feeling crafty: a quick fix for mirrored closet doors

The real estate market was very different five years ago when my husband and I bought our home. Back then, people were actually buying AND selling homes. For a profit, even. Ah, those salad days! My eyes; they mist....

The drawback to a healthy market, however, is that we had to make a few sacrifices if we wanted to buy a decent home with our limited resources. When we finally settled on our current home, it wasn't without compiling a fairly sizable list of things we wanted to fix, change, and replace as soon as our budget allowed. Now, five years later, we've managed to cross many projects off of that list, but the list was long enough that several cosmetic changes had to be given such low priority that I wasn't sure we'd ever get to them. One of those such projects was replacing the "delightfully" 80's-riffic mirrored closet doors that someone thought would look good in our dining room. When I first saw them, my husband and I both agreed that we had to kill that tacky and quick, but then roofs had to be repaired and rooms had to be painted and...well...my ugly mirrored doors were relegated to the "perhaps we can learn to live with it" list.

Fortunately, something snapped in me this summer, and I decided that I did NOT have to roll over and accept fug in my home! Setting out to find a cheap, easy way to beautify my dining room eyesore, I happened on this from IKEA and I knew I could do something with it.

And voilà!:

Fugly no more.

Because I am a terribly impatient perfectionist (an absolute train wreck of a combination), this project took considerably more time than it should have, but if you have mirrored doors and you'd like to try this project then know that it really can be done both cheaply and relatively quickly. I, however, waaay overbought my Amorf Frost due to a combination of poor planning, a mistaken belief that this was a one-woman project, and IKEA's maddeningly vague pictorial directions. So please, learn from my mistakes.

1) If you want to copy my design, then you can accomplish it with four rolls of the Amorf Frost -which, at $4.99 a roll, should make this project run less than $20. 2) I recommend using a straight razor to cut the product, as scissors don't produce nearly as clean a line. 3) Hanging the paper is not a one-person job. Don't even attempt it without a second pair of hands. 4) Before applying the frosted paper, make sure your mirror is impeccably clean, as the frost is pretty unforgiving. 5) Finally, but most importantly, you will need to DRENCH your mirror (or window) with water before applying the product. Failure to do this caused me lots of wasted time, money and a few choice curses at Swedish illustrators.

Do all this, and you should be able to modernize your closet doors in an afternoon for $20-25. Well worth the time and effort, if you ask me.