Contact your fridge

I may have completely gone off the deep end on this one but that's what I did, I stuck Con-Tact paper all over our fridge. Crazy, huh? :)

We have your average plain, white and huge fridge and because our kitchen is teeny-tiny the fridge doesn't actually fit in the kitchen but ended up in our dining room. Like a very big, white elephant in the room.

As a cool side note here I'll throw in these pics of a real elephant in the room and I wouldn't mind one of those actually. The elephant was supposedly not bothered by the paint, let's keep our fingers crossed that it's true.

 Image source 1 and source 2.

Anyway, back to the story. So the big, white fridge-look had to go and having a very fickle decorating taste I decided that it had to be non-permanent for when I change my mind. Otherwise painting or decoupaging could have been perfectly fine. 

Having heard good things about contact paper lately I went with that. I found a huge roll of it (75') on Amazon for about $20 and I already have plans for the leftovers (I don't know how many feet I used for this project but it barely made a dent in my roll).

This Pottery Barn rug pattern was my inspiration, it's Moorish so what's not to love, right? :)

Image source.

I free-handed the pattern pieces and made two templates from scrap paper. This is what I was working with. 

And before I started cutting in my contact paper I did a test run on the fridge with a dry erase pen to see if I would like it (it wiped right off, FYI). Oh, and please excuse my sloppy censorship of our private information and that of our friends, it was a quick last minute fix.

This is what it would look like for you gals out there with black fridges if you were to use white contact paper.

And then I copied the templates onto the contact paper and cut out about a billion of them.

And then I started to put them on the fridge. I eye balled the placement of each piece and there's slight variations in the pattern because of it but it still reads right when you see it as a whole. Because the pieces are pretty small it was very easy to get them on right without bubbles or wrinkles, I even peeled a few of them off to reposition them without any problems. 

Here's my before shot.  Standard, messy looking and a general eye sore. The censorship isn't helping it one bit either...

This is what it looked like half-way through the first side of the fridge. Don't you love my jungle shot through the leaves? :) That's me trying to be creative with my photography :)

And the lovely afters. 

This last one is the view from the front door. When you step through the door at our place you KNOW the fridge is your destination, it draws you in with the stylish pattern. Oops, that's probably not a good thing, come to think of it..... :) Too late, I guess, because I'm already in love with it.

If you noticed the twine wrapped handles I used the same technique as with our outdoor chandelier, and I only did that to cover up the very fridge-like plastic handles and make it look more un-fridgey. The twine has already been on there for a while and it's holding up nicely. 

I also wanted to mention that the contact paper I got is matte black. I probably would have gotten something fancier (crocodile pattern in bright blue or a brown faux suede would be definite contenders, there are many options in contact paper) if I wasn't trying to keep it on the cheapish side. Black is classic and I can use it for many other projects. 

Our magnets still work on there, but to my husband's chagrin I would like to keep the fridge magnet free from now on, for the sake of aesthetics. The fridge is wipeable and the kids have not tried to peel the contact paper off so far. It's even survived the kids climbing on the doors like the true monkeys they are... So I dub it a success. And now for the judgement - what say you, the jury? :)

Ps. Linking up with
Funky Junk Interiors
Tatertots & Jello
Cottage Instincts
C.R.A.F.T.
Shanty2Chic
The Lettered Cottage