dining room update – simple window treatment

when we moved into this house in October 2009, I started scouring internet sources to find decorating inspiration and happened upon this beautiful window treatment published on Apartment Therapy.

Loved it then and still love it now.

Our present house has standard blinds throughout – nothing spectacular and  I’ve not made much of an attempt to modify the window treatments.  However, in light of the changes to our dining room this year, this lack of attention to the windows has been creating noise in my head.

Here’s the inspired side of the room (more views here and here).

and the not-so-inspired

Add to the mix our real-life challenge:  three little dogs and a kitty that like to look out the windows and sometimes bark (except for the cat) when they see something going on outside that didn’t have their prior approval.  We’re both at work during the day and can’t exactly monitor their activity.  So we didn’t want to purchase some gorgeously expensive silk draperies with a lovely puddled crumple on the floor just to have our adorable little dogs walk all over them.  Every. Single. Day. We want our house to be pretty, but pet-friendly at the same time.  Because let’s face it, we have animals that live indoors.

A few weeks back, the opportunity for this project came together after I made that scrumptious wall hanging for our bedroom.  In the process, I had to remove this set of curtain panels, hanging there previously.

They are a very simple synthetic blend open-weave curtain I purchased via overstock.com.  I washed them, did a bit of measuring and then set them aside for the idea to fully formulate in my head.  This step takes a while (cue the jeopardy music).

After percolation completed, I purchased some suspension curtain rods, cut the width of the two curtain panels to fit these three windows with a little extra allowance for a side hem, and hung them upside down — to avoid bulk at the top.

Guided by the look of the Apartment Therapy window, I just cut one panel per window and gathered it up with a length of cotton string looped over the top of the curtain rod, tied at the bottom.

After hanging the 3 panels, I took the top plates from the old blinds, added hooks on the back, and hung them on the wall to cover the curtain rods and create visual separation for the palladium window panes.

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So there we have it – a dog-friendly, soft-looking window treatment made from a pair of recycled curtain panels.

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{lighting note for those interested – Grand Manoir chandelier}

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For another home sweet homemade window treatment project featuring repurposed items, click here.

Thank you for reading!

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