when you buy your first house your window treatments can feel really intimidating it's a lot of stuff you got to figure out right well these clients are really struggling with that too they have a big beautiful window to look out of when they're doing dishes but when you look out the window neighbors so we're going to do a really fun diy treatment today called a cornice box now i don't want to hide the upper window because there's tons of light pouring in and no privacy issue there looks pretty good right so we're going to start at the molding and come down from that and just block the part of their view that doesn't work for them so for this project it's really important to get our measurements right we're using really really simple materials and simple tools for this one this is actually a quick one that you could do in no time so we're using basic plywood and a couple of 1x3 boards really simple things that you can actually have cut for you at your own hardware store so you kind of don't even need the tools to determine the size of my cornice box we measured the size of our molding from left to right i measured the size of the face of our cornice to be just about half the window height from top to bottom so now that i've got this gorgeous piece of luan cut we're attaching it to the frame with screws you want to drive them in all the way so that then you can fill them with putty afterward and sand it off for a perfect finish once i knew i was going to use a white background for this stencil treatment i decided to use a primer that's a paint and primer all in one so i'm kind of skipping a few steps but you know what you can do it too makes your project go a lot faster and soon we're going to be ready to stencil before you get started decide where you want your stencil to start and stop my secret weapon in a stencil project is applying repositionable spray mount to the back it basically makes your stencil a giant sticker now don't forget to push down firmly on it with your hand or a dust free cloth to make sure paint won't creep behind it when you get started a small foam roller works great for this but once you dip it in roll off all the excess paint onto another surface this first coat of paint on a stencil project should be really light some stencils like the one that we used are meant to repeat so we carefully move the stencil over and finish the pattern so that's it this frame is pretty light so we were able to mount it to the window frame with just a couple of l brackets you know making this decorative window treatment was so easy it's crazy how awesome and graphic the final product looks best part is kitchen privacy