Adventures in wallpaper.

For a time in my young adulthood, I sold wallpaper.

And flooring and light fixtures and home decor items.

But it was the wallpaper I loved.  Even at $4 an hour, selling wallpaper was one of the best retail jobs I ever held. I could browse through the books for hours helping customers find the perfect pattern.

I know people who despise wallpaper and who wrinkle their nose at the mere suggestion it could solve their decorating dilemma.  Yeah, it’s a pain in the butt to hang and even more so to remove.  But I’ve done it time and again — even in rented apartments — because I adore wallpaper.  It’s like fabric for your walls and nothing can set an instant tone for your room quite like wallpaper.

I prefer it in small doses, however.  Bathrooms and closets are the perfect canvasses for wallpaper and I’m getting ready to paper one of each in my new home.

Here are the patterns I chose for my dish pantry — a 5’X7′ closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves where I plan to store my notoriously large dish and table linen collection.

I'm a preppy at heart because I adore pink and green.

The striped toile is for the walls, and the floral print is for the shelves.  I’m still searching for the right curtain, light fixture and rug and to complete the pantry.

Besides the fact that I love a toile, I chose these patterns because I have an abundance of green and pink/red shades in my dish collection, and I thought they would make an otherwise utilitarian closet pretty.

And let’s face it, you can never have enough pretty in your life.