A Breath of Fresh Erin

NO PANE. NO GAIN.

No pane. No gain. It’s true. However in this case, I am referring to a glass pane! If you can’t see the inside of your cabinets then you are missing out on a potential area to accessorize. No worries, it’s an easy fix: just add glass and you can gain a new space to display decorative items!

We have a built-in cabinet in our dining room. These cabinets had solid doors, but as you can see in the picture below the top cabinets now have glass panes! Hooray! Unfortunately, my excitement took over and I forgot to take a BEFORE picture before the new glass was put in…

{before}

 

{after}

If you take a look at the bottom doors in this picture you can

visualize what the tops doors looked like before they had glass.

 

Once the glass was in place I wasn’t sure what to tackle next.

I contemplated painting the back portion of the cabinets, but then

I was inspired by this little birdie.

Want to accessorize with this paper mache bird?

Good news, it's still available at West Elm.

This bird (made of book pages) gave me a bright idea for the background of our built-in cabinets! I hit up the clearance section of Half-Price Books and purchased two books. I bought a book with white pages and a book with off-white pages in order to create contrast between the torn pages. Here is a close-up of the new book page background!

Instead of gluing the pages directly to the wood cabinets I adhered the pages to cardboard. All you need to do is cut a cardboard box to fit the background space, glue the pages to the cardboard and use a couple of fabric tacks to stick the cardboards pieces onto the back of the cabinets! Easy breezy.

I bought this old sewing machine (below) at an antique store in Midland, Texas.

I love vintage pieces and I thought this sewing machine was so neat because it still has

a piece of string and fabric in the machine...as if someone just got up and walked away.

Keep in mind, if book pages aren't your thing - buy fabric, wallpaper or scrapbook paper and adhere it to the carboard!

This is a great project if you are renting a place and are not allowed to paint, but want a way to spice up your cabinets. Not to mention it's an extremely inexpensive project! The total cost for the new cabinet background was less than $5! I used a free cardboard box, 2 books ($1 each) and some fabric tacks. Loving the new look of our built-in cabinet! Again I say...no pane. no gain.