DIY Kitchen Peninsula Wallpaper Upgrade

*Today’s post was made possible by Fancy Walls, and features gifted product for the purposes of a candid review. All opinions are my own.

I just happened to be looking through old “before” photos of our home for fun as a little pick-me-up, and it is so satisfying to see how far we’ve come! It sort of feels like we’re moving at a snail’s pace through home projects, but, really, we’ve made huge progress in the last two years. Nearly every single room has been repainted, we’ve added fun wallpaper patterns throughout, hung new curtains, refreshed dated hardware, and so much more. I don’t think any room has experienced a bigger transformation than our kitchen, though. We’ve taken down old wallpaper, repainted the walls, removed cabinets, swapped out lights, repainted the cabinets, and put in quartz counters. The room is unrecognizable from what it used to look like, and today I’m adding yet another layer to make it feel more like us.

Since painting the existing 1960s wood cabinets a creamy off-white color last year, I’ve felt like the kitchen could stand to have just a little bit of warmth added back in. The new clean white finish on the cabinets was dreamy, sure, but you know I like to play around with color and pattern to liven things up in our house. I felt like the room needed just a littttttttle something extra, so I decided to wallpaper the outer edge of our peninsula in a faux wood finish. I figured this would help make that architectural feature of the cabinetry pop, and would bring a little more warmth to the kitchen as a whole. The other thing a faux wood texture would provide is some cohesion with the wooden open shelves that we have up on the wall. Up until now, those shelves were the only wood accents we had in the kitchen. I thought that adding wood to the peninsula would make them feel a little more intentional.

As always, I worked with Fancy Walls on this wallpapering project. I’ve used their wallpaper all throughout our home—in the entryway, the dining room, our hall bathroom, and on the upper portions of the kitchen, too. Their peel-and-stick wallpapers are really easy to install, and I appreciate that they offer samples of the patterns so you can be absolutely sure that you’re making the right decision. I ordered a sample of Fancy Walls’ Faux Wooden Slats Wallpaper, and stuck it to the side of the peninsula for a week or two so that I could view it all throughout the day to ensure that it was a good fit. I loved the warm tones in the paper, and the thin width of the slats felt very on-trend to me (it’s giving “Japandi” vibes, right?), so I went ahead and placed my order for the full dimensions of the peninsula.

The project took less than an hour to pull off on my own, and gave me nearly immediate finished results. Can you even imagine how time-consuming and expensive this project would have been if I had used real wood slats to cover the peninsula surround? It would have been so tedious and I’m sure it would have also taken weeks to finish properly. Instead, I was able to peel the backer paper off my wallpaper, line it up with the top edge of the peninsula, and stick it right down in place using a wallpaper smoothing tool. I trimmed the paper at the bottom using a sharp utility knife, and moved on to the next panel until the peninsula was fully covered. So easy!

There was just one special step that I wanted to call out in case you decide to try this project in your own home. Since I was using wallpaper instead of real wood, I needed to take into account that my wood pattern had a repeat in it. In other words, if I had lined up the paper from the top on each and every panel, you might have noticed that the printed knots in the wood repeated as you looked across the peninsula. This would have been a dead giveaway that the pattern was faux. To make sure that didn’t happen, I ordered wallpaper panels that measured double the actual height of my peninsula. This meant that I could stagger the wood grain in the pattern so that it looked more natural and random. I think this made a huge difference in the finished results, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned it to you so you can follow suit.

I love how much character the wood grain adds to our mostly white kitchen. It helps the wood floating shelves look more intentional, and also breaks up all of the white tones in the cabinetry color, countertops, and backsplash. Now the space isn’t “just another white kitchen.” It’s a funky mix of eclectic colors and patterns that feels so much more authentic to the mid-century style of our home and our own personal aesthetic, too.

The other cool thing is that, if we live with this faux look for long enough and decide that we want it to stay permanently, we can easily peel off the Fancy Walls wallpaper (which is made to be semi-permanent for just such occasions as this one!) and install real wood slats. What do you think?! Would you try this in your home? I think this wood slat wallpaper would look so cool as a feature wall behind a bed with dark green painted walls surrounding it. Let me know in the comments how you would customize the pattern.

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