How to Make Cheap and Pretty Curtain Rods

Our new house has a lot of windows on our main floor, which is awesome for natural light and making the space seem bigger.  But what is not awesome is when you have to walk from the upstairs bedroom down to the basement to shower in the morning and in your sleepy stupor forget to put some pants on. 

So for the sake of our neighbors, we had to get some curtains. I was a bit intimidated at what it was going to cost because of the amount of windows we have.  Not only the amount but 3 of the 6 windows in the main living area are over 7 feet wide.  I ended up finding some curtains that I really liked that were on sale plus I scoured the internet for a coupon and found one that saved me an additional $25. 

The excitement of my curtain score was quickly killed as I realized I now had to buy curtain rods for all these windows.  If you have ever shopped for extra long curtain rods you will know that they are not cheap!  Some of the extra long non-telescoping ones can reach prices of over $100 and we just couldn't afford to buy at least 3 of those for JUST the rod. 

So I started thinking of how I could DIY something to hang my curtains...wire, wood dowels, metal, plastic, pipes. Wait a minute.  Metal, pipes...Electrical conduit!  This stuff was perfect.  It comes in different widths, standard about 10 feet long, I can cut it to the length I need and THE BEST PART....

I had a lot of Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint at home that I could use and I found some great finials at IKEA that were on sale.  Love that store.

The process went something like this:

I removed the pricing stickers and painted the rods with Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze.  I let them dry for a week to be sure they were completely cured.  Ok, I just got caught up in some other things around the house and didn't get back to the rods until a week later. 

The finials that I bought came completely apart so I was able to spray paint them in ORB spray paint (Oil Rubbed Bronze) as well to match. 

I used Gorilla Glue Epoxy to attach the disk of the finial to the rod. 

And then use some tape to keep them in place while they dried.  I gave them a good two hours to completely set even though the package only called for 30 minutes.

I put the curtains on the rod and screwed the glass orb of the finial into the ends and it was done! 

Curtain rods for our windows that didn't break the bank!

(Crown molding will be added to cover that white strip at the top)

Materials
-Electrical conduit ($3.79)
-Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze (It's between $6-$7 but I already had some)
-IKEA Blast finials (I got them for $5.99)
-Gorilla Glue epoxy ($5.99, I needed this for some other projects as well)

My wallet and my neighbors thank me.

Marriage Counseling and Swedish Meatballs

The Hubster and I were married this past summer on June 29^th.  It was exactly what we had wanted and to this day is my biggest DIY project that I am the most proud of...until the kids come along ;) We did everything we were supposed to leading up to the wedding including pre-marital counseling, we even went on a marriage retreat.

Pre-marital counseling can evoke all kinds of emotions from men and women alike.  Men’s most common fear feeling: “I’m gonna have to sit around in a circle and talk about my feelings all day” while women worry about “Why doesn’t he care what color flowers the bridesmaids will carry?! Doesn’t he love me?!”  I myself thought that someone was going to sit there and tell us if we were compatible or not.  After 7 years together, I think we had that figured out on our own.

Now I will say that we were urged to talk about some tough subjects that I appreciate now but I have come up with the key component that is and has been missing from pre-marital counseling for decades.

Are you ready for this?

I'm not kidding here people.  I came upon this revelation after a recent trip to IKEA which therefore led to assembling our purchases.  

For those of you who have been living under a rock, IKEA is a Swedish company registered in the Netherlands that designs and sells furniture, appliances, and home accessories. This place has everything…literally.  Where else can you go shopping for a kitchen sink while getting an art piece for your wall right after you’ve picked out a duvet cover and then grabbing some Swedish meatballs for lunch right before you go pick up your kids from the indoor playground?

It is the Mecca for all homeowners and DIY’ers the world over.

IKEA tends to strike fear into the hearts of men everywhere.  Joe was no exception when I suggested we head there on a recent trip to Minneapolis.  We got to IKEA and I struck a deal with the hubster.  “For every 10 minutes we are in here that you don’t complain you will earn a star.  For every 5 stars you earn, you get a prize.”  It sounded good to him so in we went. 

We strolled through the movie-set like house set-ups looking for storage solutions and kitchen ideas.  Joe was doing SO well until I apparently spent too much time in the curtains department.  He had a bit of a meltdown so I tried to speed it up. Four hours later we were out after a short pit stop for some fish-n-chips and Swedish meatballs in the stores massive cafeteria...and because he had done so well he got a big hotdog after checkout for 50 cents.

Fast forward a week and a half and it came time to put together our big purchase- the Varde kitchen island I mentioned in Sunday’s post.  All IKEA projects go something like this:

Take this:

Turn it into this:

While trying not to do this:

 This is not an exaggeration.  Not. In. The. Slightest.

This is the only picture I have from the whole process.  Too many other things to pay attention to...like not losing one of the above mentioned 276 screws.  

