Millennial Spent $7K Renovating Rental Apartment, Said It’s Worth It

• Nnedinma Obiwuru, 31, isn’t letting renting prevent her from living in the home of her dreams.
• Obiwuru turned her white-box rental apartment into a chic oasis via DIY projects and thrifted finds.
• Some millennials sink time and money into renovating rentals when homebuying seems out of reach.

If Nnedinma Obiwuru is going to rent, she’s going to do it in style.

Obiwuru, a 31-year-old marketing specialist, and her partner have spent $7,000 transforming their rental apartment in Austin into a Parisian-inspired sanctuary. Her goal: Take the $3,000-a-month, two-bedroom unit from a white box to a chic boutique hotel.

Her inspiration for the primary bedroom — with its vintage hand-carved bedframe, a hand-me-down from her fiancé’s grandmother, and a $130 chandelier from Amazon— was a suite at Paris’s famed Relais Christine. Rooms at the 17th-century mansion turned luxury hotel with ornately decorated go for around $650 a night. For the guest room, she handmade red velvet banquette chairs and a DIY bar that can fold up and be stored in a closet when not in use. The projects in the 1,300-square-foot space have taken a total of five years.

“Our guests always freak out when they visit,” Obiwuru said. “Every time they come, there’s something new. People usually stay for at least six hours.”

As the US real-estate market remains historically expensive, some young Americans have put off or given up on their dreams of homeownership. Instead, they are redirecting their resources toward renovating their rental properties. They may spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars, along with a lot of time and effort, to make their homes reflect their personal styles.

In Austin, where Obiwuru lives, home prices have dipped but remain well above the US median. The high cost of homeownership has led many residents to opt for long-term renting.

“Owning a house in Austin feels more like a 10-year dream,” Obiwuru told Business Insider. “Renting is where I’m at, and many of my friends are in the same situation. That’s why I focus on making my place feel like home.”

The guest room took the most DIY work

Before the renovation, the guest room looked like just another standard room you’d find in an apartment — nothing special, with plain cream walls and a tan carpet.

Now a bar-and-restaurant-themed space, Obiwuru and her fiancé, John, built most of the furniture themselves. The red velvet booth seating, made of wood, foam, and fabric, cost $700 to create.

“It was the first piece of furniture I’ve ever made,” she said. “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it — it was a lot of work. But I really wanted restaurant-style seating, and everything online was over $4,000, and I just couldn’t justify spending that much for something to sit on.”

Obiwuru spent just $80 building a collapsible bar made of “just plywood and hinges. She went to Home Depot, had workers cut the wood to size, then added paneling to the outside and painted it brown herself.

She said she stores the bar in her closet and typically brings it out when she’s making drinks and hosting friends.

“The cool thing is that everything I build and design in the apartment is renter-friendly,” she said. “We’re thinking we can later move the bar into our living room or kitchen area. It’s easy to move and leaves no marks.”

Renovating a space to look high-end doesn’t have to be expensive

Obiwuru’s design style is deeply shaped by her love for travel and the hotels she’s visited.

“I’m a first-generation Nigerian-American,” Obiwuru said. “My parents provided everything we needed, but with five siblings, travel wasn’t a top priority. When I began exploring the world and staying in hotels, I truly began to feel more like myself.”

She’s recently turned to Maison Metier, a five-star hotel in New Orleans where rooms are about $250 a night, as a blueprint for how to layer seemingly eclectic pieces of furniture and art.

Obiwuru said most of the pieces in her home are thrifted from local stores and cost between 49 cents and about $20.

However, she has splurged on a few larger items, like the large brown leather couch in her living room, which cost $1,000 from Wayfair.

The gallery wall in one bathroom wall is also lined with thrifted items.

“I love it when I go to a bar, and it feels like you’re transported somewhere else,” Obiwuru said. “Bathrooms, or powder rooms, are where designers can really get creative because they’re contained spaces. I knew I wanted to fill mine with frames.”

With a budget of just $100, she and her fiancé visited several Goodwill stores in the Austin area, where they found 51 picture frames. To fill them, they sourced Harlem Renaissance and Prohibition-era artwork, spanning from the 1920s to the mid-’30s, both online and around town.

She does have a few renovation regrets

Obiwuru loves her home, and many others do, too.

She told BI that a maintenance worker in her apartment complex remarked, “This is the best apartment he’s ever seen.”

Obiwuru said she doesn’t need her landlord’s approval for her projects because they leave no permanent damage. Whenever she moves out, she added, she’ll leave the apartment as it looked when she moved in.

Still, she would do a few things differently knowing what she knows now. She painted some rooms before she had a complete design plan in place.

“I didn’t have a full vision when I moved in and designed based on the vibe I had at the time,” she said. “I’ve learned to move more slowly.”

She also mentioned that renovating an apartment while living next door to neighbors has its challenges.

“I’m an early riser, so I want to start my projects at 5 a.m., but that’s just not possible,” Obiwuru said. “You have to work around regular hours, and that’s the tough part about doing loud projects while living close to others.”

During the renovation, she started documenting and sharing parts of the process on Instagram under the username @everylastlayer. She now has more than 38,000 followers, and some of her projects are sponsored by brands.

Still, Obiwuru and her fiancé plan to continue renting for the long haul.

“We can absolutely save for a house, but our priorities are more experiential, at least for now,” she said. “We’d rather travel and spend our money on things like day care for our dogs than save for a down payment.”

She added, “The majority of the people I’m around are renting for the foreseeable future. I think the stigma around it is going away.”