Curtain Call

While hanging "new" curtains might not seem like one of the most interesting projects, I promised to post some pictures in my re-kick-off post at the beginning of March. What, you mean you haven't been checking my blog everyday to see if I've posted about my curtains? I'm shocked!

Well let's pretend that you have been waiting for me to write about them, and just go with it as I spend the next few paragraphs telling you all about my curtain adventure.

To get started, here are a few pictures of my dining room, pre-curtain era:

That poor little naked window :(

Oh wait, see that empty wall? That's where my buffet goes!

So, funny store about the "new" curtains - I've actually had them since LAST February. I bought them on the 8-hour Ikea adventure with my sister and bro-in-law when they came to visit. The curtains are part of Ikea's fantastically-easy-to-put-together-collection, with no sewing required to hem them. While this should've meant that I could hang them instantly, there was a lot more that went into it.

I bought them way before we painted our dining room, much less decided on a color. And on top of that, I didn't have a rod to hang the curtains. So without a way to hang them, they were relegated to my craft room and more or less forgotten about for the next six months. Every once in awhile Jesse would venture into the room, ask me about the curtains and get the response of, "yeah, I know ... I just need to get a curtain rod."

He also waited patiently as I bought a sewing machine, thinking that I might actually hem the curtains as a first project. Nope. I hemmed curtains for our bedroom (and by "I" I mean my friend, Grace), turned a pair of dress pants into capris, and even made a baby blanket for my new nephew. The dining room curtains though? They just sat there - untouched.

Finally, August rolled around and my mom came to visit. At that point, he asked about the curtains one more time, to which my mom responded, "I can help with those!" So among the many other projects that my mom and I started that weekend, she not only started and finished the curtains, but she used the leftover fabric to make a valence for my kitchen.

Hard at work on my curtains. Thanks Mom! :)

So now you're probably thinking to yourself, ok, all the girl had to do was buy a curtain rod. That certainly can't take much time, right? Wrong. It took me from August until February 2011 to get a curtain rod and FINALLY hang the infamous curtains. And had I not found clearance rods at Bed Bath & Beyond, which I discovered purely by mistake, those curtains would still be sitting in my basement - rodless and alone.

Alright, now that I made this curtain story much more dramatic than it actually is, let me show you Jesse's leveling and drilling perfection, which goes perfectly with my ring clipping, finial attaching, curtain hanging handy work. :)

Oooooooooohhh ....

Aaaahhhhhhhhh ....

Ooh-la-ummm, excuse me Rooney, can't you tell that I'm trying to take pictures here?

Oh, and do you like the sunburst mirror above the wine cabinet? I would show you a close-up, but I haven't taken any pictures of it on my real camera yet. (I'll work on that and post better pictures sometime soon.) So let me ask this, what do you think of the curtains? Now that I have the dark table and honey colored chairs, is the dark green too much? Most of the time I like them, but sometimes they feel too heavy for the room. Oh well, better than naked windows, right?! :)