Curtains Up! Hanging Curtains for the ineptly unskilled.

After the Curtains... Hello Privacy!

This past weekend, we decided it was high time we hung some curtains around our house.  A project we’ve been putting off for over a year, I’m quite sure no one is happier than our poor neighbors who have been bashfully hiding their faces every time we look out at them only 5 feet and away walking by the house.  Yes… curtains are a component of renovation although more in the design area than the hardware so it has been something we’ve left and left and left.

With no other excuses in sight, I headed off to our local JC Penney this weekend and went straight to the best dressed curtain lady I could find.  Going under the auspices that if someone can dress well, they can also pick some good looking curtains.  Measurements in hand, I was bound and determined to do some serious one-stop-shopping.  So… the good news is that after 48 hours of curtain time, we actually have curtains either installed or ordered.  The bad news is that my one stop required multiple visits, an order and a delivery pending not to mention the mandatory back and forth and back again to our local big-box-hardware store.

Alas, my pain is truly your gain – I’ve got some great tips garnered from the well-heeled curtain lady at JC Penney and my own school of hard knocks:

Great Tips for your Next Curtain Project!

1. Big windows get drapes not blinds… may sound obvious to you but I needed to get this advice from an expert.  Blinds on large windows can look “cheese-y” (quote from the big-box-hardware guy named Frank.
2. For custom looking drapes, buy the off-the-shelf packages and have your local tailor stitch them together.  Cost savings: 50-75% of the cost of custom drapes of the same quality.  Great tip – thanks snazzy looking JC Penney gal!
3. Take advantage of sales – kind of obvious – but get your ordered placed on a “sale” day to hold the discount.  Go home double check measurements and hop online to find coupons for the store.  I ordered custom blinds at 70% off then went home and found a 15% off my total order coupon.
4. Measure, measure, measure! For drapes, you can have a little lee-way on the bottom but your drapes must be long enough to cover from the top of the window casing to the floor + 2 inches.  We created a little more length in our room by raising our hardware above the window.
5. Depending on how wide your window is, consider the material in your hardware.  For very wide windows, you are going to need to a wooden rod.  Unlike its metal counterparts, wood will not sag under the weight of heavy curtains.
6. K-I-S-S (my dad would love this advice)… Keep It Simple Stupid (pretty much the mantra I was raised on).  When it comes to curtains, this advice could not hold more true.  Simple is going to be more forgiving than those crazy but fabulous patterns that a designer can pull off.
7. Ask for advice.  Unless you’re one of the .004% of the population that is actually born knowing everything there is to know about curtains, ask an expert.  My curtain lady helped me immensely in finding curtains that fit my room and style and when it came to ordering blinds… well … let’s just say she was like the Albert Einstein of window coverings!

Our nude windows (seriously - that's what its called in the industry... our poor nude little windows)

Happy, dressed and nude no longer!

There are about a million websites that will tell you how to actually hang a curtain, so I’m not going to bore you with the details.  If you are looking for the complete list of curtain hanging instructions – here are the results of a quick google search complements of the Junky!

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