Decorating Your Apartment Is Like Furnishing Your Life

Decorating your apartment should be something you look forward to. But that’s not true for everybody.

For some apartment dwellers, finding an apartment is the big challenge and decorating an apartment is an afterthought. Apartments become places where they just store stuff. They think of it as a temporary space, and figure that with the restrictions in their lease about painting the walls that they’re stuck with a generic white apartment treatment that looks like every other apartment on the floor.

With a little decorating creativity, though, you can make your apartment feel more like a real home that says something about your personality. Whether it’s candlelight and pastel-colored, fluffy pillows, or a display of your favorite team’ sports memorabilia, here’re some ideas to get your creative juices flowing and your apartment decorated in style.

Decorate Your Apartment in Themed Spaces

The important thing here is to brainstorm, and not worry too much about how you’re going to decorate. Just get your creative cap on, or invite your more creative friends over to brainstorm ideas and help you with decorating your apartment.

Mentally Divide Your Apartment

Even if it’s only a one bedroom apartment you’re living in, take a look around and mentally partition your apartment into some divisions around which you can create a few different decorating themes. Use the # of bedrooms + 3 rule. That is, you can usually choose a theme for each bedroom in the apartment, and create three other themed spaces. More themed spaces may create a busy, crowded feel; fewer themed spaces may give the impression that you stopped decorating your apartment halfway through.

For example, the best corner in the apartment could become a mini antique display, a spot to highlight family photos, or a morning meditation spot. By creating themed spaces, you’re taking a small, homogenous space and giving it variety. You’ll also make your small apartment feel bigger. That’s what decorating your apartment is all about.

Functional and Random Spaces in Your Apartment

Your themed spaces can be functional and random. For example one corner could be your dog’s, with his doggie bed and a few pictures of him on the wall above it, while the general living room area can evoke a relaxing, laid back feel, with a recliner as the main focus.

A Central Decorating Theme

Try making your apartment’s themed spaces revolve around a central theme. Your living room area could be decorated in a South American fiesta theme, with a large map of the continent on the wall, while your apartment’s bedroom can have an Asian theme, with bamboo pictures and thrift-store lacquer furniture. Use your own style and interests to define how you approach decorating your apartment.

Physically Decorate and Divvy Up Your Apartment’s Space

A divider can be a great way to decorate your themed space and give you even more of a feel that you’ve got more space than you do. These are a great cure for the layout of a studio apartment, which feels like (and is) one big room.

Here’s a creative alternative to the usual wooden dividers: head to your local crafts or sewing store, and ask them about large, folding table pads, used to protect tables from needles and to provide a work surface. You can throw a large sheet, blanket, or other cloth over them to create a different look, and nobody knows what’s under there. Not only might this save you money, but the foam type of material inside makes a great sound absorber, which is important in a small apartment. You never know when you’ll have trouble quieting noisy apartment neighbors, too.

Stay tuned! In our next blog, Decorating Your Apartment Part 2, we’ll give you some tips on how to add color to your apartment while keeping the apartment management happy.

Buying renters insurance is more urgent than you might assume. Think your landlord is responsible if the stuff in your apartment gets stolen or damaged? Think again. Their responsibility is only for the building itself, which you won’t matter much to you if your new laptop or flat screen TV gets stolen or trashed.
While most of us have drifted by in an apartment for awhile without buying renters insurance, it’s taking a big risk, and it simply doesn’t make any sense considering that a lot of renters insurance policies cost less per day than the price of a soda. Here’s a few tips on buying renters insurance.

1. Find a Reputable Insurance Company

You might ask for suggestions at your leasing office. Some management companies have made deals with companies to pre-approve all of their renters. If they haven’t done so, you might suggest they look into it. You can try one of the big insurance names, but you might also consider a company that helps you compare insurance quotes, or choose an insurance plan that has been developed specifically for apartment dwellers, like eRenterPlan.

2. Tally Up What You Need to Insure

Take a stroll around your apartment and make a spreadsheet of what you want or need to insure. Even better, get out your camera and take either still or video shots of some of your belongings. If anything should happen, this will come in very handy. On your spreadsheet, make the columns:

• item(s)
• date bought
• price paid
• current worth
• new cost today

Take your best guess and total the value of everything. This should give you a general idea of how much coverage you need when buying renters insurance.

