Yes, I did buy Property Brothers peel and stick wallpaper for our new home, feeling kinda ridiculous as I made the purchase. But so far it is working better than expected as a short-term remedy for unexpectedly grody kitchen shelves.

It’s been a while, but I moved a lot in my younger days, first with my family, then as a young adult. And maybe I’ve forgotten the state of past domiciles, but I simply do not recall any being so repellently dirty when I moved into them.  

What were you thinking, I kept muttering to myself in an imaginary conversation with the former owners as I clean the kitchen cupboards, which looked acceptable from the exterior but were revealed to be stained and damaged on the interior when the house was emptied. What caused a fuchsia stain in so many drawers? Why was a rollout shelf inside the pantry door so black with grime? What were you, former owners, doing on that shelf? How could you think it was acceptable to leave it this way for yourselves, let alone others?

Mind you, I am not a persnickety housekeeper – just ask my husband – but these shelves have been a real eye opener. Especially mind-boggling: the wife of the splitting couple that resided in our new home bills herself as a tidiness expert. Can we attribute the mess to the husband and kids? Was it a big cause of tension in the house? Was this grime okay because it was behind cabinet drawers? I have so many questions that I will likely never get the answer to, but am now clear on one thing: tidiness and cleanliness are not necessarily linked together. I’ll take clutter over grimy cabinets any day.

I have scrubbed the repellent (to me) drawers with various cleaning products but some of the most persistent stains – and visible wear – remained, so I tried using non-adhesive shelf liner left over from our current home’s kitchen remodel to obscure problem areas. That didn’t do the trick. Next, I applied old-fashioned contact paper, wrestling with it as I retrained myself how to apply it. Not satisfied, I placed non-adhesive liner on top. When that still didn’t completely hide problem corners and damage, I moved on to peel and stick wallpaper that I spied at the home improvement story and once would have scoffed at using.

It has been, as the above narrative indicates, a learning process, and I have a long way to go before I become adept at applying any form of wallpaper or contact paper on shelves. My fix isn’t meant to last forever, but that’s okay – we just need it to cover the stains and wear until we can replace the shelves. Turns out papering over a problem isn’t always a bad thing.