Did It Ourselves: Window Cornices

Chad and I bought our first house together in September. Someday I will do an entire post full of "before" photos of this place, but not today. For now I will just say that our Project List for it is about 3 years and too-many-thousand-dollars long. I absolutely love this house and the neighborhood it's in, but the original (1998) brass-tastic trimmings of it have GOT. TO. GO. We're tackling it one yellow-gold project at a time.

One of the easiest things we've done (and one of the only projects I have a before and after pics of) was to build window cornices for our breakfast room. I didn't want curtains in there because there isn't a ton of room between the table and the windows, and I didn't want someone to have to fight a fabric maze just to take the seat on the back side of the table.

Here's what the room looked like when we moved in:

Why yes, that IS fruitly wallpaper, and that is absolutely a green faux marble and brass ceiling fan....in a breakfast room. Does it really get stuffy enough in a breakfast nook to warrant a ceiling fan? Maybe....

Anyway, you will never hear me tell you how to do projects (talk about the blind leading the blind!) - all I can tell you is where I got the dummied down instructions I used to do them. Before we did these cornices we did some other spruce-up work to get us started. Chad the Wonderful actually stripped all this wallpaper the week after we moved in while I was traveling for work, and we painted the walls shortly thereafter. We also tore out that ceiling fan IMMEDIATELY and replaced it with the chandelier that was originally in the big dining room (after it was spray painted of course. More on that to come).

For the cornice project, Miss Pinterest led me to a blog called be.love.create and we followed their instructions as close as we could for this revamp. Go there if this is a project you are thinking about doing. Their tutorial is way better than anything I could ever tell you.

Here is how it ended up. The fabric and batting were a 50% off deal at Hancock Fabrics, and we bought the wood (1'x6"s) at Home Depot. The only thing I would add that wasn't in the tutorial I used is that you need to get upholstery fabric, not just any old thing on a bolt in the store. We got 3 yards for this and it was just the right amount (but then again we had three windows to deal with). Chad the Wonderful built the wood framework and I covered them. Teamwork people!

I think it turned out really well, especially considering the whole project only cost about 80 bucks and only took about 3 hours! Still way cheaper than buying drapes/curtains for 3 windows!

We still have to paint the ceilings in the kitchen but we're at a standstill on that because the living room and kitchen share a ceiling....yet we painted the walls in both rooms very different colors. So we are in a war over which color to lighten up for the ceiling. I will let you know who wins that battle. ;)