Ten things I did to our rental house to instantly turn it into HOME

We moved from a colourful, vibrant home into a rental house with grey walls two years ago. This is how I turned it into a home instantly without spending money.

When we left our home in Oxfordshire and moved to Washington DC, the grey walls had to be covered with as much colour as possible. I don’t worry too much about how perfectly the pictures are hung, or oif they are crooked. What matters is getting them on the wall as quickly as possible

Last week I was watching - via Instagram - a friend pack up her house and two children and move to Chicago, for a truly stellar job offer. And then later that day I spoke to my friend Charlotte, who is moving back to London after two years in New York. Both experiences instantly sent me back to the first few weeks of moving from Oxfordshire to Washington in the summer of 2023. In particular, I’ve been reminded of the powerful, strange, disorientating feeling of leaving a house I loved, and having to instantly create a new sense of home.

Every wall of our house in England was painted in hot colours, busy with pictures and books, and ponies in some of the rooms too. Leaving it was really hard.

We moved from there to a rented house in America, painted grey throughout.

I couldn’t afford to redecorate it, nor could I really be bothered, knowing we’d have to repaint every room grey when we moved out a few years later. I’m also not that interested in interior design, and find things like organising curtain rails or agonising over paint colours for ages and ages a bit of a drag. I don’t love it. But I do love have a cosy, colourful room to live in, and so without embarking on dramatic redecoration, I needed to find a way to turn this big, grey house, into a home, which would hold us all through the strange experience of making a new life in an alien city. And although it’s true I don’t especially like, nor am interested in, “interior design”, I’ve been surprised by the way that doing this very cosmetic, impermanent decoration, using bits and pieces I bought from Target or thrift shops or even found in the street, has helped me to emotionally anchor myself to a sense of place.

Below, I’m going to share ten things I’ve done to our house to make it more like home, because when I look at our house in America now, I love the way it looks. And I hope these ideas might be useful to you, if you’re moving house, or decorating a rental home you cannot change dramatically, or just want to add layers of warmth and cosiness to your own house.

Back to Charlotte for a moment, though, as my recent conversations with her made made me think more deeply about the period of time when we moved here, and what the move to a foreign country, and those early few weeks felt like, which was, honestlly, pretty weird.