Before we even bought our new home, I started filing away images of ideas for window treatments.  They offered to put blinds throughout the whole house for us (at an additional cost of course) but we declined because I knew I wanted something different, at least in a few of the rooms.  There are some rooms where blinds just make the most sense so we did install them ourselves in those rooms, but I wanted to do something different in the family room. Our old house had larger windows with pretty crown molding.  That was one of my favorite things about that house.  So when I walked into this house with basic, average sized, windows (even though they are great) felt a little squatty. So to fix that problem, I went on the hunt for some roman shades that would be slightly wider than the window and a little longer too.  I ended up going with these from Home Depot.  I needed them to be roughly 48" by 72" and I just couldn't find any that size in our local stores.  I had a little trouble finding that size online too, so I was happy to come across these.  

I really like the color.  It's not too yellowish or too brown.  The color is called driftwood and it's pretty much the same color as driftwood.  Appropriately named I guess. They actually match my dining room light perfectly. I hung them using the same method I mentioned here and it really made it much easier to hang them and get them all even.  I ended up hanging them about a foot higher than the window to give the illusion of a longer, taller window.By using this site you agree to the use of cookies.I need your drapery formula. Is it a secret? First of all, where do you buy your drapes. I can’t find anything like them anywhere. I’ve noticed you paint all your spaces white. My rental condo is white, therefore, painting is not an option, but from what I’ve seen from you, drapes can bring in colour. Second question, how to do you know that the drapes patterns will work. I am worried that I will buy something, bring it home and it won’t look like how I want it to look.

I’m going to design school! I just finished my undergrad, therefore money is tight! Oh, I love getting letters like yours because I am reminded of decorating my first place, which was an all-white apartment where making things work was a challenge. At the time, I had no money for decorating, and when I made a wrong decorating choice, it was upsetting. I definitely have a formula for my drapes. When I want to do something cheap and cheerful, I will buy an off-the-rack set of white drapery panels. The cotton Ritva curtains at Ikea.ca are $29 per pair. Then, splurge on three metres of fabric that you love, and have a “leading edge” four inches wide sewn on the left and right sides of the panel, where the drapery panels will meet when pulled closed. To save money, you can also purchase sale fabric online or at a fabric outlet. Equally as inexpensive is to cut one-half to one-third from the bottom of your off-the-rack panel and replace it with a piece of colourful sale fabric.

With this fabrication, you get a good dose of colour and pattern on the bottom and a visual reprieve of white or oatmeal on the top. To make this look finished, you will need to add trim or ribbon to cover the seam where the ready-made panel and colourful fabric meet. humphrey's corner little red car tab top curtainsIf you are handy with a sewing machine, you can DIY it, but unless you are a superstar sewing machine operator, leave the difficult stuff to a pro.kenworth t660 curtains Window treatments get more expensive when the design starts getting complicated. circo sea life shower curtain setObviously, expensive fabric will drive up the cost of your curtains, but fabrication can get pricey, too.classic curtains daniel webster highway nashua nh

The more cuts and seams in a drapery panel, the more it will cost. A single drape in one fabric costs approximately $99 per panel. That, said, I like to have widths of fabric sewn together horizontally (as seen in the photo) to create large patterned and white stripes. curtains rebo houseThe starting price is $190 per panel.argos black nickel curtain pole There are a couple of secrets to making bright and colourful drapery panels work in an all-white room. black tab top curtains 90x90The colour of your wall should be a predominant colour in your drapery panel. For example, if your walls are pale grey, then choose a fabric with some pale grey. This trick is particularly important with floor-to-ceiling drapery panels made from all one fabric because it will soften the transition between your solid colour walls and the pattern in your drapery.

To ensure that your drapery panels work, make sure that the colours are repeated around the room. You don’t have to repeat the exact shades in every accessory and upholstered piece of furniture, but repeating their colour in a few spots will keep your home looking unified. Last, collect as many inspiration photos as you can. The more photos you can give to a drapery fabricator, the easier it will be for her (and you!) to understand what you want. All the very best with design school.Thus far, it has taken me roughly two months to redo the horrendous caulk job in my bathroom. What should have taken no more than a few hours has been stretched into a drawn-out, casual sort of affair, with long periods of rest punctuated by short, manic spurts of activity. So far I’ve succeeded in scraping away and replacing all the caulk around the top of the tub, but have been unsuccessful at working my way down to the floor. Don’t even bring up that spot between the sink and the wall or you’re dead to me.

