Posts Tagged ‘window treatments’

Treatment and Teaser

2 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, May 17th, 2012

Last week, Mike and I hung a roman shade in the baby’s room. Since we just wanted a simple white one to put some bolder chevron curtains over, we decided just to use one of the 6 white shades we ordered for our master a while back. We bought cotton roman shades from JCPenney. Yeah we never hung them in the master…

(via JCPenney)

We have what I thought was a similar one of these in our kitchen and we’ve been happy with it. But when we hung the shade in the nursery, it folded up like this…

We’re not newbies to roman shades since we have them throughout our entire downstairs. Something about this was not bunching right. All of the Allen + Roth shades we have downstairs fold completely flat.

Exhibit A: Living Room

Exhibit B: Family Room

Exhibit C: Nursery?

The only thing we could think of is that it needed to be steamed. It is a different shade than the others and has many more folds because the windows upstairs are shorter. We would have went with our trusted Allen + Roth roman shades from Lowe’s if this window was 72″, but it’s 64″ and Lowe’s doesn’t sell those particular shades in shorter sizes. So I decided to attack it with the iron.

I couldn’t get all of those wrinkles out (and I was worried about the plastic loops melting or something if I took it down and ironed it), but it does look better than the picture above.

Since I got completely sidetracked after I ironed it and immediately started to hang the chevron curtains, the after picture was taken with my iPhone and… has the curtains in it. The Photoshopped curtains that is. Don’t try to find any hint of color in this picture, I Photoshopped it at a million times the size and I can promise you there is not a hint of pink or blue in this picture. Any color variation left is because of shadows. Mike was my quality control checker 🙂

I’ll share more detailed shots of the curtains, rod and clips when I post about the entire curtain process, but for now, the roman shade is looking better. I’ve been keeping it up and just closing the curtains, so it’s more functional to block out additional light than anything else. The curtains make up for the ugly shade 🙂

Random Ramblings

3 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, November 30th, 2011

I managed to write 35+ pages of papers since Thanksgiving, so needless to say I’ve been a little busy. However, we do have a few minor things to report on, so why I figured why not throw them all in one post? So here you have it, our random ramblings…

1. It gets dark before we get home from work now and the 3 spare bedrooms do not have lights in them. Taking pictures of the new floors all cleaned up has been difficult. Even more difficult when I finally got a spare minute to take pictures and the camera died on me… and the battery charger was missing… as was the extra camera. Here are the lone pictures of the new floors. This happens to be the new office.

2. The future office will soon be getting more action because this weekend we decided to paint it! We picked out paint then proceeded to run a bunch more errands and by the time we got home, we only had an hour before darkness. The color we chose is Olympic’s Denim. Unfortunately I could only find this tiny thumbnail of the color on Olympic’s site…

Hopefully this weekend when we’re a little less chaotic we’ll get some paint on the walls before the sun goes down. We really need to get a light in that room.

3. Speaking of lights! (you like that segue?) We went to Ikea last weekend to pick up a light I wanted for the playroom (the old office). You know, this room with the stripes…

No we didn’t clear the room out yet, but I chose this picture because you can see that we currently have a ceiling fan in there. We need the fan for whatever room the office is in because all of the hardware we have produces some major heat. We decided to take the ceiling fan from the stripey room and put it upstairs in the new office. To replace the ceiling fan, I wanted something fun, but that would still look classy as it will be seen from the entryway. We picked up this guy…

Of course, he still has to be put together and hung.

4. Speaking of lights! Does that work twice? Anyway our Jonathan Adler giraffe sconces arrived early!

I think I have an idea of what I want to do with the nursery and I’m planning to write something up in the next few days. Right now I’m leaning towards giving the baby the room with 1 window, as it’s known around here. This one…

Bedroom 2 is still a consideration. At first I always imagined using bedroom 2 since it has 2 windows and a walk-in closet. I imagined the pretty window treatments I could have, but I think that bedroom 1 has more wall space for a better furniture arrangement. Decisions decisions.

5. While we’re on the topic of window treatments, the 6 white roman shades that we ordered for our master bedroom came last week. We’ll throw those on the weekend to-do list too since they won’t take very long to install.

I think that pretty much catches you up with what’s been going on around here. Thanks for hanging around through the chaos. I’m looking forward to December 21st when I can finally put my feet up. But then we’re hosting Christmas events on the 22nd and 24th… so maybe I’ll put my feet up on the 26th 🙂

Treating the Windows

2 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, November 14th, 2011

The day has finally come. Tonight, Mike and I ordered real shades to replace the paper shades in our bedroom.

I know, it’s been a year and a half since we moved in. It’s been a year since we added those french doors and accompanying wall and they’re still not even primed. Well last week, we decided to change that before the end of the year. We figured we’d at least get some paint on the walls and get real blinds before the baby comes. Because let’s face it, once 2012 hits we’ll be working on a nursery and we won’t care about our embarassing paper blinds. Which can grow to be even more embarassing when we’re up at all hours in the middle of the night and our bedroom is illuminating the whole neighborhood….

We’re not planning on doing an entire bedroom makeover, we’re just getting the basics that we should have had from day one and we’re basically making the room more cozy and easier to sleep in. We haven’t decided on a paint color yet, but it will probably be something neutral since we have 2 different colored duvets to rotate between and not much else planned. So we decided to go with some basic white roman shades from JCPenney.

