I've gone from sharing one (tiny/moldy/size of a large closet) dorm room with two lovely people sophomore year to sharing an entire apartment with two friends senior year! The overabundance of mold/zombie-suicidal ants (true story) sophomore year may have helped boost my immune system, but I am quite excited to get a (hopefully) cleaner living situation this year.
While there are obviously many perks to living in an apartment, the apartment is unfurnished. So I picked up a cheap plastic dresser/drawers set up. Next year when I'm off to graduate school I'll spend more thought and perhaps money on setting up an apartment, since it'll be more long term.
But this will do fine for at least one year. I've seen tutorials about cutting up a large poster and decorating the front of an old wooden dresser. I thought that could be a cool way to spice up my plastic drawers. However, my plastic dresser is a bit bigger than most of the posters I found online-- and I'm too cheap to spring for a large poster on a project that may or may not turn out.
Then, a week or so ago, I was wandering through a cool hippie store and stumbled upon a large sheet of patterned paper. I bought one sheet for my quick canvas DIY and bought another one for my dresser DIY. The papers were about three dollars a piece, and was big enough to outfit my dresser.
The hardest part about this DIY was just taking the time to cut and tape each little piece of paper into the drawers. I used the patterned paper for the front of the dresser and used black card stock for the rest of the sides. I'm a decently messy person, and I wanted to use the card stock to hid my messy piles of clothing/whatever ends up in the drawers.
I tried using Mod Podge to fix the paper to the plastic drawers, but Mod Podge doesn't work well with plastic, so I stuck to using tape. I measured how long the drawers were, cut up my paper, and taped it to the inside of each drawer. I made sure to apply extra packing tape so that the paper wouldn't tear as I threw clothes in and out of the drawers.
It was a bit tricky to fold the purple paper over the contours of the drawer handle, but nothing a some scissors and some tape can't fix.
If you want your pattern to be all over the drawers, you can always find some fun wrapping paper and use that. I really liked the purple paper-- no one is going to see the sides, so I don't mind that they are just covered in black card stock.
Et, volia! That's it-- an easy way to customize a cheap set of plastic drawers.
It's not perfect-- the purple paper was about 1in too small width wise, and I don't have a perfect amount of patience. However, you won't notice the imperfections unless you sit and stare at it and I know that is one thing I won't have time for this coming semester.
Thanks for reading! Hope you were inspired to spice something up with a little DIY.
:)
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