A Little Trickery

Happy April Fool's Day! Are you ready for some eye trickery on this fine morning?

One issue we had with not completely renovating the addition of the house were the doors that led out to the backyard. We went back and forth on whether to keep them or not and how to make them safe to have in the baby's room. We resolved to keep them (mostly for the light) and to make them safe, we screwed them shut and spray foamed all the gaps so they were completely sealed off. This essentially turned the doors into really long, inoperable, windows. Now, there is no direct outdoor access in or out of this room, but it was still pretty ugly.

Our goal to make this area a little prettier was to trick the eye into thinking that this wall has windows instead of doors. From our last house I already had a bunch of basic white curtains, but our ceilings in our last house were a lot lower so all of the curtains were too short to be hung properly in this house. Awhile back, I had bought a few yards of cute elephant fabric and I had been contemplating using it to elongate the curtains so that they would touch the floor. After going through a few ideas and not liking any of them, I realized that if I used the fabric to make a valance, then I could get away with hanging the white curtains much lower and it would give me the added benefit of covering up the top of the doors (plus if I want to use the curtains somewhere else later on, they would still be plain white curtains)

A lot of people seem to like the "no sew" methods out there, but I find my sewing machine faster for projects like this so just hemmed three of the edges and then folded the top over enough so that the curtain rod could go through and stitched. The trickest part was lining up two pieces of fabric so that the elephants were even. I then hung the valance near the ceiling so it just covered the top of the doors. I didn't have enough curtain rods to hang the white curtains so we picked up a metal electrical conduit at Lowe's for under 2 bucks and used that with some left over brackets to hang the white curtains near the bottom of the valance which allowed them to touch the floor. By using three curtains, all the edges of the door, as well as the lock and handle, are now covered up so you can't tell that these are doors when you look at it.

To help the doors look even more like windows (and to add more storage to the room), we pulled an Ikea bookshelf in from the living room and placed it infront of the doors. This cuts the doors off at about the same length as the other window in the room (which also got a valance and white curtains).

Now we are really happy with this wall of the room instead of cringing every time we see it. Plus, the bookshelf is a great place for the baby monitor, books and more storage for toys and various other things. It also makes it so no one can even attempt to go out of the house this way. 

It's been interesting working in rooms we eventually want to renovate. We don't want to spend a lot of money in a space we want to change, but we also want to be happy in the space until we do change it. This has forced us to be a lot more creative which has turned out to be a lot of fun! (This particular project came in under $20 since we used so many things we already had) We have a lot more projects that fall into this category so hopefully we can keep the creative juices going.

Linking To: Hi Sugar Plum, The Great Indoors, House of Hepworths, My Repurposed Life, Our Delightful Home, Five Days Five Ways, Serenity Now, Lovely Etc., The Rooster and the Hen, Six Sisters Stuff, Tatertots and Jello, Wayward Girls Crafts, Twigg Studio, Serendipity and Spice, Ask Anna, Home Stories A to Z, Uncommon Designs, House wives of Riverton, Crafty Texas Girls, Southern Institute, Watch out Martha!,http://www.myrepurposedlife.net/