Window!

More home improvement fun! So in our lovely room with the purple paint, the wall opposite the piano is one that is home to a small desk for our computer and to a weird little window. The window is short and wide, and the bottom of it is taller than my head, so even though it doesn't reach the ceiling, it has a basement-like feel to it on account of its not being a picture window. There are a couple dividers in it to make it look like three windows, but that doesn't matter because the glass doesn't open at all. This window faces west, which normally means that you have a smashing view of the siding of the house next door, but when the angle of the sun is just right in the afternoon, big bright sunbeams shoot through the window and threaten to sear the retinas of anyone in a nearby radius.
The previous owners of our house had dealt with the "big useless window that allows afternoon sun to blind us every day" dilemma by installing a dull ivory ruched, ruffly curtain on a couple of tension rods inside the window. You can sorta see it below, behind Alton's head..
(note from Andy: The previous owners also had a large 72 inch TV under this window, thus distracting your gaze from the uselessness that is this feature.)

Ouch. That's pretty ugly. And definitely not our style, so we had to come up with something different. While we were pondering different curtain ideas, Andy was in the midst of a project to put some privacy film on the window next to our front door. The film gave the window a "frosted" appearance and made it opaque so that passers-by can't see into our house. There was a ton leftover, so we decided to take down the ugly granny curtains and put up the film instead--we needed something on the window at all times so that the sunlight didn't damage the finish on the piano. You can see the film on the window below, install stepladder still in place and everything.

Okay, so a slight improvement, but still not fantastic. The white film, with a white wall, next to a white wall, with a white front door...we were getting snow blindness in this room and were dying for color. Our new master plan? Paint the walls behind the piano purple to spice things up! The wall with the window, however, continues on to our entryway, which has a two-story height vaulted ceiling in the entryway with the door. We didn't want to teeter on rented ladders to paint a wall with vaulted height, and we decided that we didn't want to leave the vaulted section white and paint a purple line down the wall where we arbitrarily would decide that the entryway ended and the front room began (do you follow?). So we decided on a plan that would solve both our ugly window and whitey whiteness problems: install a wooden windowsill on the window so that it looked more like a window and less like a hole in the wall, and make a tailored valance for the window in a coordinating shade to the purple to give that side of the room some color. Whew!
Both phases of the project are done after a steady weekend and a few weekdays of work from Andy and Katie. Andy handled the windowsill, of course: he took measurements of the window, took pictures of the other windowsills in the house, went to Lowe's and matched both the size of the sill AND the look of the trim underneath. Add some semi-gloss white paint and he was good to go!
My portion of the project required a little more prep. We went to Joann's fabrics armed with our paint hue card from Home Depot showing the four shades of purple paint with graduating darkness in the shades. You had pale lavender, then plum, then violet, and finally, "really bad bruise." I was hoping to find a solid-color home decor fabric in a plum shade, slightly lighter than our violet walls, for the valance, and a coordinating ribbon in the violet shade to use as a little visual interest accent for the trim. No small order, eh? As my cousin Louise can tell you, as soon as you have a specific idea in your head of what you would like to find, you get to the fabric store and uncover...nada. We traversed through the whole home decor section and then tackled the rest of the store. I even checked out the "quilting cotton," not the best fabric for a tailored valance choice. We hit the "special occasion" section and looked at silk and fake silk that was much closer to the dark purple color, but we knew that with the lack of light in that room, the dark purple would turn to a gothic black on our wall. Le sigh.
I halfheartedly flipped through the special order decor fabric swatches, not expecting to find anything, when I FOUND IT!!! A lightweight canvas fabric, solid-color, in the Lilac hue. Success! Those of you who have trawled through home stores, fabric stores, or the entire Internet looking for the perfect shade of something can relate to my disappointment followed by elation! We were expecting the fabric to be off-the-charts expensive, since it was in the special order section, but were pleasantly surprised to find that it actually cost less than some of the other "designer" decor fabrics by the yard. We actually took the swatch home and compared it to our paint (had to see the paint hue card on a bigger scale) after we had analyzed the Joann's ribbon section and found some gorgeous, .5" wide velvet ribbon in an eggplant shade. We placed our order, purchased a new curtain rod, and once the fabric was in it was only about 10-12 hours of mainly hand-hemming later that we were the proud installers of a new valance AND windowsill. There are a few whole-window shots and one detail shot of the fabric. Enjoy!