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!

Budgeting {Revisited}

Back in January I wrote a lengthy post about how my husband and I budget our life, and included some tips, like setting aside some personal spending money (so you don't have feel guilty about buying something you want for yourself), and dividing your savings into "pots" to make it easier to project how much and how long you need to save for certain goals.

Well, my tips and strategies are still the same, but now that we're living in North Carolina, I thought it would be interesting to compare our expenses and savings percentages now, against what it was when we were living in California!

I've updated the spreadsheet I included in my previous post, for a side by side comparison of our total expenses breakdown back in January compared to now.

First off, you can see that of our total expenses, we're down about 10% on rent alone. That's because we're spending over $1,000 less a month on that one budget item alone now (although it's still a bit high for our area, but we need a big four bedroom house, since two of the rooms are dedicated to our home offices).

Secondly, we are spending more on groceries, but that is because A) I'm cooking more, and lots of ingredients cost more than frozen dinners, and B) my husband used to get 2 free lunches each week when he worked out of his office, and I would frequently get free catered lunches at work as well, so we're spending more on lunches now.

Our other expenses like cell phones, electricity and natural gas, water and sewer, cable and internet are pretty close to the same amounts as they were in California, but because we're only looking at percentages, that's why you're seeing small differences in the chart above. But car insurance is down because we're finally on the same policy and getting a married discount, as well as a discount for having our renter's insurance through the same company.

Car gas is a huge savings. We go through about a half of a tank each every month, since I'm no longer commuting 38 miles each way to work. And since I bought myself an espresso machine, the $4.85 I was spending everyday at Starbucks is now off the list of expenses (rolled into groceries for coffee beans and syrups).

The biggest budget update though, and part that makes us the happiest, is the state of our savings contribution!

Source

Back in January, we were spending 65% of our take home pay on the expenses I listed above, therefore contributing the remaining 35% to our savings. Which I must say, took a hit after paying for our move (all said and done, with packing supplies, movers, shipping my car, the drive and hotels to get here, and buying cleaning supplies and condiments and everything we couldn't move, we spent about $12,000 on the move.)

But now that we're here, we've been able to shift it to spending only 45.6% of our take home on the expenses in the above chart, sending 54.4% straight into our savings account! And that's pretty huge, to decrease our expenses by almost 20% (19.4% to be exact), just by moving here.

Source

Even better, we finally got around to opening a joint savings account together, through ING Direct. Their 1% interest rate is a whole lot better than the 0.044% or so we were getting through our banks. And now we just schedule automatic transfers into our joint savings at the end of each month, and we're quickly building up our down payment to buy a house next spring. Hopefully it will be our forever home, or at least our 10-year home, because I DON'T want to go through another move anytime soon after next year (I think it will be our 7th or 8th move in 10 years).

Do you and your husband or significant other make detailed budgets together? How often do you revisit the budget to make sure you're still on track (we usually do it every 6 months or so)? Does anyone else get weirdly excited about putting money into savings, like I've started to?

Goodbye Duvet Cover, Hello Ottomans

Let me just start this post by saying thank you friends! You guys are so smart, and always have the best suggestions :)

Remember when I was wondering what I could do to balance out the top heavy side of our living room?

You guys suggested either plants or poufs/ottomans to fill in the empty space, so I took your advice.

I had some tall blue wine bottles on hand, and some dried grass, so I gave the plant idea a try.

I liked the additional color low on the wall, but they still weren't filling in enough space to balance the frames above our aquarium. Just too tall and skinny to work, although a definite step in the right direction.

So I decided to keep an eye out for something else, and I found the answer at Target! These two storage cube ottomans were on sale for only $17 each, so I snagged them.

They're pretty much the perfect size for the space, plus they work as extra seating or storage. The only problem with them was the color. In the above photo they actually don't look too bad, but the photo below is more true to life--and much more neon green.

And that green color was just clashing with the softer, olivey-sage green color of our sofa cover. But I had a solution, related to the lightly striped blue pillows on our sofa!

Those throw pillows actually match an old duvet cover we had in our master bedroom for a short time, years ago. We quickly realized we didn't like the buttons on the inside of the duvet (since you know we still hate using top sheets), so only used it for a couple of weeks about 6 years ago. But my pack-rat tendancies do come in handy, all the time in fact, and this time, it was because I still had the duvet cover. And since I knew we'd never use it again, it would make the perfect fabric to cover the neon green ottomans with!

I cut the top layer of the duvet cover free from the bottom cotton layer, then measured out how much I needed.

Once I cut and ironed the fabric, about 20 minutes later I had a recovered ottoman. It was very much like how you would wrap a present, except with using a staple gun instead of tape.

