High & Wide

I feel like we're just exiting the "getting settled" part of this move and moving (very excitedly) into the tweaking part.  AKA, everything is moved and, at the very least, everything is in the room that it's going to permanently reside.  But every single one of those rooms is unfinished...very much so.  As to be expected though, right?

We are SO excited to start making this house our home...on the usual small budget, of course.  Our priorities have changed just a smidge since we moved in but I'll update you on that in a different post.  And finish the post(s) about the (now gone) popcorn ceilings.  And get a moved-in house tour up.  Add a few etcs and I think we'll be good.  ;)

Today though, let's talk curtains.  One of my favorite things to do is hang them.  In my opinion, they are the best way to warm up a room.  By just putting up a rod and some fabric, you can change the feel of a whole room - from stark to homey - just like that.  But how you hang them matters.  And really, I'll never tell anyone they're hanging their curtains the wrong way (because once upon a time, I was hanging them "wrong"...check out the master in our first house) but there's a better way - high and wide.  For me, this PSA I found pinned changed my entire curtain-hanging life once upon a time and I'll never look back.

Let's take this window in our master bedroom:

Forget the fact that the trim around it still needs to be painted white to match the rest of the trim in the room.  Last weekend, I had the itch to get some of our curtains off the floor and up onto the wall.  With this curtain rod* I found at Dirt Cheap, I hung curtains...

high and wide:

And then I moved a few plants around because our appliances came in and the rubber ficus was in the way...  But, ahem, curtains.  Those curtains aren't covering any window at all so that ALL the light can come through.  They're just covering the wall surrounding the window and the trim on each side of the window.  For all you know (well, had you not seen the before picture) that window extends well past what you can see of it and under those curtains.  It looks much bigger than it would if I had done what I used to do and hung the rod right above the top window trim and lined up the ends of those curtains with the side trim of the window.  A bad photoshop job can show you how that might look:

  

I told you, it's a really bad photoshop done real quick like but you get the picture, right?  Look at how small the window looks and how much LESS light you'd get from a window by hanging curtains alongside the window trim?!  Crazy, isn't it?

Of course, going higher means needing longer curtains if you want them to just graze the floor (which, trust me, you do) and that usually means more $$$.  If you have an IKEA near you, rejoice, there's an abundance of l   o   n   g curtains there for not a lot of cash (and hey, they ship now if you don't have one near you!)  Or, you could take the DIY route and make your own.  I promise you that you can.  Using iron-on hem tape to hem big 'ole fabric rectangles is one of the easiest DIYs there is.  Hang those rectangles with clip rings and you are golden.  To make things even easier, grab a few flat sheets, iron-on hem tape them to the length you want, and ring clip them up.  If you like the grommeted look, here's my tutorial on how to make some of those - sew or no-sew!  (Pssst, I made these curtains with grommets using Kravet's Waterpolo fabric in the cloud colorway.)

However you get them, trust me, high and wide is the way to go!  Your windows will look bigger and you'll be able to sun bathe in all of that new found light.  ;)  And you might notice you need to clean a few corners a little better but hey, LIGHT!

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Questions?  Comments?  I'm here to help!  Leave some words below or email me at beaninlove@gmail.com 

*These links are affiliate links which means that, if you click over and/or make a purchase through the link, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.  All of these links will lead you to things we actually paid for or that are similar to the item we paid for in case ours is thrifted/sold out/secondhand.  This extra money helps us with the costs of running the blog.  Thank you for your support and for fueling our love to share all things DIY!

And don't forget...