Renter's Genius DIY Completely Transforms Ugly Closet Doors: 'It Looks Amazing!'

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Somewhere between an auto body shop and a HGTV fever dream, a new TikTok trend has captured the millennial conundrum perfectly. "We're too broke to renovate, and too worried about our feeds to live with decor eyesores". Remember how your mom liked to put contact paper on the pantry shelves in the '90s? This is like that, but for those hideous floor-to-ceiling mirrored closet doors reflecting every pile of laundry, dirty dish, and unflattering angle back to you like a portal of doom. The concept is simple. Remove the offending mirrored slabs before slapping on some vinyl car wrap, meticulously placed adhesive trim, and a coat of primer, then paint until your closet doors stop making your apartment feel like a carnival funhouse. Watching it all unfold on @hotpinkpineapple's TikTok is oddly soothing and ends up looking surprisingly chic. It's part desperation, part ingenuity, and people are obsessed.

"Dang girl. You did that," said @KeEKs. "This is genius," agreed @hammersandhijabs. "It looks beautiful!" according to @EvilQueen. And @wisterialane didn't take long to make this weekend's DIY plans crystal clear to @van.dad. As the ambivalent owner of basic slab ones, watching someone else spend literal hours transforming their ugly mirrored closet doors with car wrap vinyl raised some questions about the cost, permanence, and even sanity of it all. But it's definitely the kind of home improvement project that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that when you combine a 'delulu is the solulu' type attitude with enough primer, even the most hated architectural features can be turned into content gold. By the way, using wallpaper is just another way to cover dated mirrored closet doors, and might actually be easier.

Unless you love watching cars bouncing by on their way to the nearest NOPI convention, or you're a marketing manager tasked with figuring out how to make your company's fleet vehicles stand out ("Make the logo bigger, anyone?"), you may not be super familiar with car wraps. Essentially, they're giant sheets of sticky vinyl that can be molded, stretched, and trimmed to cover the curves of a car, and apparently, mirrored closet doors. You can buy them on Amazon in a huge range of colors. Even if you opt for basic white, a decent car wrap product like ColorFusion PPF by VViViD can run you $200 for a roll big enough to cover a single closet door. 

By the time you add some flexible trim, high-quality primer, paint, and handles, you're looking at closer to $400 to $500 just for the materials necessary to complete this closet door upgrade. Plus, it takes a ton of time. Cutting, aligning, smoothing, trimming, priming, painting, and waiting for multiple coats of paint to dry can easily take an entire weekend. Although a hairdryer will be surprisingly handy for getting rid of those air bubbles, you'll need to enlist the help of your bestie to avoid the frustration, nay, existential dread, that comes with both rolling out and removing vinyl, because it's like hanging wallpaper, only worse. Nevertheless, if you can't stand looking into your outdated mirrored doors a moment longer, this DIY transformation is a straight-up genius way to temporarily elevate your space while ensuring you'll get your security deposit back.