Glass Cabinet Dilemma...

I love our sunroom.  It's my favorite room in the house and the radiant heat floors make the dogs and my feet very happy.  One end of the room has what appear to built-in cabinets, although they actually aren't built-in.  However, they are tremendously heavy and will never be moved from where they sit.  Each side has some storage area with glass doors, and in the middle is the open area for a television.  

I've had everything from my grandmother's china to books and now DVDs stored in the cabinets.  I like the open feel of glass cabinets, but it's a real pain to try to keep the contents organized and I am constantly annoyed with trying to balance it all out.  Plus, there is one aspect that drives me absolutely batty.  A previous owner thought that this cabinet would be the perfect place for an air conditioning unit.  It's ugly, it is drafty, and we never use it.  Not to mention, that to use you must keep the cupboard door open. 

Excuse the awful picture.  The ac unit is covered with window weatherization plastic to stop the draft.  Eventually we will remove the unit, but since it is built into the house and the siding will have to be replaced where it is located, it's a bigger project than just pulling it out.  

I began looking at options for covering the cabinet doors.  People have used wallpaper, contact paper, scrapbook paper, and lots of other methods for concealing the contents of similar cupboards.  I decided to go with fabric to line ours for a couple of reasons. 

I knew that there was a 50/50 chance I might not like the results or would get tired of a certain look after a period of time, so I wanted something that was simple to undo or easy to change out.  I also wanted something wide enough to go over the entire cabinet door so I wouldn't have a seam to worry about.  Fabric is also inexpensive and could be found in a wide variety of patterns.  

Right now the sunroom is a cream color - Adobe White.  Eventually it will be painted Benjamin Moore Coventry Grey to match the rest of the upstairs, but that is not going to happen for awhile.  I needed a fabric that would go with the cream now, but that might also work with the gray later.  I went to Hobby Lobby and looked over the fabrics.  I wanted something a bit heavier than Calico so I went with a cotton duck.  I also went to the clearance bin because I didn't want to invest a lot of money into this initial trial since I wasn't sure I would like the outcome.  Choices were very limited, but even with few choices, I spent an eternity trying to decide what to go with.  

Big print?  Small print? Floral?  So many choices.  

But I settled on this one.  It's not in LOVE with it, but it will work for now.

The cabinets are held in by double sided tape and some little doodads I don't have a name for that screw into the wood and have a little arm that holds the glass.  Other than that, the glass is surrounded by wood, so I decided I would use my staple gun and staple the fabric across the inside of the cabinet door. 

You can see the white strip of tape.  I didn't trust those little bits of tape to hold the entire door in if I took out all the screw doodads.  (If you know what these doodads are called, please tell me!)  So I took out a few doodads at a time and stapled that section, then screwed the doodads back in and did the next section.  I used post it notes to mark where my doodads were so I could have a better idea of where to screw them back in since fabric covered the holes.  

The first door took me almost an hour since I was going really slowly, but I got in a groove as I went along and before long I was all done!  Forgive the glare on these pics.  I need photography lessons, clearly.  

I need to try taking photo at night so I can get less glare, but you get the idea.  I think it turned out pretty well and for now it works.  I do think I will be going with a little less boldness if/when I update it after we paint.  I would like a bit more subtlety.  Less bold pattern, and perhaps in a gray.  One thing I know for sure - it will not be a print with stripes or lines - trying to line that up would drive me crazy!

I do think it's an improvement over looking at miscellaneous items stuffed in the cupboards, and especially nice not to have to look at a plastic wrapped air conditioning unit!