Vintage Bird: My Own Curtain Installation

Yesterday I wrote a post about How to Choose the Right Curtains for Your Space and outlined things to consider when choosing curtains. The post was born out of my curtain search for my new studio apartment.

I have these three beautiful windows in the main room of my studio. They let in some great light and I want to have the option to have the curtains for privacy when needed, but I want to still be able to open them up and let in the full power of the sun and day!

The challenge was considering what the best option for such a long span of windows would be.

Curtain rods can be so expensive and an almost 10 foot long curtain rod would be very expensive!

My friend, Brenda, had done this in her house and I loved the look of it.

This definitely goes along with my worldly cottage feel! It's a wooden dowel rod with wood brackets. She spray painted them black and they look so great and pretty expensive considering how easy and inexpensive they are to purchase!!

So I set out to do my own version that would work with these Ikea curtains that I had chosen for my space.

I love this pattern and thought it would work great with my style. It's a light enough background color, with a really cool pattern that is bold, but not so bold that it takes over the space. I am not afraid of some pattern, though, and thought this had an amazing worldly feel to it!

The nice thing about Ikea curtains also is that they come in a great length that's really easy to work with! My windows span 113" and I wanted my curtain rod to sit in between the top of the window and the ceiling, which is about 91" off the floor. These Ikea curtains are 57" wide (each panel - so 114" total) and are 118" long. They are the perfect width and I can hem them just a bit to get them to be 91" tall. Standard US made curtains are around 84", which was too short.

So once I had the curtains figured out, I wanted to figure out my options for curtain rods. There are great options at Lowes, Home Depot, Home Goods, TJ Maxx, Wayfair, Overstock, etc. They can get pretty expensive and especially a 10' option! I think some of them can look really nice (usually the more expensive ones), but oftentimes the more affordable ones are cheaper looking.

I wanted to try my own version of the wooden curtain rods and I think that's a great option for my curtains. I think the design and style totally match what I am going for with my curtains.

I found a 10' wooden curtain rod from Lowes, 2 wooden side brackets and one wooden center bracket from Hobby Lobby, and two finials from Lowes.

The rod and finials came in bare wood, while the brackets were pre-stained, although they didn't quite match the color stain I was going for, so I sanded them down to prep them for staining.

Here's the Rustoleum stain in Kona, which is the perfect dark colored stain for what I wanted.

So I stained the curtain rod, finials, and brackets to all match in the Kona color.

Then came install time - you have to be really precise when installing. You have to make sure that the brackets are perfectly level so that the rod sits level. You also have to make sure that you screw the brackets into a stud or at least use the plastic drywall screws so the rod doesn't get ripped out of your wall when opening the curtains one day!!