Window dressing

When we moved in there were actually blinds on almost every window.  The problem is, they were kind of fug.



They actually don't look terrible from far away, but they were plastic faux wood blinds.  Could be worse I guess, but I wanted to try something new.

Shortly after we moved to the new house I ran to Target to grab some curtain rods.  I'm super cheap and I'm yet to be convinced that expensive metal rods are better than cheap metal rods, so I thought the Target ones would do.  That said, these are definitely pretty cheapo, but I really don't think you can tell unless you're staring at them up close.  If you disagree and can totally tell these rods cost $10 from these photos don't say anything.

Putting these up was a huge pain.  Since our house was built in 1937, we're blessed with wonderfully crumbly plaster walls.  I'm still having nightmares from ripping 800 plastic wall anchors out of the wall and spackling over the destruction before we painted the living room, so it honestly pained me to put more of these suckers into the wall.  However, since I wanted to keep my curtains on the wall it was kind of a necessity.

At the old apartment I hung our curtains almost all the way up to the ceiling because the internet says that's how you make your windows look bigger.  Thanks, internet!  I thought about doing the same here, but our ceilings are a little bit higher (9' as opposed to 8') so I after some deliberation I thought hanging the curtains too high may look more dramatic than the casual look I was going for.

For the curtains I used the dependable Ikea Vivan in plain white.  I've been really into white lately, probably because I have too many other decisions to make without worrying about a thing like color.  Super lazy here.  However, since the white curtains are a little sheet, I wanted some extra privacy - that side of our house faces an apartment building and I don't want people seeing how much reality TV we actually watch.  So, I stole an idea from Young House Love to pair my boring white blinds with bamboo curtains.

 I'll spare the gory details because they're really just boring and involve lots of internet searches for bamboo blinds.  Shockingly exciting.  Also involved was a trip to Home Depot to buy the wrong size blinds, then another trip to Home Depot to return those blinds, then ordering online at homedepot.com with a $10 off coupon code.  The fun don't stop 'round here.

The result is this (I may be a few curtains short and need to take another trip to Ikea, don't tell).

Yippee pretty windows!