Window Talk

In our last post, we showed you our new firewood rack. We also inadvertently showed you another project we worked on this weekend: our new dining room windows.

The window above the stack of firewood looked like this last weekend:

A rogue chunk of plaster went flying through the single pane glass during our dining room demolition. We covered it up with a sheet of plywood and ignored it for over 6 weeks. You can see a bit of the top right hand corner:

We pretended we were pioneering a new look called shanty-chic. Our neighbors pretended not to notice.

While I stacked firewood in the basement, Bradley swapped out both windows by himself. It took him about an hour to do both. And that includes removing the old window weights and insulting the hollow crevices. (The process was exactly the same as when we changed the windows in the office upstairs. You can read about that here.)

Here’s how the windows look now:

The dining room was always one of the most cold spots in our house — more so when our window was busted and cold air came streaming in. After swapping out the window, we noticed a difference right away. The room stays warmer, even though the walls aren’t insulated. And it’s only going to get better from here.

We can officially scratch dining room windows off of our Just Say No(vember) to-do list. We got a head start on another project as well:

A few weekends ago, we picked up some curtains for the office and guest bedroom.

We snagged 3 sets of the Hedda Blad for $15 a pair. And 2 sets of Matilda for the guest bedroom for $24.99 a pop.

We picked up 5 Skuggig curtain rods for $20 a pop.

IKEA’s instruction sheets are a little cryptic, but we managed to figure them out. First things first: we measured out how high we wanted our curtain rods and marked the wall:

Next, we drilled our pilot holes:

We put wall anchors into each hole.

Wall anchors help distribute weight of whatever you hang on them, so we like using them for things like curtain rods.

Putting in wall anchors is super easy. You gently push the anchor into your pilot hole, then use a hammer to lightly tap it in. After that, you put your screw right into your anchor and you’re set. (If super-detailed instructions float your boat, check out this site.)

Next up, we hung our rods:

We decided to cut our rods because they were much wider than our curtains.

The curtain rods are aluminum so we could use a grinder to cut them. We marked our cuts with painter’s tape and lobbed off a bit from one end.

The guest bedroom curtains are a gauzy white with a light vertical stripe pattern.We love how they let in plenty of sunlight but still give us lots of privacy. We decided not to hem the guest bedroom curtains because we liked how they grazed the floor. Curtain length is kinda tricky. Too short and they look silly, too long and they look comical. We asked ourselves WWWED — What Would West Elm Do?

Source: West Elm

Source: West Elm

Good enough! We let the curtains kiss the floors:

One one problem: our window has a radiator right in front of it.

Doh! Not so pretty. And we can’t just turn it around and shove it near the wall because it’s too wide. Luckily, we have an extra radiator in the purple room:

We tore down the wall between the purple room and the master bedroom, so we don’t really need another radiator in there. This one is taller and skinner than the guest bedroom radiator. We could — hypothetically — put it next to the window. That way the curtains wouldn’t be in the way. We dragged it into the guest bedroom to give it a shot:

We had to do a quick swap of the pipe fittings. Bradley headed them with a soldering torch:

He heated the fitting and then we tried to pry off the fitting with a wrench. It took longer than we expected.

…annnnnd the fitting still didn’t come off. So we left the radiators for another day and hung curtains in the office:

These puppies definitely need to be hemmed.

We used the same curtain rods in both the guest bedroom and the office, but they look totally different:

The office ceilings are so short (less than the standard 8′), so we tried hanging the rods from the ceiling. We loved the way they look similar but different.

We snuck in the next morning to see how the curtains look with sunlight streaming in:

Ooh la la!

Love that soft glow!

We also snagged this clock from IKEA:

We loved its simple, old-school-cool look. And when we saw this, it went straight into our cart:

We couldn’t help ourselves — we’re total suckers for pugs.

We’re off to catch up on Dexter and The Walking Dead rest up for this weekend’s projects. We’ll be back with updates soon!