JCPenney Cotton Roman Shade

They don’t have an image of the white ones, so brown it is! I really wanted blackout roman shades for the bedroom, but the one I ordered for the kitchen was no longer available. Which is funny because I really didn’t want blackout for the kitchen, I just wanted a dark brown and blackout was all I could find in the right shade. I decided to go with these basic cotton thermal shades because they are on clearance for $29.99 each, plus we had a 20% off coupon and they were offering free shipping. Since there are 6 windows in our bedroom, I did not want to spend any more than that. Is there an Extreme Couponers: Online Clothing & Home Items Edition? I refuse to ever pay full price or for shipping! Though they may not fully darken our room, I’m sure there will be a big difference when compared to the crinkly awful paper blinds we currently have. Even if it’s just aesthetic 🙂

I just finished mass amounts of homework so I’m keeping it short tonight. More to come when um, the shades come (in 4 – 7 business days) 🙂

New Year, New Projects

4 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, January 2nd, 2011

First off a little year-end blurb 🙂

I’d like to thank all of you who have visited my little side project and sent me words of encouragement- whether through email, snail mail (thank you Laura :)) or in person. I really lacked the confidence to get this thing going in the beginning (if you look at the archives, I half started this in February!), but because of the kind words from people I haven’t talked to in years, people I’ve never met, or people who want me to help them with their homes, I feel so loved and encouraged to continue this. I LOVE doing this and it’s so rewarding to hear that so many of you enjoy it too. So thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for helping me to keep this bloggy up. On to a new year of blogging!

Though we still have many, many unfinished projects hanging around from 2010, we’ve already begun planning some new projects for 2011. We often say that we have house A.D.H.D., we bounce from room to room, never really finishing things. Oh you’ve noticed? Well this is sort of intentional because it keeps us interested, gives us time to think and re-think of things we’d like to do and be really proud of our finished product.

So what’s new around here? Well first off, we received the Delta Pilar Touch 2O Single Handle Pull-Down Kitchen Faucet we were eyeing on our Dear Santa list!

It was a generous gift from Mike’s parents and we are very excited to put the final piece of our kitchen puzzle together! I am planning on recreating the commercial once it’s installed….

While we’re on the topic of Christmas gifts, my parents bought us a Cutting Edge Stencil. I had been eyeing up the Casablanca Allover Stencil for months and decided it would be a good gift to ask for. Since I love meticulous, detailed jobs, I am going to do something like this in our master bedroom…

Okay, I am beyond excited to do this. Though Mike has already warned me that though he is fully confident in my abilities, this project is outside of his skill set. He always manages to roll paint in his hair, never mind successfully applying a stencil….

Yesterday, we hit up Ikea and found another missing puzzle piece- extra long teal-ish curtain panels. These are something I’ve been thinking of for our family room for quite some time. Once we added our white roman shades, we knew we needed a little something extra there. Cue the Merete dark blue panels!

They are nearly identical to the color of my coffee filter wreath ribbon and they will add just the right amount of boldness and fun that we’ve wanted in the family room since we moved in.

Soon I will have the Hawaii inspired color scheme I’ve been dreaming of in the family room.

As excited as I am to do all of these things ASAP, we’re laying low this week, putting away some Christmas decorations, oh and HEADING TO DISNEY ON WEDNESDAY! Woooo 🙂

Anyone else scheming up 2011 projects already?

window drama

2 Comments

Posted by Rebecca, September 30th, 2010

A while back, I posted this picture of a failed adventure in natural woven shades with separate you-attach-it-privacy liner.  The good news is, I figured out how to properly attach that thing.  The bad news is, I hated it once it was up.

I wish I could say this was the first time this had happened.  But it was the second.  Then there was a third. And a fourth.  Add in a bunch of ideas that were canned before we actually purchased them and we’ve gone through about 10 ideas for what the hell to do with the family room windows.  Someday, when we find a solution, I will go through all of the ideas and why they didn’t work for me.  I won’t do that now just incase I have to backtrack and choose one of the treatments I didn’t like… then eat my words that I described how cheap it looked on my blog.

For now, cue our most recent attempt…meet the Allen + Roth roman shade from Lowe’s in snow white.

The woven shade previously linked it also from the Allen + Roth line.  I absolutely love their stuff… our walk in closet and other roman shades were made by them.  Plus they carry 72 inch long shades in stock, for around $30 each.  I decided to give the white a try (I’ll explain my logic once I figure it out…)

The problem was, the white is too white.

(Tangent: ignore the random mish mash going on with the  fireplace.  The frames are going to be hung, the vase is experimental, and the fireplace is not yet finished.  Work in progress!)

Until we hung this, I had no clue that our trim work wasn’t bright white.  The mantel, baseboards and window sill looked dirty compared to the shade.  Which I’m actually happy about in the long run, since the creamier tones blend better with most colors.

There are a total of 5 windows in the room, so I’m limited price wise.  I’m desperately trying to avoid anything that falls into the ‘custom’ category! Suggestions welcome 🙂

Copyright 2010 - 2011. The Lil House That Could. All rights reserved.