I love doing home improvements on a dime. I especially love making window treatments that look really unique or expensive for pennies on the dollar. I love telling the story of how I got $10K over the asking price for my home in Connecticut because of my $200 window treatments. They offered me $10K if I would leave my curtains behind. I prayed they would never examine them too closely. Especially the ones in the dining room….
We had just ordered a new washer and dryer and my eyes lit up when I saw the boxes they came in. They were perfect for cornice boards for the formal dining room. I cut out beautiful scrolled shapes covered them with damask -textured wallpaper, hot glued trim around the edges, and mounted them on l-brackets. Voila! I had the most beautiful cornice boards in town! I hung silk drapes beneath them that I found at Tuesday Morning – and my dining room looked like a million bucks. (Or at least $10,000!) If you happened to look on the inside of the cornice board, you would see the words “This Side Up” imprinted on the cardboard. I still wonder if the new homeowners figured out my dryer box secret. 🙂
Today I want to share a fun and unique design that I did for our new dining room here in Charlotte. I fell in love with a very expensive fabric and didn’t want to spend the money for 8 yards of it. So I bought ½ yard and cut out the shapes of the floral designs I liked. I then washed the pieces in a lingerie bag and dried them in the dryer on low heat. Then when they dried, I ironed them smooth. I bought 8 yards of a very inexpensive chocolate linen fabric and glued the colorful designs on the fabric. I cut the chocolate fabric to the length I needed and ironed a hem so they looked neat when hanging. Then I clipped (the pinch clip rings at Lowe’s work great) them on a rod – no sewing involved. You could also buy inexpensive ready-made curtains, and make them unique using the same cut-out appliqué technique.
I even had enough leftover to make a little pillow! This project takes very little time, and is so inexpensive you don’t have to feel too attached to it. I’ll re-do this room in a year, and won’t feel like broke the bank!
Coming up a soon: another home improvement project: painting laminate counter tops to look like granite!
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