A pleasent yet affordable bathroom shelf upgrade

Hello everyone! Did you love March as much as I did? The weather has been BEAUTIFUL!!! I suppose if you are up north you might not agree with me, but these Florida evenings have stolen my heart. The only thing I love more than having my windows open is dreaming about having all of them open once we get the rest of our screens on!! Maybe next year right?

Back to business...I had some time the other night to tackle a minor project to make our bathroom closet a little more palatable. We use our main bathroom for everything except showering, but there are no drawers. Ergo, everything is stored in the closet that I would otherwise consider a linen closet. Since it does not serve that purpose, we have made a few adaptations.

When we moved in, I organized it by like items. For example, my toothbrush and toothpaste were on the same shelf as The Engineer's. This, however, drove me crazy. Primarily because The Engineer has an electric toothbrush that I kept knocking over. I then decided to re-arrange and give each of us our own shelf and store less used items behind our every day items. This became a problem because I put our medicine box in the back and every time we needed a band aid, it was not very accessible. Every time we needed something or tried to put it back it was a hassle and it got messy. Since we were due for another re-arrange, I wanted to do something about our shelves.

The shelves are 'white' wood, but they are old and have many years of life ground into them. Sanding them and putting a simple coat of white would have solved the problem but I really wanted something a little prettier. I had planned to paint a black and white chevron pattern on them but hadn't yet gotten around to it. Turns out I didn't need to. I was perusing TJ Maxx for some office decor and something jumped out at me. (No, the office is no where near done but you can't blame me for getting a jump on decorating! You can check out the progress here and here.)

Contact paper in one of my favorite patterns...two rolls for $7. This was way better than painting. I hope that someday we completely demo this bathroom and start from scratch, but that is a long, long, long way off, so a little pick me up was just what it needed.

I cleared one shelf off at a time and gave it a good cleaning.

Then I rolled my contact paper on the shelf wrong-side-up and marked the back where I needed to cut. 

I lucked out because the roll was the same width as my shelves. Amazing. When I marked my paper I left enough room to wrap around the front so the white would be covered...after all, isn't the front of the shelf the one spot you look at the most?

Once I had my paper cut I rolled it and peeled the backing off the first few inches. I started at the front because that was the most important place to make sure everything was lined up and straight!

Then I just worked my back and made sure I had no bubbles.

With one shelf done, I was so happy with the improvement!

I was also really happy I thought to wrap the paper around the front of the shelf, it gives a nice little detail.

The rest was a simple rinse and repeat. 

I love this improvement! Everything was great except when I looked up at the top shelf. 

See, I hadn't planned on doing the top shelf because you couldn't see the top of it. Buutt when I had the brilliant idea to wrap the paper around the front of the shelf (really, it was a good idea, I'm very happy I did that) it meant that I would have to do the top shelf to calm my OCD. So I got on the step stool and did that one too. 

All better <3

This only took me about 30 minutes, and that included re-organization and cleaning time, so it was definitely a simple, cheap, and pleasant upgrade.