I know I’ve announced the Dining Room is our next big project, but I’ve spending January focusing on Apartment Therapy’s January Cure since it’s nice to spend some time doing a whole house refresh + clean. I haven’t been completely slacking on the Dining Room though.  This week I made use of my media downtime assignment (which I mostly failed out by the way….) to work on curtains for the dining room.

Yes, I’m just going to need to take them down again once we start painting, but it looks nice for the moment and the hard part (getting the holes drilled in the right spot) is done.

Anyone who spends a lot of time googling decor advice/reading design blogs/perusing Pinterest can probably tell I broke one of the most common design “rules.”  But rules are made to be broken and I’m a rebel.

What is usually recommended when hanging curtains it to hang them higher  and wider than the window frame.  Wider, check.  Higher… not so much.  But here’s the thing, the logic behind this piece of advice is to make your windows look more dramatic and you can use it to fake a bigger window or a centered window.  The problem is that I think there’s an underlying assumption that you’re hanging curtains in newer construction–dinky moldings, average ceiling heights, that sort of thing.  Here we’ve got nicely tall ceilings, big, and some lovely window trim.  If I had hung the curtain rod higher than the window it would get squashed in the space in between the top of the window molding and the crown molding.  It would also hide our window trim.  No beuno.

Instead I opted to hang the rod across the the “blank” area of the trim so the fancy molding peeks out over the top. It’s still nice and high, but not overly competing with the charm of our trim, which is one of the reasons we picked this house out in the first place.

Moral of the story, there are no hard and fast design “rules.” There are a number of really good suggestions out there that will make sense for a lot of people, but if it’s just not working for you, don’t fight it, no matter how often it pops up on Pinterest.*

The curtains are super cheap IKEA VIVAN panels (no longer sold apparently) that I spruced up with some curtain rings and chunky finials.  The sheers are from Target and just held in place with inexpensive tension rods.**  I opted for sheers again like I did on the kitchen because we’re on a busy-ish street and our windows are about 2 feet from the sidewalk so some semblance of privacy is nice.

Both the curtains and sheers needed to get hemmed so I pre-washed everything first. It’s usually a good idea to pre-wash anything you may need to wash again in the future since there can easily be some shrinkage.  Even though I can’t say I wash my curtains with any regularity, they can get dusty (and furry around the bottom in our house) so being able to toss them in the washer and not worry too much is worth the added step of pre-washing.  In my opinion pre-washing > hand-washing.

After everything was washed and dried I ironed it all nice and smooth and hung up a panel to mark my hem height. My personal preference for curtains to have them just skim the floor.  I opted for a wide hem so I didn’t have to cut any of the fabric off (in my experience these curtains don’t rip straight at all), I just doubled the fabric over to make a nice smooth hem and give a little weight to the bottom to what are pretty light-weight curtains.

Press.

Press.

Sew.

You can either run it through a sewing machine or hand stitch.  Hell, you could use some fusible webbing and I won’t judge you–if someone is inspecting your curtain hem when it’s within a few inches of the floor they’ve got some issues.  I haven’t decided which I’m going to yet.  I’m leaning toward hand sewing because it’s more subtle, but then I’m also lazy…. (no lie, those pins may stay in for a little while).

In unrelated news, I should be getting a new camera this weekend (!!!) so hopefully the picture quality will improve around here.

 

*You know what else Pinterest suggests?  Self-tanning with coco powder.  Yeah…. if you ever start feeling Pinterest envy, just remember that one.

**So Target only had one in stock when we were there earlier this week and it’s on the other window and not hemmed yet.  This one is a little short because it’s from the bathroom in our old Apartment, but you get the idea, right?