SUBURBAN * POP

Our neglected pantry, which has been working overtime during this pandemic, recently got some love with new shelves and wild wallpaper – applied with only tape to make it removable (I’ll share all the details below)!The pantry is in our laundry room, right off the kitchen, and though its size is generous, it had been in rough condition for years: peeling paint that was applied over contact paper, vinyl adhesive stuck on the walls, stains and scrapes everywhere, and no ceiling light so very dark. Oh, and also poorly organized! We put in wood floors right away and removed a door that was inconvenient and cramped, but everything else remained…
As we began fixing it up, we hoped to reuse the original shelves but the layers of paint over layers of contact paper problem, plus not wanting to mess with the inevitable scratching and chipping of paint in such a high use area led us to go with melamine shelf boards instead. We did keep the existing supports because the configuration was great as is. The new shelves mixed with a fresh paint job, actual baseboards, and adding electrical for a ceiling light was an instant improvement…I really wanted to use bold wallpaper on the back wall since I would see it regularly but not, like, from every angle of the house. I tried to find a peel and stick wallpaper for the convenience and impermanence, but it is expensive and I didn’t see any patterns I loved. But I did find this amazing wallpaper from Arthouse in Quartz Yellow. It matched our kitchen/laundry perfectly and was ridiculously cheap. So I bought a roll and hoped the internet had a way to hang it without pasting. Internet delivered: double sided tape over painters tape! Sticks to your wall but shouldn’t rip up your wall when you peel it off, yay.To apply the wallpaper I used a roll of delicate painters tape, several rolls of double sided scotch tape, and a wallpaper smoothing tool to help me get the paper in place. I used delicate tape only because the standard dark blue showed through my paper and delicate was lighter. I stuck tape around the borders of each of my rectangles and put an extra strip of tape down the middle too. Then I unrolled and smoothed precut wallpaper pieces across the tape. The trickiest part was measuring and cutting the wallpaper to fit in each shelf because nothing is square. Dry fitting before adding double sided tape saved me a few times but I still had to trim a few areas in place with a blade. It is surprisingly strong even with the delicate tape and my sorta glossy walls (satin). I don’t think this method is any easier or faster than traditional wallpaper, but the removal one day should be!I always like to see how other people organize their pantries so here’s ours, a mix of food, laundry supplies, overflow dish ware, and other randoms. I purged a lot of stuff that had piled up over the years and bought these metal baskets to corral the smaller food items that always end up sprawling, which really helped to open up the shelves. We’re overdue for a grocery trip here so picture bags of chips for a more accurate picture :) I saw this wall hook from H&M and knew it would be perfect for the pantry. (I also grabbed a different color for a bathroom and this larger one for the laundry room!) We keep a Cosco step stool chair (that I recovered a few years ago) in here to easily access the top shelves. I’ve always wanted this space to be organized and pretty, and we finally got there!

Sources
wallpaper
wall hook
step stool
metal baskets
recipe box
retro cooler, similar
curtain – no longer available (Target a few years ago)
yellow light

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