Building a Custom Double Cornice

Welcome to Week 5 of the One Room Challenge: Building a Double Custom Cornice.

Week 5 of the One Room Challenge: Building a Custom Double Cornice. This week we are building and installing the accent cornice to replace those heavy drapes and roman shades that blocked my beautiful woodland view.

RECAP: Just to recap this challenge happens twice a year, April/ October, the designers only have six weeks, from start to finish in order to complete a full room transformation.  Each week the guest designer’s will link their progress to the host page, Calling It Home, and share their room’s progress. The best part is you will be able to follow along step by step with all the participants progress including JENRON DESIGNS and just by clicking the ORC Spring 2018 post.

WEEKS AT A GLANCE:

WEEK 1     WEEK 2     WEEK 3    WEEK 4   WEEK 5   REVEAL

Building a Custom Double Cornice

If you can’t find what you want, then you build it instead!

This seems to be the motto of my life. I can not begin to tell you how many times my poor husband has a picture of something I want shoved under his nose. Then the  conversation goes a little bit like this: I love this _______, BUT I want it to have ______ instead of _______, and I needs it to be _______ instead of _______.  Honestly you can pretty much fill anything into the blanks, because at this point he has seen and heard it all……LOL. Thank God I married an engineer, and let me tell you that degree is really paying off.  He can pretty much figure out how to make whatever it is I want, to my specifications, and it usually, 99% of the time, always works. {knock on wood}

Before:

So today we are building a cornice to go over the window to look as if it was built into the home as a original piece. I have tried a bunch of different things over the years on this window, nothing that I really liked. You see the thing is I love my view, and since it is an office I do not want to obstruct my view in any way. As the trees have started to green up this spring you can see my backyard is now completely private.   As I mentioned I have tried drapes, with a rod, and while they did frame out the window they just did not float my boat. I even tried adding a Roman shade to cover the large area of sheetrock above this window and it just made the wall feel too heavy and over done. So, I ended up deciding that I just wanted to use trim to match the rest of my home to create a cornice board over the window.  We purchased a very large piece of MDF board to create the backer of the cornice. I only wanted wanted the cornice to be 2 1/2″ deep to create that built in look. These side reveal pieces were cut and first glued to the main board and allowed to dry over night while in clamps. Then we tacked them in with mending brads from our nail gun, for additional support. These brads were long enough to go all the way into the wrap around piece from the front side. Next we added picture frame molding, which was already used on various columns and trims around our home. We have a great DIY tutorial on How to Upgrade Your Kitchen Island, that gives more details on how to create and install picture frame trim. I decided that since my office window is a double window that it would pretty to create two large picture frame boxes and a smaller narrow one to line up in the center over the window casing. This layout just felt right for my window, please know that we considered 3 evenly spaced boxes too, but I decided to be all fancy, lol.Once the picture frame molding was attached to the MDF with a nail gun. I filled the counter sunk nail heads with dry wall spackle. I love the pink kind that turns white when it is dry. This way I know for sure that the mud is dry prior to painting, and the humid south things take forever to dry properly. Plus there is just something super girly about pink drywall mud, and I just like it. {insert my husbands eye roll here}It took 2 good coats of paint to make sure we had a really good coverage. I used Pure White by  Sherwin Williams  to match the rest of my trim throughout our home. Once it is dry we can go ahead and hang this beauty up. Since it took the both of us, together, to hang this beast up; there are no any installation pictures, sorry lol. See, I told you we did all our own work, no staff here. So, I will walk you through the basic idea of the installation. We added 3 support boards installed directly to studs in the wall. One ran across the the top and two shorter ones for each side.   Then once the cornice was lifted and snuggled into place, I held the one side as my husband attached drywall screws through the cornice into the support boards. They are counter sunk so I can use my famous pink putty and fill the holes never to be seen again. Of course we will paint and caulk any gaps at the ceiling and between the cornice and the wall.

As you can see by the checklist below, we are almost there! All I really have left to do is staging the room with all the accessories I have been buying over the last 6 weeks.  I need to hang the art work and tie up a few other odds and ends but we are almost there.

The Check List:

Week 1- Introduction & Inspiration Board

Week 2- Place all orders for Custom furniture and online pieces

Week 3- DIY open wall shelves, stain & install

Week 4- DIY build custom cornice board, paint to match trim & install (MOVED TO WEEK 5) 

Week 5- Assemble and place all furniture, art  and accessories.

Week 6- Stage the room for  The Big Reveal

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RON’S TOOL BOX:

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