I think that Joey and I lucked out in terms of our apartment situation. The reason I believe that is because a) we live in a convenient location, b) we are in a top floor corner apartment, and best of all, c) our landlord is fairly lenient when it comes to decor.  He said we could paint the walls, hang photos, drill holes, basically whatever we feel like; however, his only rule is no painting the cabinets or doing anything permanent to the kitchen.  This creates a challenge because our kitchen is extremely ugly.  Seriously, it is so ugly it makes me cringe. As a result, I have taken it upon myself to give the kitchen a temporary facelift.  Step one in this facelift was to install a new temporary backsplash. The material I used is none other than silver contact paper.  I was inspired by a post from the blog, A Lease to Decorate.  This was a super easy project and the resulting backsplash brings some much needed life to my boring kitchen.

Materials:

  • Silver Contact Paper
  • Scissors

Instructions:

  1. Unroll a section of the contact paper and turn it so the grid lining is facing upwards.
  2. Determine what size tiles you want.  I chose to use tiles that are 4 squares by 4 squares.
  3. Cut out the squares in the size of your choice
  4. Peel the backing off one of the squares and align it in the top center of the area you want to cover.
  5. After placing it on the wall, smooth out any air bubbles.
  6. Repeat steps 4 and 5, working your way across the backsplash.  I choose to rotate the grain of the tiles so that every other tile was facing the same way.  This gives it a unique checkerboard look, but is totally optional.

Overall, I am pleased with the result.  Step one of kitchen revamp is complete.  Now I’m on to step two, which is fixing the ugly cabinets.  I’ve already put in a bid on eBay for some white contact paper.  Once that comes in, I’ll be recovering all of the cabinets.  I’ll be sure to post pictures once I am done.