Once everything was stapled in place, on the bottom of the ottoman I cut off most of the excess fabric.

Then I used a BBQ lighter to lightly melt the edges of the fabric, just to prevent any unnecessary fraying. It's a quick technique I perfected when making belly bands for our wedding save the dates and invitations.

Once the ends were melted, I folded under the excess and secured the edges with a few more staples. Now I had a nice, finished bottom, which will hopefully hold up to sliding and moving on the carpet.

The inside, not so much. I figured there was no point in finishing the inside of the ottoman if I'm the only one who is ever going to see it, and it doesn't have to hold up to wear and tear.

For the lid, I just wrapped a square of fabric around it, folding the ends like I would a present.

And I also sealed the inside edge of the lid with the lighter, before calling it finished.

One down, one to go, and so much better already!

Another 20 minutes, and the second ottoman was covered in the blue fabric as well. And I'm in love!

Yep, they are the perfect size, and now an even more perfect color! Especially since, thinking ahead for next year, I'm considering doing our living room in all blues (hopefully with dark walnut wood floors and bright white trim), so these ottomans will still fit in with my future living room plans.

One last photo, a close up of the finished product!

So thank you, thank you, thank you for all your helpful suggestions to my problem! You guys really are the best, and because I love you all, I'm working on a giveaway to announce this week. :)

Have you ever recovered furniture before? Or repurposed something to make something else?

Updated Bedroom Wall Art

Remember back in June, when I was gifted these canvas wraps from Target? And I said they weren't quite perfect as-is?

Well I finally got around to updating them!

See the baby blue colored circles? Yeah, those had to go, since there's nothing blue in our master bedroom color scheme.

So I bought some paint to attempt to cover up the blue.

Mixed together, the Citron and Spanish Olive colors were a close match to the color of our curtains (which I also owe you a post on, since I finally got them hung up this week).

And since I didn't want to risk it without testing, I first spot tested on the back of the canvas, where it wouldn't show in case my paint idea didn't work out.

After I let the test spot dry, it looked alright, so I took a deep breath and went ahead and applied the paint over the blue circles with the foam tip of a dry erase marker (pictured earlier). It was the perfect width for the circles and turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself.

See, no more blue!

Except I'm still not 100% in love with them. I think it's the unevenness of the circles that's throwing me off, since the circle pattern on the curtains is so much more geometric, and the lighting project that I'm going to start working on soon will also feature perfectly round circles. But I am digging the colors with our bedspread and the headboard I made years ago.

I also want to find a way to tie in all my planned circle patterns in with the rectangles of the headboard. I'm thinking with a gallery wall on another wall, with a grid of small rectangular frames, with circle prints in them?

Although that would have to go on the wall above my husband's side of the room, which is and always will be a mess. I'm really hoping when we move next year, we'll have a walk in closet off the master bedroom for him to dump his never ending pile of clothes in (since of course, I'll still get a whole bedroom for my walk in closet, like I have now).

In case you're curious about the headboard and bed frame, here's a few more shots of it. I actually made this about seven years ago, when I knew nothing about furniture construction. We're still sleeping on my husband's full size mattress from college (although we do like to cuddle, someday I'd like to upgrade to a Tempur-Pedic queen), and once we moved to California, I was annoyed by the ugly box spring laying on the ground.

So instead of going out and buying rails, I cut some wood on our tiny back patio with a hack saw, stained it, and encased the box spring on three sides using L brackets on the inside. Yep, the bed is low, but it's actually really comfortable that way to us, after years and years of sleeping in it.

I also used the little hack saw to make the intersecting wood slats on the headboard. I absolutely love this headboard, because it's so comfy to lean on with the rectangles of fabric covered foam, but still shows off so much of the pretty stained wood. I would definitely make something like this again in the future, but with a few design tweaks like making it taller (although right now it is to scale with our low mattress), and making individual, removable fabric covered rectangles, so it would be easier to clean (or switch out the color of fabric if I wanted).

So there's a little look at the very early progress I've made in our master bedroom!

This is actually the one and only room of our house that I would leave painted the light cream color it is currently painted. I think the soft color gives a nice contrast to the dark wood furniture we have (which will all be replaced once we buy a house. See our bedside tables? One is actually a TV stand on wheels, and the other one my mom salvaged from next to a dumpster when I was moving out of the college dorms ten years ago. I'd say we are definitely in need of some upgrades, but are doing the best we can with what we've got for now!).

More to come on our master bedroom decor, once I catch up on my writing--I've been too busy actually working on the projects!

Have you ever updated or tweaked art to fit your color scheme? Or found ways to work with the less-than-perfect furniture you have, until you're ready to upgrade?