After all was said and done this guy now sits in our kitchen providing some much needed counter space and storage. 

Excuse the mess. This is real life, people.

Like I mentioned on Sunday it will eventually get painted to match the cabinets. But for now we are just enjoying him the way he is and thanking him for the lesson in spousal conflict resolution.

While Hubby's Away, the Wife Will Play (with power tools)

We've been MIA for awhile now, but in all honesty what I'm sharing with you today is literally all that has been going on in the house for the past month and a half. I didn't want to share it part way through the project because I felt the reveal would lose some if it's WOW power. I'm talking about painting our kitchen cabinets people. I'm. In. Love. More than the floors but not quite as much as my husband.

 This is a project I knew I had wanted to do before we had ever even found a house. All those poor unsuspecting kitchens out there never stood a chance.  I've loved the look of white cabinets for a long time.  But since buying brand new custom cabinets just isn't really in the budget right now, painting them was the perfect solution. I did a lot of reading on different methods for painting cabinets; spraying, rolling, brushing, etc. etc. etc. I decided on using a Rustoleum Cabinet Transformation kit. This kit ran us around $70 and it's supposed to cover about 100 square feet.  *supposed to*

The first thing we did was take the cabinet doors off, take all the hardware off of them, and wash them down.

Then came deglossing. Deglossing is exactly what it sounds like- taking the gloss off the surface. This is necessary so the paint can really adhere to the surface. There are two methods for deglossing; sanding with a fine-grit sandpaper or a chemical deglosser. Rustoleum's kit uses a chemical deglosser. With a scrub pad, plastic gloves, and a bottle of deglosser, I went after the doors.  This process also does a good job of getting the built up grime off. It was amazing how much gunk came off that wasn't visible to the naked eye beforehand. This step became a bit old after the 2nd week but I sucked it up because if you skimp on this step, it will ruin the entire project because your paint won't adhere very well.

 

Then came painting. I painted the backs of the door first to get the method down- if I was gonna screw up I wanted it to be on the back of the door where no one could see it. The instructions tell you to do one thin even coat, let dry, and then do one more white coat and it is "supposed to" be good.  Wouldn't it be nice if projects worked out perfectly the way they're supposed to according to directions?! After 2 coats it looked...bad.

I was frustrated and a bit panicky at this point because I thought I had ruined the cabinets. Our cabinets weren't bad to start off with. They're actually very well-built solid oak cabinets and I'd be lying if I said no one had tried to talk me out of painting them. But since I was past the point of no return I put another coat on. The 3rd coat pretty much did the trick, there were just a few spots in the cracks that needed a 4th touch up layer.  I had heard that the white color didn't cover very well like the darker colors do. We don't have a very big kitchen so if you're wanting to do this in white and your kitchen is bigger, get an extra can or two of bond coat!

The white bond coat is pretty cool stuff. After painting it, the brush strokes for the most part disappeared. Since our cabinets are oak you can still see the indents of the wood grain, it's not a smooth factory like finish, which also helped to hide any brush strokes that may have been left behind. Long story short, they got 3 coats of white and 2 coats of protective top coat.

We also bought new hardware. Adding new hardware is the easiest way to update your cabinets if you don't want to go all out by painting them. We chose the Lansa handles from Ikea. This was an inexpensive update at around $85 for the whole kitchen.

1st door goes up at 2:30 am

The Hubster was gone this weekend and I wanted to get the doors back on before he got home.  I grabbed the power drill and at 2:30 in the morning the dog and I put them back up.  This was not an easy task to hold the door, align the door, put the screw in and drill it all by yourself but I was determined and I succeeded.














But after a month and half....here is our new kitchen!

Before

After

After

After

I have to buy some longer screws to attach the handles to the drawers.  The drawer fronts are thicker than the cabinet doors so the screws that came from IKEA aren't long enough.  And the door that goes underneath the sink...well, that hinge and I are fighting so I'm gonna see if Hubster can fix it.

Directly behind me in the last picture there is a 7 1/2 foot tall cabinet that will serve as the pantry.  We added a toekick to that last week but now we have to secure it to the wall.

We bought this guy at IKEA.  His name is Varde and I think he's pretty neat.  This will sit perpendicular to the stove creating an L-shape with the other counters.  It will add some MUCH needed storage and counter space.  He'll eventually get painted to match everything else but that's not at the top of my list right now.

Next on the list is trimming out the dining room window, patio door, and walk-thru between the living room and dining room.  Joe has about half of those boards primed and painted so he has to put those up this week.

 We will also FINALLY be ordering carpet this week for the upstairs. Then we can move our furniture up there and quit camping out on our bedroom floor.  Not that it hasn't been fun but I'd rather keep the camping for all the fun camping equipment we got for our wedding...and for the outdoors.