Our Hobbit Home: Updating A Renter's Paradise

I like to lovingly refer to our rented duplex as a hobbit home. Jamie and I already have a penchant for collecting little nicknacks, books and unique furniture. Our place has a sort of layered, multi-patterned and cozy feel. There's always water in the kettle, and there's always cheese and good beer in the fridge. That paired with the mottled brown shag carpet (apparently saved from my grandmother's first house.. just kidding) makes for the perfect hobbit locale. Honestly, if I could live in a real hobbit house I would. Sans brown shag.

So even though I'm pretty comfortable in our rented home, I'm pretty eager to update and redecorate as much as I can for as little as I can. I have a really hard time with dark spaces (I may be an undiagnosed sufferer of seasonal affective disorder), and our hobbit hole feels a little more like "hole" than "hobbit".

The Kitchen

One project currently underway is turning our dark hole of a kitchen into a cheerful, bright hub. Since I spend a lot of my time in this room, I think it's important to enjoy it even if we're only renting.

Right now the kitchen only gets natural sunlight in the late afternoons from a small window over the sink. The main ceiling light seems to give off a candlelight yellow, which, when reflected off the brown cabinets and off-white wall paint, creates a sort of dingy vortex that makes me sleepy every time I go in there.


The biggest improvement would, of course, be to update the cabinets. But since the idea of sanding and repainting our kitchen cabinets a fresh white was shot down (Jamie understandably doesn't want us to put in a ton of work on a house we don't actually own), I had a few other ideas up my sleeve for how to freshen up the kitchen without making any permanent changes.

First I took off all the brass-plated (NOT solid brass, I found out...) handles from all the drawers and cabinets and set to work brushing away about 60 years of grime, oil and general mange. Unfortunately, I believed the hardware to be solid brass and not plated brass, and they require two very different cleaning techniques. So, while they're all "clean," most of the hardware looks just as dark as it did before I started. A lesson in TESTING the metal before cleaning! (Just use a magnet - if it sticks, it's plated. Read more about testing and cleaning brass at Centsational Girl's blog.) Now I just hope I get permission from the owners to spray paint the hardware a brighter brass or gold to add a bit of sparkle to the dark '60s cabinets:


Since we had a bit of semi-gloss white paint in the garage, I decided to repaint the inside of the cabinets above the stove so I could take the doors off and open up the space. The white paint really pops and adds an attractive contrast to the other cabinets. By filling the cabinet with cook books and canisters of noodles, beans and flour, there's more to look at and the space feels more active. Love the difference!

A really easy (and cheap) update was in changing out all the incandescent bulbs for fluorescent ones. We found a pack of 4 on sale at Home Depot for $1.53. If you're worried about using fluorescent bulbs because of their reputation for creating garish "hospital light," DON'T BE. This stereotypical fluorescent effect is quickly being replaced with a warmer white, like sunlight. This was the perfect effect I was hoping for, adding a desperately needed brightness to the kitchen while saving us money on our electric bill at the same time.

Next on the list is painting the kitchen chairs from their current darker finish and blue upholstery to a lighter off-white (or something lighter with a pattern), like this one from Home Dzine:


Or perhaps just reupholster the seats to something like this from Design*Sponge:


I also really want to cover the upper kitchen cabinets with fabric using liquid starch. Apparently it's fairly easy and doesn't damage the cabinets underneath when the fabric needs to be removed. Here's my inspiration from a favorite blog, Living in a Nutshell:

Stay tuned for more design updates from our little hobbit home!