Window-Balancing Master Bedroom Curtains

I've been on a DIY roll lately, with my freshly recovered ottomans, updating our bedroom wall art, and a ton of other projects (to which I've added like four more since I posted that)!

And now I've finally finished sewing and hanging our master bedroom curtains. Which of course, tie in perfectly with the circles on the opposite side of our room, which I showed you last week.

Other than the fact that our room was in desperate need of color, I also really wanted to hang curtains to hide that our windows are not centered on the wall. This has been driving me bananas for months, how the window on the left is closer to the edge of the wall than the window on the right.

(please ignore my husband's messes on the floor)

So, my first step was to sew some curtain panels. Which are probably one of the easiest things to sew, so I won't go into a ton of details on how to do it (since I'm sure there are already hundreds of tutorials online). To sum it up in one photo collage:

1. Lay out your fabric, and cut it to your measurements, giving yourself about 1 1/2 inches extra on all sides
2. Fold (or iron if you have difficult or thick fabric) the fabric in on itself twice to finish the edges
3. Pin your folds in place so they'll stay put when you go to sew them
4. Sew along your pinned folds down the side of the curtain panel
5. Take out the pins, and admire your mostly straight sewing job (it's just curtains, after all, not rocket science!)
6. Repeat the steps until you've sewn around all four sides of your curtain panel.
7. Leave the curtain panels piled on a chair for several weeks, while a kitty on the couch watches over them*

*Last step optional

So while my curtains were hanging out on the chair in our basement, I had to prep what I would actually hang them on. Which was two old and tarnished curtain rods I got from the Target clearance rack years and years ago, and some Command hooks (since as usual, I was going for a non permanent, no-hole-in-walls solution).

It took me a while to figure out how I was going to spray paint the curtain rods. Obviously holding them up while spraying wasn't a good option, and if I lay them down and tried to spray one side at a time, I was afraid it wasn't going to look like an even paint job.

So my solution was three shish kabob skewers, stuck in the ground through a piece of newspaper.

They were the perfect length and thickness to hold up half of each curtain rod, so I could spray them from all angles.

I chose the hammered brown RustOleum spray paint, because I wanted something that would work well with the dark wood on our headboard, and this lightly textured, not-too-shiny paint worked perfectly.

I also propped my Command hooks on a rock and sprayed them too.

But I should have thought that through a little better. Because once we put the hooks up on the wall, the fact that the back part on the wall was going to stick up higher than the curtain rod started to bug me.

I wanted to leave the hooks up for 24 hours before putting the weight of the curtains and rod on them (so we didn't have any more accidents with stuff falling off of walls). And after that 24 hours, I didn't think I could live with the brown semi circle on the wall, detracting from the curtains themselves.

Luckily, our landlord left some paint in our basement workroom, and I found the same beige color used on our walls.

OMG, it took forever to cover that brown paint though! Below is just one coat of paint--it took me 6 coats to properly cover it all.

But it was worth the delay, because now they blended in so much better up on the wall!

So finally, weeks later, we were able to hang up our curtains! And since I shifted the edge of the left side curtains to just skim the far left edge of the window moulding, I was able to make it look like our windows are nice and evenly spaced on the wall.

(Hooray for no more junk on the floor, it's in the closet now! Although I couldn't convince him to get rid of the VCR our lame little TV is on top of, apparently it's propping the TV up at just the right height (cue eye roll). Someday I want a flatscreen TV in our bedroom that magically rises up out of the foot board of our bed at the press of a button. But because I'm the only one of us who likes to fall asleep with the TV on, for now the compromise is a tiny TV that doesn't put off too much light at night)

Here's some more gratuitous curtain photos! They've been hanging now for a full week, and the Command hooks are still holding just fine.

Yes, I actually like my curtains to be functional and wide enough to be able to close them.

(See that "boob" light in the above photo? I've got big plans for covering that up!)

And the before photo again, followed by the after.

We definitely need to do something about our cord situation, and need something above the TV (or just a bigger TV, but that's not gonna happen any time soon), but I can't tell you how happy it makes me to lie in bed and look at our colorful curtains. Curtains are such an easy and quick (if you're not me) way to spice up a room!

Have you ever made your own curtains before? And does anyone else still have a VCR in their home? Ours isn't even plugged in, nor do we own a single VHS tape!