Lounge Room Curtains

In making a house a home, curtains can play a big part. Since moving into my home almost nine years ago, I have made new curtains for almost every room in the house - some rooms more than once! Apart from windows that have not yet had curtains made, the last room to have new curtains made is the lounge room.

There were a few reasons why it took me so long to make new curtains for this room, not one of which because I wanted to keep the existing curtains. It's a big decision to make curtains for the most used room in the house.

New curtains for door

New curtains behind our lounge

I didn't know what colour scheme would suit the house best, as the rest of the room is all timber furniture, floorboards, and brown lounges. I didn't really want brown curtains (we already have a brown / tan scheme happening in the bedroom, as well as my studio). I wanted something that would add a bit of colour and even some glamour to the room. It has only been in the last 12 months that we finally have the furniture that we want in this room, so there wasn't much point doing new curtains prior to that. When we were looking at a new dining suite and decided the colour of the chairs, we made a decision about the curtains, and ordered fabric that matched the chair covers.

My next issue was the style of curtain. That took a lot of thought, and many conversations with a friend and local curtain installer, who was invaluable in talking me through his preferred methods of hanging curtains. I needed something that would block out as much light as possible. In our lounge room we opted for a projector rather than a TV (size over quality!) so need to have the room as dark as possible to be able to see the screen, which can be a problem, especially with the sun streaming through our west facing windows in the late afternoon (which also causes havoc when trying to take photos).

My one tenth scale drawing of my plans

Our original curtains were hung on large wooden rings hanging from wooden rails. They didn't slide smoothly, and every now and then you would find a hook on the floor, and maybe a broken ring. There wasn't much still holding them up by the time we took them down.

Previous curtains

Previous curtains behind the lounge

Old curtain rods coming down

My decision on the style was for inverted pleats. I love the clean look from the front of the curtains, and you can add as much or as little fullness as you like into the pleats. I added as much as I could given the amount of fabric that I had to work with. When we ordered the fabric last year I hadn't yet made a decision about the style of curtain, so did a rough guesstimate on how much fabric I would need. Given the cost of the fabric, I didn't want any to go to waste, and I plan on making matching cushions with the leftover trim fabric.

Close up

They are hung using drapery hooks, something I have never worked with before. I was a bit worried about the amount of weight that those sharp little hooks would be holding up, but they seem to be doing just fine.

I'm going to call this a rather large stash bust, given that I used up 23.9 metres of fabric (upholstery and blockout lining), but feel that I'm cheating just a little due to the fact that I bought this last year when I had banned myself from buying any fabric at all. I justified the purchase though as it was bought for this very specific purpose, and there was never any doubt that this is what it would be used for.

Time to make: around 13 hours.

Time spent on calculations and drawing up plans? That I didn't keep track of. Far too long, I'm thinking. But now that I have done these inverted pleat curtains and I know how they will turn out, if I were to do more (which I just might), I'd have the calculations done in no time at all.

So, what do you think? Just the right amount of elegance?

Curtain railings by A Fitting Solution