Saturday, January 7, 2012

A cheap window treatment

Do you have any of those ridiculously wide 70's windows in your place?  Our dining room window is 14 feet wide!  14 ft!!  Without wanting to fork out hundreds of dollars for a custom window treatment, I found a much cheaper option that will do for now.

I bought two of these finials from Amazon:

Button Wood Finial in White finish for a 1-3/8" dowel rod - 2/pack [CAPITOL CITY LUMBER]

Then three of these brackets:
Round Support Bracket in a White finish for a 1-3/8" dowel rod - 2/pack [CAPITOL CITY LUMBER]

And I got a 14.5 foot wooden dowel from the building supply store.  We drilled holes in the end of the dowel to screw on the finials and painted the whole thing white.  You could easily paint it black or brown or red or whatever color you feel like you need above your window.  The brackets are the best I found (and I looked at a ton!), plus they are pretty when painted the same color as your curtain rod. I just settled for a bunch of Ikea panels like these:
MATILDA Pair of curtains, white Length: 98 " Width: 55 " Weight: 1 lb 2 oz  Length: 250 cm Width: 140 cm Weight: 0.50 kg

When you get enough panels on there, you can cover a 14 foot expanse.  It's not the easiest thing in the world to open and close, but it works for now and all together I spent under $50!  I'll get a picture up once we get the curtain rod hung in the right spot - right up next to the ceiling.  The panels are 118" long, so I have plenty of fabric to add some height to the room.

2 comments:

Ashley Antkowiak said...

Wow that's a big window! Have you thought about using a pair of flat sheets? I've seen them hung with ring clips in that sort of situation and they end up looking great. Just a thought if you aren't loving the ikea curtains!

Lindsey said...

The dowel is 1.38 inches in diameter, and the ring clips to fit that were more than I wanted to spent. :) I have used sheets as curtains before and actually really liked how they looked.