If anyone remembers my IKEA unit with map decals, I just finished a similar project! I used removable Spoonflower wallpaper to cover up some boring white furniture with cute cherry blossoms.
The great thing about IKEA furniture is that it’s affordable, easy-ish to build and all looks good together. The downside is that it’s not the best quality. When I moved here 6 years ago, I had a lot of space to fill and picked up a matching beside table and chest of drawers. The white was a good choice to make all my colourful kawaii possessions pop but the table has been looking grubby for a while – I think from my phone charging there every night.
I realised I could cover the top with a decal. Spoonflower no longer sell the decals I used last time but the removable peel & stick wallpaper seems to be exactly the same. You can even order a swatch, which is big enough for a lot of small projects, but was too small for my table. The smallest roll was way too big but I enlisted my dad to figure out the best options to use it to cover my chest of drawers too. I went with diagram #2.
For the wallpaper, I decided to order my sakura cherry blossoms as it has soft colours and a scattered, non-directional pattern. It arrived really fast and the whole project was mostly just a matter of measuring everything very carefully – twice! – and then cutting up. The wallpaper is quite tricky to cut as it’s woven and has a heavy backing paper so you want to use very sharp scissors or a craft knife. Even so, I had a few wobbly edges here and there but it’s not noticeable against the white furniture.
The wallpaper includes a guide to hanging, which was mostly applicable for my little DIY. Basically you clean the surface, peel back the backing paper, stick it on and use a plastic scraper to smooth it out and remove any bubbles. The hardest part is lining it up accurately but it’s easy to peel off and try again until you get it right.
It turned out I even had enough spare for the drawer, which makes it look even nicer. The finish is hard-wearing and wipe clean so it should be fine if I spill some tea or something.
With the chest of drawers, I measured and applied the big middle piece first and then tried the side pieces each way to see which was the least obvious join. By some luck, I got a perfect match on one! The other isn’t too obvious either. I cut the side pieces bigger so I could overlap the join as recommended. I ended folding the extra over the side, which looks surprisingly good.
I’m so happy with how these turned out and it was so much easier than I expected. If you’ve got some boring IKEA furniture, now you know how to jazz it up. Here’s some more fun wallpaper projects at Spoonflower’s blog.
Spoonflower’s wallpaper is available in thousands of designs in 3 sizes and as traditional style wallpaper for pasting too. They ship worldwide from both Germany & the USA. I have over 100 cute patterns in my shop to choose from – above are a few more I considered for this project.
This is not a sponsored review, but I do sell my designs through Spoonflower.
