Saturday, March 2, 2013

DIY Fabric Cornice Board over french doors

DIY Fabric Cornice Board over two sets of french doors. Total cost of project: $55.00. Total amount of time: Roughly 5 hours.

Well I finally did it! I have this hesitation when it comes to ruining things that are brand new by using for a purpose other than what it's intended to do. But I did it! I bought a brand new panel from World Market and cut it all up to make cornice boards over my french doors in my family room.

This is a project we've known we were going to do for a while, but had to wait until I found the perfect fabric. Since my walls are a cool color, I wanted to warm it up a bit with the fabric. I was at World Market spending the day shopping for my birthday with my dearest friend who's birthday falls on the same day as mine when I spotted my fabric. One panel was $30, but I only needed one to cover both sets of french doors. Sold!

I told dear hubs we could do it the less expensive, easiest way by using a foam board like I've seen other bloggers do, but because ours in over sets of french doors and is in the main rooms of the house he said we should use wood . Here's step by step how we did it:

We used douglas fir (total cost of wood, $20) and went with 12 inches long and made it to come away from the wall 2 1/2 inches. After attaching it though, we would've been better off coming 3 inches away from wall.

As you can see in the picture, hubs screwed the 2 1/2 inch board to the long board. This created the box he needed to attach it to the wall which you'll see later in the post.

 
Here's a better picture of the board. Remember, it's going over a set of french doors so it has to be pretty long.

 
I put batting (cost of batting, $4.50) on top of the board to soften the look just a bit before putting on the fabric.

 

 

 
Here is the fabric ($30 for fabric) before I used a nail gun (but used staples) to attach the fabric:
 

 
I don't own a staple gun, but we do own a nail gun and guess what your hardware store sells?!?! small staples that fit in nail guns! Woo Hoo!

 
Here are what the staples look like.

 
Make sure to pull your fabric tight before you staple. You'll also want to keep in mind how the pattern will be cut if you use fabric with a pattern or design on it.



It didn't look so pretty underneath, but no one sees that part.

 
This is the fun part. Hubs built this to hold the board. So the screws that you see not completey in, will be screwed in once the cornice is placed up here. Inventive, huh?! Only my hubs.



 
He's using the screwdriver to drive in the screws. This part is when he realized coming 3 inches off the wall would've been better than 2 1/2, due to the tight squeeze of trying to fit the screwdriver up there.

 
Here it is all hung up! It's dark outside so our fabric blinds are already drawn for the night, but I'll try to post some pictures in the daylight tomorrow.
 

 
Here they are the next morning with the sun out!
 
 
Excuse the mess, and we're missing few pictures that hang on the wall in between the doors.

 
 
 

Installing Crown Molding in the Dining Room

When we first moved in, one of the first things we said needed to go was the "crown" that was in the dining room. Here's a picture from the day of inspection:


 
We painted the first week we bought the house, but we just got around to ripping out that "crown" and installing the new crown. It was my Valentines gift from the hubs. Nothing more romantic to me that my guy doing DIY projects around the house!
We decided to get the higher end crown since this was a formal dining room. Since there is nothing formal about us, we did it for the next owners because ya know, that's what you do. This room is actually our homeschool room because it's within perfect view of the kitchen so kiddos can be doing their work while I'm doing mine and my eye is on them the entire time.
 
So here are the pictures from this weekend project!
 
This is before we ripped down the previous "crown"
 
Close up before picture

 
And there's the red before we painted the room. You can see we added the corner's and that's the new crown that you see.

 
And here it is completely installed!

 
Close up of new crown


This room is really coming together. I got some new furniture pieces and pictures to put up. Will try to update the room once I get it together.
 




 

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Giving cabinets a custom look with framing

I just realized my last post was in August. Ha. I'd be a horrible blogger! I found out I was pregnant shortly after my last post (it was week of labor day when I found out) and I was so tired my first trimester so I literally did NO home improvements. When I finally starting feeling better and up to doing something it was Thanksgiving and we all know the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years are hectic so starting a new project was not even on my radar. I'm feeling a little back to normal now and actually did a few projects this past weekend. After I took down the Christmas decor I noticed our house was really lacking in the "comfy" department so I headed to the stores to get some greenery, picture frames and pictures/paintings for the walls and shelves. Those pictures will be posted shortly. Until then, this is a project we worked on just before labor day and I'm just now posting. We decided to add some character to our kitchen cabinets, trying to give them a more custom look. I saw this done on several blogs and showed the pictures to Ryan and he knew exactly how he wanted to execute the plan so it was off to the hardware store he went.

He purchased a sheet of the cheapest wood. I think it was particle board.

 

 We used a table saw to make the cuts. The bottom cabinets are wider than the uppers so we made the widths of the cuts a bit larger for the bottom than for the top. The width depends on the size of the cabinets. We just estimated based on what we thought looked better.




We used a nail gun to shoot it in.
 
Here's the bottom finished! Then there's one of the uppers we did.

Here it is all painted! Made a perfect subtle statement.