I don’t know where this year is going, but I’m fairly certain that science has found a way to speed time while simultaneously slowing my mental processes and emptying my bank account. This might also just be an indication that I’ve been really busy and taking on any major project (or, let’s face it, even most minor projects) just seems totally out of the question and overwhelming. Hence, the caulk situation. Luckily school ends in a week. As such, I’ve been trying to take this as an opportunity take care of some of those smaller items on my to-do list that tend to fall by the wayside in the excitement of things that are…way more exciting. It’s miserable shit, but it’s also teaching me lofty concepts like “following through” and “responsibility.” Here is our original living room light fixture. I’ll just say it was probably one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen and leave it at that. You don’t even want to know the horrors on top of that circle of glass.

New light that is actually old, seeing as I bought it off Craigslist back in AUGUST. Take that in for a second. It’s a Kartell FL/Y Suspension Lamp. It’s huge and plastic and gives off nice light and retails for like $300 but I bought it for $60. Even though Max has all but outlawed the use of overhead lights, I like knowing it’s up there. Ready for service in the rare moments when I can get away with it. A long time ago, right after I painted the living room, I made the super crappy mistake of trying to pretend I liked curtains. This was a bad idea, seeing as I do not like curtains. Not for myself, anyway, or maybe only these curtains hung in this horrible way. I’m all about curtains for other people. I’m sure yours look great, for example, because you’re perfect. You know how to hang a curtain. Yes, this was the best picture I could scrounge up of the curtain fiasco of 2011-early ’12. God, I hated those curtains. Because they were “temporary,” I decided I didn’t care that the panels were too wide, so the windows could only accommodate one panel each.

Sure, I could have cut them in half lengthwise to make two skinnier panels like normal curtain-loving folk might do, but they were “temporary” and…too much effort. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.RITVA curtains from IKEA on an ugly IKEA curtain rod that seems to have been discontinued. That RITVA fabric is actually really nice, by the way, it just looked awful in my windows. This entire curtain nightmare was brought on by IKEA’s choice to discontinue the fabulous and perfect and beautiful light of my life, fire of my loins that was the ENJE roller blind. Sensing the remote possibility that such an earth-shattering decision might be made by my favorite Swedish furniture manufacturer, I had hoarded all of my ENJE shades from my last apartment, but these two living room windows were too big for those salvaged sloppy seconds. So I had to wait. I heard all of this was brought on because the pull-chain constituted a possible strangling hazard for toddlers or something, but honestly?

I’m not a huge fan of most kids, but I was a huge fan of those blinds. You see where I’m going here. Oh joyous day when the ENJE returned to IKEA, but of course they went and bastardized a perfectly good child-repellent design with a new spring-loaded suspension system instead of a pull-chain, which seems like it would be infinitely more hazardous. So I bought two, brimming with excitement to go home and immediately rip down the curtains and throw up my new shades. A good three or four months later, I finally got around to cutting them to size and actually hanging them in my windows. Why is it so hard for me to take a decent photo on a sunny day? Point is, you can kind of make out where the shade ends, about six inches short of the actual bottom of the window. IKEA, you sneaky little bitch. While the ENJE was undergoing its flashy redesign, IKEA also decided to shorten the shades to a mere 64 inches, from what had previously been about 6,000 inches. What, IKEA, no more love for big-ass pre-war windows? 

Like, seriously, could my life be any harder? Fuck that noise, even too-short ENJE blinds are better than the curtain disaster. Who needs those last 6 inches? IT TOTALLY DOESN”T DRIVE ME CRAZY!!! It drives me fucking insane. Here’s a picture to hopefully convey how great the fabric is on these things, diffusing just the right amount of light and obscuring just enough of the outside world for you to both see it when you want to and pretend it isn’t there when you want to be naked. Oh, and because I like to think of myself as a rebel first and a responsible consumer second, I totally harvested all the pull-chain pieces and brackets from my old too-small shades and used them on the new shades, discarding the weird spring-loaded system that I couldn’t get used to. Sticking it to the man!!! I don’t really know why I’m explaining the intricate minutia of the differences between two versions of the same IKEA products and my basically n0n-replicable means of addressing my disappointment, but the real takeaway here is this: toddlers, stay out of my apartment.