Dining Room Drapery Action

Whew. Day five of a seven day juice fast – this is intense. I feel a little drowsy and out of it, so please excuse any lapses in grammar or spelling. Heck, yesterday I even accidentally said I was reading Vanity Fair, when I was actually reading The Bonfire of the Vanities. Of course I’ve gone back and fixed the error now, so it doesn’t just sit there, its incorrectness archived for posterity, but I wanted to keep it real with y’all. Juice fasting is not all energetic rainbows and eloquent unicorns. Thank you for understanding.

Now you know our Norwegian Month rules, so you know there is no fun purchasing this month. No throw pillows, no decorative accents. Nada. If you’re a loyal reader you know that I’m not a spendy impulse shopper – in fact I try to be as thrifty and DIY as I can – but I do love a little injection of fun in the décor. Doesn’t everyone? Luckily, since I had a few projects that I had put off doing, my little decorating nerve endings don’t have to shrivel up and die this month. One such project involves the curtains in the dining room. Here’s what the curtains originally looked like:

Ok, so that’s a lousy picture if I’m trying to show the curtains, but this seems to be the only one I have on hand. The drapes were sheer white with black grosgrain ribbon that I attached to the sides with fabric glue. Lovely, yes, but about a foot too short for the windows. Short curtains are about as cool as Steve Urkel’s pants, so something simply had to be done.

Ikea is a great place to look if you’re searching for loooong and inexpensive curtains. But these (that I wrote about here), were just not exciting me. At first I thought it was just because they were lacking the ribbon trim of their predecessors, but that wasn’t the whole story. The old curtains were lovely and sheer and had a faint chrysanthemum pattern. The thick, plain sailcloth just wasn’t cutting it. I also had kind of fallen out of love with the black curtain rod in this space. Even though I usually call black curtain rods the eye liner of a window. I still love our ebony curtain rods in other spaces like the living room, (click here for the living room curtain saga) but with the intense blue walls I yearned for something different in here.

I got these sheer, patterned curtains at Ikea (which I can’t find online, for some reason) for $15 a pair. The gold rod, finials and curtain clips are from Home Depot. I have fallen in love with the gold hardware against the cool blue wall. (Even though on this super gloomy day it looks navy.)

The only problem was that they were very long. Luckily Ikea always includes hemming tape with their curtain panels, so it’s a cinch to get them to the desired length. My favorite method involves hemming the panels while they’re still on the rod. I just batted my eyes and asked my Honey to lug the ironing board up from the basement, and I was good to go. Of course I had to make sure Bébé was napping and Petite was snuggled on the couch with her Where’s Waldo book before proceeding. Didn’t want to be worried about little ones getting burned when I was attempting a little DIY magic.

And voila! I know that a lot of designers want drapes to break or slightly puddle on the floor, but in this room where spilled milk is not just a metaphor for disappointing things that have occurred, I elected to keep them about 1/4 inch above the ground.

Going back to the shot of the current furniture arrangement from the Dining Room Time Capsule post, you can see that we have commandeered the door to the deck, at least for now. There is always the back door out the kitchen, which is about 2 feet away, so this inconveniences exactly no one. And since I was now treating this door like a window, I saw no reason why it shouldn’t get a window treatment too!

Again, I apologize for how dark these pictures are. On a sunny day I’ll get some much prettier ones. In any case, I love the curtains hung on both “windows.” I’m not exactly sure that the plates will stay where they are, though. Hmm, we’ll see. But one thing I knew I didn’t want to look at was that door knob and dead bolt. Like a good drag queen, this door needed to learn how to hide the bits and look like a lady. Too far? Oh well.

Much better. After I finalize the placement of a few other things, I’ll have some full-room shots to share with you – hopefully a day when the sun is shining! It feels so good to have this project done. The other little project I got done this week involves our bamboo blinds (remember from this post?). Don’t worry, they didn’t get painted or bedazzled or covered with ribbon.

No, they didn’t get hacked or altered in any way. My “project” involved actually installing them. Uh what? Here’s the story: when I was installing the two blinds on the front windows (which must be 1/16 inch narrower than the side windows), I was holding them up to place a pencil mark for the pilot holes. Well, they sort of stuck up there to the point that I was afraid of ruining the paint on the window frame. I figured they were nestled in there snuggly enough, so I just left them as they were – wedged in, with no hardware holding them up. My laziness knows no bounds. Unfortunately, as winter approached and the weather got colder and things constricted and science happened, they started to come loose and occasionally fall on us. Le Catastrophe. So finally, one afternoon last week when I was fiending for a glass of wine I got out the drill instead. That’s totally normal right? So, now they’re all properly hung. Whew.

I just realized that I almost began and ended this post with the same word. Could have something to do with five days without solid food and over a thousand words about window treatments. Haha. Anyway, have y’all ever taken the easy way out on décor or home repairs? Any funny stories?

xoxo,
CA

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