Ducks on a Door (or, How to Make Your Attic Doors Stylish)

Most people leave their attic openings as plain, drab things, perhaps to hide away the fact that the house even has an attic at all (a counterproductive endeavor as attics are rather useful, but I digress). However, this drab look poses a problem when the attic happens to be in almost plain sight.

Yeah, it’s not a good sight to see.

Thankfully my mother had a solution. Why not decorate the darn thing? It can’t hurt, really. So we just got decorative fabric (keyword decorative), and glued it on there.

Yes, it really is as easy as it sounds. The door handle, of course, had to be disassembled from the door itself so we could fit the fabric over it, but other than that it had no other inconveniences. Well, except for the fact that we were dealing with loose fabric against a vertical surface, but we made it work. And I said we used glue earlier, which is only technically true– we used Mod Podge, a special type of glue substance that’s also a sealent. Usually you find it in the arts/crafts department, it’s a very useful item to have if you want to glue things but don’t want to use the typical “glue” they provide over in school supplies.

Mod Podge can be painted onto a surface, whether that be fabric or something more solid, to act as either a glue, a sealant, or a finisher (or any combination of the three). In this case, using it as a glue is tricky due to the fact that Mod Podge dries fast once spread out, and with a big piece of fabric covering a door, you may have a bit of trouble if you try doing it all at once. Keeping the fabric smooth, too, is important because otherwise it’ll look quite bubbly– and bubbly is not good. I recommend gluing a small part of the fabric at the top first, and then dabbing Mod Podge as you go down and smooth out the fabric in the process. Being patient with it always helps, too; rushing through even a simple project just results in a mess. Taping some brown paper on the floor will help with it, but even still.

Here’s what we put together after about an hour of dealing with the fabric:

It’s very scenic, I think! 🙂

Of course you don’t have to limit fabric to just a doorway, you can technically paste it anywhere you’d like. Whatever fabric you want, it goes there, though I sincerely recommend you use panel fabric or something with more decoration than a solid colour. Or, if you want to go further, you could patch together multiple types of fabric and paste the thing as some sort of abstract decoration. It’s a nice, simple crafts project you can do if you want to relieve a boring day. Have fun!

~Stella