DIY Home: Pretty Patterned Bathroom Cabinet Makeover
Along with the DIY $5 Bathroom Drawer Makeover I did last year, I decided to also give the insides of my bathroom cabinets a facelift with some shelf liner paper and washi tape.
It’s super-easy to do the same – and it provides amazing results. Here’s how to give yourself a little pop of happiness each time you open the medicine cabinet:
DIY Pretty Patterned Bathroom Cabinet Makeover with Shelf Liner Paper
You Need:
sticky-back shelf liner paper (or removable wallpaper!)…I believe my shelf liner paper was actually from a recent trip to HomeGoods / washi tape / sharp Xacto knife or box cutter / scissors / measuring tape
How To:
- My bathroom cabinet was a mess – overflowing with expired meds, unused items, and general junk. (If yours is only half as bad I’ll feel slightly better. I mean, who keeps a bottle of silly putty slime from their son’s 7th birthday party in their medicine cabinet??! (My son is now 10 and a half.) But I digress.) The first step in a makeover is to remove!
Remove everything and go through it mercilessly.
2. Wipe down the inside of the cabinet and remove the shelves (if you can). Apply a pretty washi tape to the edges of the shelves, cutting the ends flush with the ends of the shelves.
3. Measure the inside of the cabinet and cut a piece of shelf paper that matches in size. Remove the backing to the paper and, starting at the top inside of the cabinet, start applying the paper, smoothing down as you go.
4. My cabinet had screws in the center of the back, so I used a box cutter to carefully cut out a round hole for each screw as I encountered it. I then carefully smoothed the shelf paper around it to remove bubbles and lumps.
5. Once the paper was flush with the back of the cabinet and secure, I replaced the shelves.
And the pared-down pile of junk I still wanted to keep in there!
It looks a lot better, no? All in all – it took my about 15 minutes – and it makes me grin every day when I open it and see how pretty it is on the inside. I chose not to do the sides of the cabinet or the inside of the door just yet…because I think I want to do something different with the back of the door!
Here’s one more time, before…
and after! A huge improvement, and I’m totally happy with it.
Tell me: Have you gone crazy and papered the inside of your cabinets yet?
xo
Carly
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I love love love organized drawers. When you open them, every item in its proper place, catalogued and corralled, and I just can’t help but smile. Who wouldn’t love to be able to find everything you need, right at your fingertips? And don’t get me started on the kind of heaven that 
* / your favorite wrapping paper* / measuring tape / double-sided tape / scissors / pen / extra jewelry boxes, shipping boxes, or other small boxes
You’re done! Revel in your newly-organized drawer, and breathe a sigh of happiness every time you open it.
For the past couple months, I’ve turned my attention from clothing and accessory DIY’s to 
Straight off of the kitchen and next to the garage door, this is the bathroom that is one of the first things you see when you come in from the garage – and that people visiting our home will always use. It was a pastel mint color with a mid-90’s-style pastel lavender-and-mint wallpaper border. 
The previous owners of this house LOVED lavender and pastel mint – the entire outside of the house and the master bath were lavender, and the kitchen, downstairs bathroom, and bedroom were pastel mint. Though I don’t mind either of those colors in clothing (some clothing), the color scheme felt a little dated – and completely NOT us. However, after buying the house in February 2008, I went through a phase of painting Lil Tot’s room…then the kitchen…and then I think Hub got tired of constantly living amongst plastic dropcloths and paint cans and told me to stop.
So this bathroom lingered for a long time, untouched. 
I purchased a Monet poster and a faux orchid thingy from Target to deck it out, for the sole reason that both items matched the color scheme. But I HATED this bathroom, and vowed to eventually do something about it.
First, I painted the main wall facing the door white (Miller – straight out of the can eggshell-finish white!!). Once dry, I taped off my stripes, and added a contrasting gray stripe down with the help of 
One afternoon I handed Lil Tot 4 colors of coordinating gray and orange paint (ignoring his pleas for “Blue! Blue!”) and asked him to paint me a picture on a 24″ x 24″ canvas I’d gotten from Michael’s. At first he was grumpy, but then got into it. After about 30 minutes or so, he was upset that his painting was awful. I said leave it for a day, and the next day try again. And lo and behold, the next day we got out the paints again, and I encouraged him to add more layers of paint over top the parts he didn’t like. And what do you know? He ended up creating a beautiful, personal piece of art that I just love, and am so proud to hang in our house. Plus, he was so proud of himself for painting something he really liked and not giving up the first time around. (To me, it looks like a police car spinning its wheels in the snow…but it could be anything, really.) Seriously, who needs Monet??!
Then I found the perfect mirror to replace that hideous mirror at Target. A friend and I pried the builders’ mirror off 
Inspired by 
We had the soap and lotion dispensers (Molton Brown White Mulberry, a Christmas gift from years ago…and if you can find this scent on Ebay I highly, highly recommend it!!), so I placed them on a little striped tray from Target. (Tray was bought around Christmas-time, and I haven’t seen it since the Spring at Target, sorry.)
The ugly dust-collecting orchid got the boot, and was replaced with what was actually the 
The books are Hub’s manga. I absolutely loathe having books in the bathroom – I think it ruins the books due to moisture and ugh! other bacteria floating around – plus, it looks super-tacky. But he loves reading them while doing his business (and leaving them all over the counter), so I just became the willow, bent, and covered his favorites in handmade 
Book-covering 
I created that following 
, and the remaining 1/3 Tangerine essential oil). I can’t recommend the Clean Cotton scent enough – it’s just amaaaazing!!!
I used an old jam jar, and replaced the lid with a piece of orange cardstock I painted a pattern on with white paint, then punched holes into. If you feel the bathroom is stinky, just shake thejar from side to side holding it above where the smell is originating – and poof! Gone. No nasty chemicals, no cloying, overpowering scents. Beautiful.
The toilet paper holder got moved to the right utilizing a pivoting design…the previous owners must have been left-handed since all the toilet paper holders in our house are on the left side of the toilets! (With hastily-patched screw holes in the walls to the right of the toilets. 😉 I also got a matching towel ring for the wall next to the sink so Lil Tot stops dripping water all over the floor after washing his hands. And I replaced the cabinet pulls with silver hexagonal ones from the Home Depot.
And finally, towels: picked these two grey-and-white patterned ones at TJ Maxx, and I just love the geometric pattern on them. Perfect for our little sanctuary!
Every time I look at this room, I can’t help but smile. It’s so perfect. I want to spend all day in there. Well, not quite all day…. (Maybe that’s weird to share with the Internet…?)