Depending on the policy that you choose when buying renters insurance, the insurance company will either pay the original value of the item minus the cost of depreciation, or pay you what it will cost for you to buy it again new (called “replacement cost”). Naturally, an insurance policy that pays the depreciated value will probably cost less. However, replacement cost policies make it much easier to recover from a claim or catastrophe; you can simply stroll into a store and get new items to replace what you lost.

3. Compare Costs

Get a few quotes and compare the straight yearly cost of that insurance coverage. For example, a renters insurance policy covering up to $10,000 might be between $160-$250 per year. If one company’s quote is significantly higher or lower than the rest, try to figure out why before deciding whether it is a good bargain or a bad deal. There might be a good reason for either. If you can’t figure out the legalese, you may want to contact the company and ask them directly why their insurance policy is so much cheaper or more expensive before buying renters insurance.

4. Compare Insurance Coverage

Here’s where you make sure you’re looking at apples and apples. Make sure you understand what each renters insurance policy is covering, and if you don’t, ask. It’s a good way to test how easy to use their Websites are or how knowledgeable and friendly the customer service. Pay particular attention to answering these questions:

• How much does it cover? (10k, 20k, 30k?)
• Does it include liability insurance?

This is where the party guest who trips or the pizza delivery guy getting bit by your dog is covered. This might include damages as well as medical coverage.

• Is the depreciated value or the cost of buying the item new covered?

• Are “additional living expenses” included?

This will help you with the extra costs of relocating, finding temporary housing, etc.

• What type of damage does it cover?

Most renters insurance policies won’t cover flooding, but will cover water damage caused by leaks, a neighbor leaving their water running, and so on. Depending on what natural disasters are common to your area, you might want to check and see if certain specific mishaps are covered. For example, if you’re in the North, the weight of snow does sometimes cause roofs to collapse. If that happens to your house or apartment, you want that to be covered, and you should consider that when buying renters insurance.

Once you take into account the quality of the coverage with the price, you should be able to make a good decision when buying renters insurance. We hope you won’t ever need to use it, but if you do, we’re sure you’ll be very glad you bought renters insurance.

The cost of cable television for apartments may soon get a lot cheaper. Millions of Americans who watch cable TV in their apartments don’t have any choice in who their cable provider is. This means no choice of rates, providers, or packages.

It’s called exclusive rights, and apartment buildings across the country have experienced them when it comes to their cable services provider. But this is about to change with the recent FCC announcement that it will no longer allow cable TV service providers to force apartment communities into exclusive contracts. Companies such as Time Warner and other large cable service providers have in the past been able to sign exclusive rights agreements with individual apartment buildings. In return for these agreements, the cable TV provider would agree to upgrade the apartment cable systems as well as other capital investment. But with these upgrades comes a downside for renters. If a renter does not like the rates that he or she is charged, they have to either switch to satellite television or go back to using good ‘ol rabbit ears. The ruling, which is expected within the next few weeks, would strike these agreements down, thereby allowing other cable service providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, to provide cable television for apartments that previously had exclusive agreements. The result of allowing even just a second competitor, experts argue, is a drop in price of roughly 30%. With cable TV prices having risen significantly in the past ten years–one study estimated a rise of 93%–this will come as a relief for many families.

Proponents of limiting exclusive rights include a broad range of groups. There are other large corporations, such as Verizon and AT&T who, with recent technological advances, are now able to provide cable TV service. Then there are also satellite providers who would like to see more fair positioning in providing cable television for apartments. Finally, there are the small regional cable providers who are especially disadvantaged by exclusive rights in cable TV contracts for apartments.

So, what does this mean if you’re renting an apartment? First, there you can expect to see cheaper prices on your existing cable provider’s bills as the threat of the competition’s lower price causes price cuts. Second, with more options available, expect a more diverse set of cable television programming packages for apartments as competitors try to fit different niches in the market. Third, watch for bundling services with their cable television for apartments, especially from new cable providers like AT&T and Verizon. Both companies offer several services across the technological spectrum, such as phone, cable television, high-speed internet and wireless.