Our family room has definitely evolved over the almost 4 years we’ve been living in this house. This is what it looked like in early 2010, about 8 months after we moved in and just after adding some wall art:
Later that year, we upgraded to a much nicer TV console.
Then in August 2011 on a whim, we painted the TV wall:
And then a few months ago we finally got rid of the boring beige carpet in favor of pretty laminate:
The latest addition? Curtains! This was also an “on a whim” addition. I’ve thought about window treatments on and off for a while, but one evening I somehow got it in my head that it was time. Our ceilings are 11 feet tall so finding affordable curtains is not as easy as one would think. I wanted them to brush the floor, and I wanted to hang the rods higher than the top of the window, which is ~2 feet from the ceiling. I needed really long panels — standard curtain lengths like 84″ (7 feet) or even 108″ (9 feet) wouldn’t work. I looked around the internet for a few weeks and finally took a chance on some 120″ sheers from Macy’s (well, their website anyway) when they were running a home & bath sale.
(I thought about making curtains also, but buying them pre-made is actually cheaper in most cases. I would’ve needed at least 14 yards of fabric, and even the cheapest home decor fabric I’ve seen starts at around $10/yard. Each of these panels was $35 on sale, so it was $140 total — the same as I would’ve spent for even the cheapest fabric options.)
They arrived but I was still a little hesitant — so I taped two of them to the wall with masking tape as a test run. They stayed there for 2 weeks. By the time the tape started falling off, I had decided that I liked them enough to put them up permanently. Yay!
Even though I had found curtain panels that were long enough, the next challenge was finding a curtain ROD long enough to span all 3 windows. Each window is almost 4 feet wide, with just over 1 foot between each one. All in all, I needed almost 180″ (15 feet!) of rod. I decided to try making one rod out of two sets, so I went to Lowe’s and got one 72-144″ rod and one 36-72″ rod. I used the entire long rod and two of the three pieces of the smaller rod — so all in all, my single “rod” is made up of 5 segments.
I spent some time considering where to install the brackets, and eventually decided to use 5 brackets evenly spaced out across the entire span. I wanted to use several brackets to make sure the weight of the rod and panels was well distributed. The other option would have been to use 5 brackets with 1 on each end and 1 installed in the center of each window. However, that wouldn’t have supported the curtain between each window as well, and since the rod was made up of so many segments, I thought evenly spacing the brackets was the better choice.
Despite my fairly careful measuring, the curtains still ended up about an inch higher off the floor than I had anticipated. It’s just so difficult to get things exactly right when want them to literally skim the floor! Fortunately it should be a fairly easy fix — I can let out the hem on one end of each panel by an inch. This isn’t a huge priority right now, but it won’t take much time so I’m hoping to get to it in the next few weeks. (The most time-consuming part is probably just having to climb the ladder to take each panel back down for an evening.)
Ta da! We need a new coffee table at some point because the one we’ve had for the past few years from World Market has not held up very well (the top is all scratched and discolored). And someday I’ll make some pillowcases that match our couch better than the red ones (which don’t really match at all). But all in all, our family room is in pretty good shape.
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