3-2-1 contact paper

During our first week here, my mother in law and I ripped out all the old contact paper from my kitchen cupboards. It was like a history of shelf liners, all right there for us to get painfully under our fingernails.

This looks like original 1958 paper to me, and the dirt underneath it seemed to confirm that hypothesis. Gross! Beyond gross! I had to disassemble the wooden divider to get this out. Yeah, it was worth it.

I was thinking 1960s for the palm trees, until I saw similar Contact paper for sale at the local WalMart.

Obviously an early-1980s print.


Mid- to late 1980s. I may or may not have owned a cotton x-back crop top with a similar print. Or maybe it was splatter-print. Definitely the same color scheme, though.

White on pale green. My wedding colors from 1993.

The faux-marble look screams 1990s to me. (But, hey! Pull out shelves in the pots-and-pans cupboard! Super!)

My new shelf liners are plain white and brilliant kelly green. After this circus you can imagine I was not over-eager to choose an up-to-the minute print. I also used non-adhesive options - the squishy, grippy kind, mostly. I hope never to have to unadhere contact paper again. Blessings on Dr. G's wonderful mother for helping me through that ordeal.

My heart is half breaking that these maple cabinets are painted. I love that color of wood. However, we think we will need to completely overhaul the kitchen in a couple of years. It is too small, and there are a couple of minor electrical issues. (The lighting is really inadequate, and the old outlets don't produce enough juice to power my mixer and blender, for example.) So we will likely be saying farewell to them, anyway. Maybe we will move them down to the rec room to create an entertainment/storage wall.