Adding some style with shelf paper

When I was working on the nightstand I bought some striped shelf paper to line the drawers with but in the end I decided against using it because the colors wouldn't work together.  I had eyed the same shelf paper a while ago for lining the back of the corner cabinet in our dining room (posted about here and here) but never got around to it.  So now that I had the paper I thought I'd test out a section and see how it looked.

I first started out with the drawer because if I didn't like how it looked I could just shut the drawer and ignore that it was there.  (After working with it some it is really easy to remove, not like wallpaper so if I had changed my mind it wouldn't have been difficult to remove.)  Here you can see a picture of the drawer:

The shelf paper is a ticking stripe pattern in a turquoisey-grey with thinner white and green stripes.  The green is pretty close in color to the green paint of our walls so it ties everything together pretty nicely.

Next I decided to tackle a bit larger of an area, the back of the cubby in the middle of the cabinet.  Working with the shelf paper was a bit frustrating although I think the stripe pattern did make it a little easier for lining things up and matching edges of side by side sections.  I began at the center edge of the cabinet back, aligning the paper and then working out from there.  The part that tends to be a bit tricky is smoothing out all the air bubbles.  I kept having to pull the paper back and work out the bubbles before moving on to the next section.  If the bubble is relatively small you can use a needle to prick the paper and release the air.

I left a little overhang at the bottom and top of the section I was working on, rather than try to cut everything perfectly before applying the shelf paper as you can see here:

I then used an exacto knife to trim the paper at the top and bottom edges for a nice clean edge:

And here you can see the finished cubby and drawer:

And finally I worked on the larger compartment on top:

Here it is with all our dishes loaded back in:

 

And a closer view with the light on:

Now we really need to replace the cabinet window with plain glass!:

 

One of the added benefits of the darker color of the shelf paper is that it makes the cabinet appear deeper than when the back was a plain white.  Not only is it cuter it also seems larger and makes our white dishes stand out more!

For comparisons sake, here is a before picture:

And an after picture:

 

So that concludes my adventure with shelf paper, there are a lot of cute styles of shelf paper out there, I had no idea!  There are some really cool patterns at Chic Shelf Paper ............ or they have some nice patterns that are less expensive at Orchard Supply Hardware where I found mine :o)