then there’s the cost for the tenant to consider. If you’re not living in a place for a long time it probably won’t seem worthwhile to do things like repaint the walls or restore hardwood floors."

However there are little things you can do that make a big difference, without making any permanent changes. In this post I’m going to look at landlord friendly ways of updating doors.

It’s funny about doors. We often don’t think of them at all when decorating, except maybe to give them a lick of paint. Being literally transitional things, it’s easy to forget about including them in a design scheme. But they’re huge, they create a first impression and most homes have several of them, so they’re an obvious choice for a quick makeover.

In our flat we recently changed all the door handles from the plain, shiny brass levers to antique style ceramic knobs. It’s such a small (and inexpensive) change but it’s amazing what a massive difference it has made to the feel of the space. It’s much easier than it looks to install a handle, and the great thing is that when we leave we can just put the old ones back and take the new ones with us, so no investing in a property we don’t own, and no quibbles from the landlord!

Here’s how the old handles looked:

And here are the new look doors:

So simple, but so effective!

The other thing we did was to change the hooks on the bathroom and bedroom doors for similarly antique-style types.

Our antique-style knobs and hooks were bought from Butlers and Nkuku. For other styles, there are any number of shops, from the big DIY chains and interiors’ shops to family run ironmongers, many of which have websites with online shopping. And don’t forget eBay!

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