Fresh Baked Fun!: DIY No Sew Window Valance

Here's the first of the tutorials from my friend's son's new bedroom! Let me apologize to you first for the lack of pictures. It's a pretty simple project, I wish I had more pictures to show but I'll try to make up for it.

Just a reminder of what the room looked like before:

It's amazing how some simple window treatments can really pull a room together. I decided to try to make a faux box valance. This was something that I had never done before but always thought it would be pretty simple to do. My first thought was that I would cut some plywood down to size, well, I would have the nice employee at Lowes do it for me. Then I would cover it with some batting and use my new handy dandy staple gun to cover it with our fabric. Great idea, right? Seems simple enough. However my biggest concern wasn't making it, but hanging it. I'm a very crafty person however I'm lacking in basic handyman (woman) skills and I was worried about the weight of hanging fiberboard or plywood, or a 2x4. I honestly just don't know enough about support and weight and whatever else I need to know. I could always ask the hubby but I really wanted to do this project without his help. Off to Lowes I went for some inspiration.

I asked for some help from one of the nice gentlemen that work there and, after explaining what I was looking for, he took me on a guided tour of the store and showed me all of my options. Inspiration hit when we hit the wall insulation department! This huge foam sheet was way more than I needed, incredibly light, and at $16 a sheet, was perfect!

This is a picture of the leftover piece after I cute it to size.

I had one very long window (96.5") so I had to use two pieces and fit them up to each other. Really, all it entailed was wrapping the foam with fabric and stapling around the sides so the fabric was taut.

At the corners I tucked the fabric over to make my corners as neat as possible and stapled the fabric out of the way. It does help to trim any excess fabric away. I will say, it looked beautiful! I was so proud of my little piece of fabric covered foam!

Looks perfect, doesn't it? Just go ahead and ignore my messy dining room. I really didn't want to carry all this stuff down to my basement craft room.

Now, here's where I'm lacking in pictures. Again, sorry about that. I didn't connect the two pieces until we were actually in the room. I was worried about transporting it to my friend's house with the length that it was. When I got to her house, I used 2 flat splice brackets to connect the two panels at the long end.

Flat Splice Bracket

And then I used (2) 4" L shaped brackets on each to connect it to the wall above the window. First I connected one 2 to the wall, one on each end, then after triple checking my measurements, I connected them to the backside of the foam. Since it was foam that I was working with, I took my Gorilla Tape and secured everything on the back, the brackets, staples, everything, just in case.

After all the brackets were attached we simply lifted the valance,which was as light as a feather (and stiff as a board), and connected the brackets to each other so the final bracket shape was an upside down U. The side panels are hanging from curtain rods behind the valance. Very simple and easy project. I think the Valance part of this project cost less than $40.