I’d like to take 100% of the credit for this, but the first person I saw putting contact paper on kitchen counter tops was Linda of Make Do and DIY in her post the ultimate “new kitchen counter” cheat. It stuck with me in 2015 so well that when we moved into our Lower Town apartment, I knew I’d be adding some to our rental counters.
For me, buying enough contact paper for the kitchen was a mini investment. In my head it was a frivolous thing to want to buy. You have perfectly functioning countertops as is. Why would you want to cover them? But the reality is that our kitchen is a very dark room + the cupboards are really dark [not complaining], but also having dark countertops is just a bit too much dark. For a room that helps if you can see what you’re doing, I should say.
I did some work and once I saved up enough, I bought a few rolls for the kitchen. In the mean time, the One Room Challenge happened and I ended up using a few rolls to cover our dining room table, so this week I finally decided to test out some faux marble contact paper in our kitchen.
We have a single counter unit between the stove and the fridge in our kitchen so I thought this would be a perfect place to test the contact paper for a few weeks before committing to covering the entire kitchen [and hopefully ironing out any issues on a small scale vs. finding it doesn’t suit our kitchen after covering the whole thing].
This is the section of counter that gets the most use so if the contact paper can hold up here, it’ll have no problem working throughout the rest of the kitchen. I’ll use it as I normally would for a few weeks before making up my mind on covering the rest of the counter tops, but let’s face it, it already looks so much better so I’ve 85% already made my mind up! It’s beautiful! Cover ALL OF THE THINGS IN CONTACT PAPER! Now I’ve just got to convince the critical part of my brain that it’ll be practical.
I’ll blog an update in a few weeks regardless of whether I decided on covering the entire kitchen or not and will give honest feedback on it all. But for now, it’s already made this corner of our kitchen so much brighter! I’m crossing my fingers it works out.
If you’re curious to see how to apply contact paper like an expert, you can check out my four-step tutorial here!