Our House: Family Room Changes, Starting with Re-Doing Window Treatment

A little bit ago I shared with you, over several posts, how I had ‘lightened up’ the living room on our main level. Well, now it’s the lower level’s turn for some lightening up and neutralizing! 

In case you missed it, I started with the hallway that leads to this family room by making this fun faux zinc lettered sign for it. 

Now, moving into the family room, I’ll show you how the valance was…

Cute and colorful, but I’m ready for a little more neutral in my life… 

For the past several years the family room has been very colorfully decorated with bright cottage colors, but as we’re preparing to sell our house, I’m trying to tone down anything that may appear a little too specialized and open it up for ‘the masses’. Ha! 

Part of the family room walls are papered with a yellow background paisley print, it is a very nice paper, and I’m thinking that with everything else now being changed to mostly neutrals, that the wallpaper with just a tiny pop of color on the other side of the family room will be a fun accent.   

This window treatment is one of the first changes to the family room, it’s an upholstered board valance above the 8’ sliding door that leads out to the screen porch and beyond to the patio, grill etc.

Here’s a before and after pic:

On the before and after pics, you can see how the bright orange and green plaid really pulls the bright contrast out of the papered walls and add even more life to the party… but after I recovered it with the brown woven fabric, it totally tones it down. I’m hoping that with all the other changes I make in the family room, the wallpaper can continue… if not, then I’ll make a change to the wallpaper too, but I really want to be patient and try it with it first. 

Here’s are some quick details on how I re-did the upholstered valance board. 

I made the original board a long time ago, by cutting ¾ inch plywood down to the size I wanted and used simple mounting brackets to attach it to the wall above the door after upholstering it with padding and fabric attaching it with a staple gun to the back of the board.  

Here’s a pic I took looking up from the floor between the valance board and the wall to help you see the mounting brackets. They hold the valance board away from the wall allowing space for the trim and shades etc.

With this style bracket, you attach ½ of the bracket to the wall and the other ½ to the back of the board, then set the board’s bracket half on the wall’s bracket half and drop a bolt through the top bracket’s hole into the bottom bracket’s slot, secured with a nut tightened on the bolt.

The brown fabric I put right over the orange and green plaid fabric, (after removing the tassel trim on the plaid fabric). I simply stapled it to the back of the board, so I needed to allow an extra 3 inches of fabric around the whole perimeter of the valance for stapling. (I found this brown fabric at JoAnn Fabric’s and it came with a light layer of padding attached on the back of it, perfect for this application, and doubly perfect because it was on clearance with another half off that!) 

After I stapled the brown fabric on, I brain-stormed on what to add to it for a subtle detail. I had the woven linen stripe fabric left over from a curtain I had just made in the hallway a few days prior, (I’ll show you that in a later post), I initially thought about adding that stripe around the outside of the valance, but since it is such a long valance, it really gave the illusion of being extra long.

So I decided it would be much better to have the detail vertical, but the striped linen fabric by itself just wasn’t enough, then I found this burlap/jute strapping used in upholstering furniture in my craft closet just hanging around. That would make a great background to the stripe linen.

Aren’t all the nubby textures yummy?  I love it.  By cutting the striped linen fabric just wide enough, it just covers up the red part of the strapping and has that subtle detail I was looking for.

I gently raveled the edges of the linen fabric a little bit for that casual, natural look I was going for.

So simple, and already it’s making a difference.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue updating you with my projects and changes until it totally done… 

well, let’s be honest… is it ever really totally done?