When we first got this property, I was admittedly very excited to pick out a bunch of creative finishes. I started fantasizing about a farmhouse sink, shiplap walls and tall moulding. I wanted a dramatic transformation and a beautiful end result.
As we started working on the house, my mindset shifted from one of design and creativity to one of practicality and simplicity. It went from what looks sleek and fancy to what is going to get us the best return in the form of rental income? Do we need high end finishes? No….:( But we do need inexpensive yet long lasting products.
The idea is to have the place hold up well with renters in so you don’t have to do much, if any, repairs in between renters. There are a lot of things that we cheaped out on (that still look nice and modern) such as kitchen hardware, lights, and shower rods from Amazon. But there are other things that we would NOT recommend being cheap about. This doesn’t mean you have to order custom, top of the line products, but just be aware of qualty.
Flooring
It’s tempting to purchase the laminate flooring for ~1.00/ sq ft. It looks nice and modern. Or the cheap carpet. But how is it going to hold up? I know some investors might feel different, but personally, I would probably never do carpet in a rental. That feels like an invitation for stains and filth. I like laminate, but rather than laminate I prefer to use Luxury Vinyl Plank (LVP) flooring. It’s a little pricier than laminate, but you can still get it at a very reasonable price. The reason I like it is that it’s often a material that you can ‘click’ into place and it’s waterproof. We have it in our kitchen and bathrooms where there is a high degree of water.
White/Neutral Light Colored Paint
Again, I was very tempted to do a couple feature walls in my property. From shiplap to a darker wall in the living room, I wanted to give the rooms a bit of character. After speaking to other people with rental properties, I learned that many prefer to use white or a neutral color throughout ALL of their properties. This makes it extremely easy to touch up spots or repaint a wall, or just simply buy big pails of paint to save money. After painting our bathroom a space silver color, we changed course and painted the remainder of the property eggshell white. Although the design is not overly creative, we feel that it looks very clean and modern, and will attract the type of renters we want, which, at the end of the day, is our goal.
LED lights
We replaced a lot of the old lights in the house with modern looking simple LED lights for less than $50 each. Not only do they give off a lot of bright light, they also last very long and you do not have to worry about changing out light bulbs.
It’s really tempting to pick out the latest and greatest of everything, but a couple of important questions to ask yourself before choosing something for your rental renovations are:
Will I get a return on this?
Will this attract higher quality tenants?
Is this within my budget?