New Curtains

Needless to say, after building our addition, we are a bit short on spare change. However, we had three windows that needed coverings (we opted to leave the three 2x2 square windows free of treatments). Initially I wanted to do wide white wood blinds. Actually, we went so far as to order the blinds (after I tracked down an amazing sale at JcPenney!) and hang them on two of the windows...and I hated them. Not only did I not like the look at all (they made our room look very closed in) the wood blinds totally didn't work on our slider. When the blinds were pulled up, there was a big mass of blind at the top of the doorframe (8ish inches or so) that we had to duck under. Not good!
So, we took down the wood blinds (while mourning the holes we had just put in our brand spanking new woodwork!) and had naked windows again as evidenced in the picture above (ignore all my extra kitchen stuff on the buffet--this was in the midst of the kitchen cabinet painting project!) Oh, and now we had even less spare change than before.

What to do, what to do? Why jump on the dropcloth curtain bandwagon, of course!
I bought cheap black curtain rods at Target--which finally made the black chandelier tie into the new space. Unfortunately the curtain rods were so cheap, they had "clear" plastic pieces in the middle of each rod that looked so tacky! Still, the pricetag on the curtain rods was too perfect to pass up--so I used a black Sharpie on the plastic pieces. Worked like a charm!
See those pieces on the rod--those are the plastic adjuster pieces that I colored black. We thought about hanging the rods all the way up at the ceiling, but we plan to put crown moulding up in here in the next year or two, so we opted against going all the way to the ceiling with the rods.
I wanted the curtains to be full, so I used one dropcloth for each panel even though I probably could have split the cloth and saved some money. Still, it was $10 per dropcloth, so it wasn't much at all. Six dropcloths to cover my three windows and they look like linen. My friends have been quite surprised to learn these are dropcloths!

I washed, dried (these shrink a lot!), and ironed the panels before running a few straight lines of stitches...and that was it! No cutting of the dropcloths at all! I'm so pleased with the look.
It's a bit beige in here right now, but I'm planning on some black and white pictures to balance things out. Right now I'm finding the light and airy neutrals to be quite soothing.