Curtains help make a room feel finished off, and give it a bit of warmth, and color. They can also pull the colors together in a room, or become a focal art piece, if you think outside the box. Curtains can be expensive, even buying basic panels can get pricey. At most regular stores you can spend around $40.00 for a single panel (or $80.00 per window). What happens if you have an enormous picture window? Get ready to pay through the nose.
I’ve already talked about one of my favorite fixes, the fabulous shower curtain. They are cheap, and with a little work they can look just like their expensive counter parts. Too short? Add a few inches of fabric to the bottom. Want it to open in the center like a regular curtain. Get out the scissors and some stitch witch. Just be sure to put the nicely sewn edges in the middle, or it will look a bit weird.
So we have two fairly large picture windows in our house. One in the living room, which is nice it looks out into our yard. The other is in our kitchen, and it looks at the twelve-foot retaining wall that keeps my neighbor’s house from crashing into ours. Now If you like looking at your neighbor’s car and a giant wall of concrete (and I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t) you may want to leave the window open. We don’t really care for it.
Originally we had some cheap cafe curtains, which looked pretty good, but I got this idea and thought it would look amazing in the kitchen. What do you think?
Think Outside the Curtain
I love maps, I think I got this from my dad. He had this enormous Atlas that we used to drag out, and flip through when I was a kid. So when I was trying to figure out a cool window treatment that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, I started looking outside the box. This is an old school pull down map I found on Ebay. The map and shipping cost about $40.00. What I forgot about was how the map was mounted on the wall. I had to find a rail online (another $30.00, I tried to find some used ones, but no good), and finally we got it up today. So I originally thought this would be a crazy cheap alternative, well it wasn’t. It is, however probably one of the coolest window treatments I’ve ever seen. So we went Green, because we helped keep this awesome find out of a landfill, and we have a great conversational piece right in our own kitchen. Art with a function, I love it. And if we get bored with looking at the world, we can open it up to the US or Alaska, sorry no Hawaii. I think the map was made before Hawaii became a state. Let me know what you think…comment below or take this handy dandy-poll.
1undomesticgoddess 