Pretty much every place we’ve rented has had the standard cheap blinds in every window, and I’ve never felt any inspiration to dress them up. Even now, curtains fall into the “things I’m barely willing to spend money on” category. But we managed to grab a set of curtains made out of a kind of mesh-like material on clearance a few months back, and we bought two sets of the cheapest cotton curtains we could find at Ikea last month.

And now, finally we put them up. The curtain rods were left to us by the prior owners, so they were free. 🙂 As a bonus, they match our style pretty well. We took them down when we painted, and we re-hung them a bit higher and wider than they were originally. The cotton curtains went in the living room:

Tada! Oh, and as a bonus you can see that we got a new rug. The natural material of the sisal rug did not stand up to our pet mess cleaner, and ended up with silly-looking light splotches. (The sisal rug can be seen at the bottom of this post.) And continuing with the theme of not spending much money, we went and found the cheapest new 8×10 rug in existence. We’re so proud. I’m sad to say that it looks better in photos than in person, but it is undeniably practical, and certainly not boring.

Anyway, back to the curtains. Here’s the big window from another angle:

Just last week I finally got around to hanging that picture up by the front door, but I wasn’t thinking about how much space curtains take, so I had to take down the cool-looking iron candle holders that I had hung next to it. Boo. They will probably find a new home along the stretch of wall shared by the living room and the dining room. Or something.

Getting back to the curtains once more, the bottoms are unhemmed, so now we need to decide how short we want them. We’re leaning towards not-quite-floor length… But first I had to wash them. And find a place to dry them. Stringing up a line between the mulberry tree and the patio covering supports worked perfectly. I’m thinking of maybe rigging some carabiners so I can take the line up and down whenever I want. maybe.

The curtains dried really quickly, and I immediately hung them back up even though they really need to be ironed. And hemmed. Really though I’m dying to know if our thrill-seeking kitties are going to try climbing them, and I’d rather know before I put any more effort into them. 🙂

The mesh curtains in the dining room were a bit less effort since they’re already hemmed. Though if we ever get around to building a banquette in that corner I’ll probably have to re-hem them anyway. Considering out list of things that we want to build is about a mile long and we aren’t planning to host a formal dinner party any time soon, I’m just not going to worry about it for now.

And you can see from the picture that Dave has finally replaced the hard drive on our media computer, whose old hard drive died at the beginning of the year. (Here’s a shot of the dining room minus the curtains, and minus all the computer junk too.) And on one more awkward note, the dining room curtains are cream while the living room curtains are crisp white. Ummm. I think it looks okay? The windows aren’t all that close, and the wall color is different, and the lighting is completely different between the two rooms. Ah well, if it annoys me too much the mesh curtains will probably end up in the guest room. In the meantime, our windows having dressings! hurray!

And with that I’ll close a very rambly post. Thanks for reading!