Faux Shagreen Cabinet DIY

With the new season of One Room Challenge upon us I felt it was time to finally share my faux shagreen console DIY I created for my office. I received a few emails about this DIY so thank you to those who have been patiently waiting for the tutorial! 

Items you will need:

Furniture piece you are going to wrap. I used an Ikea Akurum cabinet which they no longer sell, there Sektion is very similar though.

Your faux shagreen fabric. I used this faux stingray.

Then, this awesome mounting tape from 3M (which I would NOT substitute any other adhesive for this)! It is super strong but allows you to reposition the panels you make in case you need to. I think I used 4 rolls. Buy more & return what you don’t need, you’d hate to start and have to stop in the middle.

Any hardware you want to add, I used these Lews Bar Pulls in brushed brass.

So the steps are really easy, but tricky to describe so I tried to include as many photos as possible, reference the photos & you’ll be fine!

First, calculate all of the faux material you need, you’ll do this by measuring the top of your furniture item, tops of your doors, size of your door faces adding the width of the side of the doors, then the outside sides of your item. This diagram is to help you illustrate what I mean:

When you get your fabric, cut out each of these pieces. There, you’ve completed the hardest steps of this DIY.

I think you could do this DIY on an assembled item, what I did is, I assembled the cabinets, sans the doors, hung it on the wall, then started covering the doors.

Take your door and mark where you will place your pulls then drill a hole through your doors.

Then, take your 3M tape and wrap it so half the tape is on the front face of the door and the other half is on the side of the door. Then, along the top edge of the door and bottom, place the tape in entirety on the doors face (so you are not wrapping any part of the tape like we did on the sides).

Once in place, take off the other side of the tape’s wrapping, starting on one long side of the door, line up your fabric on the tape then wrap your fabric around to the other side of the door.

Then put a screw through the hole you’ve drilled so you can see through the fabric where you need to cut a small hole. I could cut this with scissors, affix your pull, and then push down the fabric securely on the top and bottom of the door. Repeat for all doors.

Cut the tape in half (no it’s half as wide) and place these on the tops and bottoms of each door. Then affix your small fabric rectangles.

You are almost done, the other steps are insanely easy!

On the outer sides and top of your furniture piece, place tape on the outer edges of each area. Then just affix your large pieces you’ve cut for each.

Admire your amazing new faux shagreen cabinet!!

I think there are areas for improvement with this DIY (like adding puffy paint to the areas you see the cabinet or wrapping the doors more like a present) – if you attempt and learn a trick, please leave it in the comments!

- Last (pretty) photo by Sarah Dorio