These $7 Wall Decals Are the Easiest Kitchen Cabinet Refresh | Apartment Therapy

Oct 15, 2024

My toxic trait is that I’m all ideas and no follow-through when it comes to DIY projects. I want to do so many creative and fun things, like upcycling candle jars and vintage vessels with my own signature scent and reupholstering my headboard with fun food fabric. But these ideas just live in my Notes app and my imagination. Except for one thing: strawberry kitchen cabinets!

Over the summer, I spray painted my kitchen cupboard knobs from brushed silver to hot pink and bright purple. They brought me joy every time I opened them, but then the boring white doors really stood out as the least “me” thing about the kitchen — the room I spend the most time in for work and fun. My dad had just helped my grammy update her kitchen from an all-yellow, faded Big Bird cupboard situation to a beautifully understated gray-and-white motif. He painstakingly removed every cabinet door and all the hardware and then sanded, primed, and painted all 16 of them. It took him months, and I knew I could never put in the patience to do a good job like that. Plus, I’m a renter, so there was the fear of having to paint them back if the landlord didn’t like my bold choice of color.

I considered using peel-and-stick wallpaper to cover them, but my cabinets have grooves in them near their centers, and that seemed like an absolute nightmare for proper temporary wallpaper adhesion without bubbles or unevenness. I had previously added cute food decals to my spice cabinet that made me smile, but I never thought about using them across all of my cabinets. So I headed to Amazon to search for a design featuring my favorite fruit (to eat and aesthetically) and came up with the following: strawberry decals. I found a four-pack with 92 assorted size stickers for $6.99 on Amazon and ordered them immediately. I turned on some music — a playlist called “Fruit Jams” that I made using songs that have fruit in the title — and just freestyled placing them semi-evenly across all of my upper cabinets, avoiding the grooves. I knew I wouldn’t have enough decals for the lower cabinets from this single pack, so I’m considering doing another type of fruit for them or some fun graphic squiggles and shapes from one of my favorite designers, Zander Schacter for Otto Studio.

Now that I have discovered how easy it is to apply wall decals — especially if you aren’t trying to make a straight line or match a pattern exactly — I want to use them as a wallpaper alternative in other parts of my home. They’re easier than peel-and-stick wallpaper because you’re working with a smaller surface area to smooth, and the same kind of smoothing tools exist to help make the process, well, smoother. They’re also significantly cheaper than peel-and-stick wallpaper, too. For the holidays, I’m going to get seasonal decals for my doors and (non-working) fireplace, which is gray and in need of some razzle-dazzle. I’m also going to add some border decals to my walls to accentuate my white crown molding and perhaps to create “frames” on the wall to hang some of my extensive collection of fake foods and intricate painted Jell-O molds. (Grocery Girl Fall, if you haven’t guessed it, is my lifestyle in all four seasons.) I also may use some decals to give an old IKEA cabinet and drawers a facelift. These are the seven removable wall decals I’m considering for these projects right now, and I think you might like them, too.

The Shape Assembly Decals from Otto Studio are a Matisse-inspired design featuring assorted funky cut-out shapes in five color options. One of the options, Candy Bar, has five different colors within one pack to mix-and-match and really get playful! The decals range in size from a 1/2 inch wide to 20 inches wide, and the largest sticker is 20 by 4 inches. The full sheet is 48 by 26 inches and costs just $49.

These terrazzo wall decals come in assorted colors and small sizes (around 1.5 inches wide, on average) for a boho vibe. The geometric shapes are irregular and come in six different sizes on each of the three sheets. One of the inspiration photos featured using them to decorate stairs, and now I wish I had stairs in my one-bedroom apartment to terrazzo-ify!

Into terrazzo but don’t want to have to apply quite so many small stickers? This set includes flecks sized from 1.6 inches to 5.5 inches, all with a matte finish and transparent borders.

This twist on stripes was also designed by my favorite, Zander Schlacter for Otto Studio, and these Wave Border Decals come in eight different colorways. The 48-by-3-inch panel is $34 and printed on satin-finish vinyl. I’d try it around a doorway or near my molding to draw more attention to it.

This idea is for the young and young at heart. If you want a silly little game to be accessible anytime, this magnetic tic tac toe board decal has lightweight acrylic Xs and Os with magnets and double-sided tape to install quickly and easily. You could spray-paint the Xs and Os colors or decorate them to fit your space (I’d bejewel mine … ) and vibe.

This combination of mushrooms, flowers, and trees comes in gentle, muted colors and has a surprisingly minimalist vibe (at least minimalist for me). The forest floor wall decals are on the smaller side, so they’d work great for small upcycled furniture or decorating a mirror or photo frame.

The stars in this starburst vinyl decal set ($8.98 per sheet on Etsy) will transport you to the ‘70s when mid-century modern ruled the world. Each sheet includes two decals of a boomerang or crescent moon shape and two stars, with each vinyl decal measuring 6 by 4 inches. There are an astounding 25 colors available in this Etsy shop, and the seller currently has a deal for buy two sheets, get one free automatically.