Fabric Wallpaper (Is Better Than Sliced Bread)

 That door was kind of like having an enormous dog turd hanging out in the corner of your bedroom. It had to go.

I used the impeccable tutorial from How About Orange, but since my cooking skills are such that I literally cannot boil water unless I’m using an electric jug, I had trouble with the paste-making aspect. I stirred and stirred and boiled and stirred and boiled some more, but it just wouldn’t thicken. After three sing-throughs of the fire-burn-and-cauldron-bubble song, I got bored and took it off the heat, and within a couple of minutes it was as thick as Homer Simpson. It was also lumpier than the three-week old milk I found in the fridge the other day, but that was fine – as you smooth down the fabric, the lumps squish away.

I didn’t brush the paste on the entire door before I started since it does dry and I work slower than an arthritic tortoise, but it is easy to add more, and you definitely won’t be short of it. I kept the excess in the fridge for the next couple of days in case any touch-ups were needed, but it stuck on perfectly. I don’t trust my measuring skills, so I cut the fabric slightly bigger than necessary. Once it was glued I cut off the excess by running a razor blade along the edge, which ensured it was a perfect fit. 

In a tragic turn of events, it poured like the apocalypse was coming a few weeks ago, and the moisture soaked up the first twenty centimetres of the material at the bottom of the door, leaving an unsightly stain. My suggestions are:

1. Don’t do it on an outside door.

2. If you do it on an outside door, cut the edge off along the bottom of the door, don’t tuck it underneath flat against the floor.

I loved it so much that the first night, I went to bed with my light on so I could look at it until I fell asleep, power bill be damned. In fact, I loved it so much that I repeated it with the paint-scratched rusting laundry cupboard as a well-it-can’t-get-any-worse experiment. It sticks just as well on metal as it does on wood.

Recovered Chest

This is the colour my mother affectionately calls “calf shit brown”.

It matched our carpet, and that is not a good thing.

The vinyl, unfortunately, was held on by more staples than the population of Beijing. If you wiggle the screwdriver completely underneath the staple and jerk it up hard, it’ll come flying out. However, our lounge room carpet is big and shaggy and vacuum-resistant, and I didn’t want to spend the next six months on my stomach with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass. Instead, I did it the slow way – popping each staple half out with a screwdriver and yanking the rest with pliers. I spent hours doing this, until I felt like a sadistic dentist and even a lecture on the laws regarding boundary fences seemed like an exciting alternative. Eventually I went ‘meh, what am I, Anthropologie?’ and yanked the vinyl off, leaving the rest of the staples in.

After painting the bottom, I removed the hinges and recovered the top with regular cotton material. It wrinkles a little when somebody sits on it – you really have to pull the material tight when you’re stapling, like you’re trying to win a tug-of-war or somebody’s trying to take your last bag of Doritos.

I’m not sure why I didn’t paint it brown to match the tree trunks, but I think this may have been around the time that a friend hid the tin because every time I saw it I started lamenting about all the things I could have bought with that money (“twenty-two double cheeseburgers and an apple pie!”)