Transforming Ikea Drawers With Bold Wrapping Paper & Decorative Tape

I’ve been busy customising the girls Aneboda drawers by Ikea and wanted to share the work-in-progress after great feedback from peeps on Twitter. I’ve been meaning to inject some excitement into what are effectively very basic drawers that are cheap but no so cheerful at just £39.99.

It’s not finished yet but if you’d like to achieve the look with your own drawers, all I used was wrapping paper (I got mine from the ever fabulous nineteenseventythree) or you could use wallpaper or even fabric, low tack decorative masking tape for the frame of the drawers (I got my yellow tape in a set from Papermash), PVA, and some sandpaper to make it easy to adhere the paper to the surface, a bit of sponge for speedily spreading out the glue, plus a blade, ruler/tape measure.

This took less than an hour and a half to do and even just papering the drawer panels will create instant high impact results.

I mixed the PVA with water although with thicker paper like what I used, you’ll need it to still be a fairly thick consistency and you can use it to ‘varnish’ the paper to protect it from grubby mitts, although you may need to do a couple of coats with thicker sheets. Note that if your paper isn’t the length of the drawer panels, you will need to two sheets for each drawer if it’s a pattern so that you can line it up – think of it like wallpapering the drawers.

Using the decorative masking tape came to me in a lightbulb moment although you could remove the handles, paper the frame around it, and leave the handles white, paint them, or use the decorative tape to cover them. I’m going to get a couple of other colours to finish off the last two drawers. I’ve used less than £20 worth of materials and it can be done for even less or you could get super fancy and track down vintage wallpaper.

The great thing is that the drawers themselves are pretty cheap so you can invest a little in decorating them to give them a totally unique look. Experiment with texture, collage etc or even get the kids involved.

Back soon with the finished drawers!