At Home With POPSUGAR: How White Paint Completely Transformed My Once Ugly Apartment

Everything pops with a white background! Most of our furniture is neutral, so I'm able to use colour with our other decor, like our teal blue bar cart, pink throw pillows, and rose gold everything.

This is the view of the inside of our apartment from the kitchen, and most of what you'd see when you walked through the front door. Even with the apartment empty, I felt like having medium brown walls, especially the wall with the window, made the space feel so small and closed in.

After we painted all of the walls white, it feels so much roomier in this space, despite this photo being full of furniture (and our two cats).

Even though the paint in this photo doesn't look that dark, the first time I looked into this room it felt to me like the walls were closing in (I told everyone that it reminded me of the trash compactor Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Princess Leia were trapped inside of in A New Hope — everyone rolled their eyes, but it's a good reference, sue me!). I knew there was going to be a lot going into this space (see next photo), so honestly, painting it was the only thing that could be done to make it feel less cramped.

Despite our living room being absolutely crammed with a huge couch, a giant Lovesac Sactional chair, a coffee table, shag rug, and TV console, this photo is so airy compared to the before photo. And even though I was going for this, I do love that the big pieces of comfy furniture mean that the room we spend the most time in ourselves and when guests are over is cosy and welcoming.

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Y'all. This room. It was almost the reason I said no to this place. Looking back, that's obviously so silly. Don't ever let lime green paint stop you from achieving your dreams! (Unless you love lime green paint, then use it everywhere!) This room was the hardest to tackle, as it took three coats of white paint to truly cover up the slime-green.

I know I'm overusing the words light and airy, but, like . . . look! Even with a dark grey duvet cover and a nearly black dresser, the white paint turned this once wacky looking room into a delightfully bright space.

You can't see too much of the paint in this room, unfortunately, but as you can tell from the space behind the refrigerator, it was a dark shade of . . . something. It was the colour of whatever would result should mustard and coffee choose to have a baby together. Paired with the terrible backsplash that I knew we likely wouldn't be replacing any time soon, everything just looked so tired in this poor room. White paint to the rescue, once again!

I wish I had photos of what the original kitchen looked like after paint, because even though we had to upgrade our appliances (the ancient dishwasher was broken, so it was in our best interest to replace everything with a bundle price) and we chose to splurge on a quartz countertop to replace the peeling laminate one, everything looked so much better after paint even though it was old, cracked, and broken. Even the not-my-taste backsplash looks like less of an eyesore.