Quick Spruce-Up Between Tenants

Time to do a quick spruce-up between tenants at one of your rental properties. The walls have lots of holes in them from previous tenants hanging pictures and things on the walls over the years.

You could just cover the walls with wallpaper. The drawback is that it is difficult to clean between tenants. One a corner or a seam starts to peel and gets ripped you need to re-do the whole room, which is expensive and time consuming.

You could replace all of the drywall, another costly option. Depending on how bad the walls are, replacing the drywall might be your only real option.

You want to paint with something that is easy to clean and that usually means a semi-gloss. You don’t want to use white because it shows any dirt really quickly and always seems to look dirty.

A textured paint, like Ralph Lauren Suede, will do a decent job camouflaging the imperfections but it’s expensive. You can make your own a lot cheaper. Go to your local pool supply store and pick up some filter sand. This sand is very fine.

In a separate 2 gallon pail, put in one gallon of paint. Start adding the sand to the paint while stirring it. Be sure to keep track of how much sand you are adding because one gallon of paint will not do the whole room. When you get the right consistency for the coverage you want start painting. Remember to stir the paint often because the sand will sink to the bottom.

You can also put a clause in the lease specifying that nothing can be hung on the walls or that only small finishing nails can be used to hang things.