Baker's House: Curtains, Curtains, Curtains...

I have been wanting to change the curtains in our living room for some time now. I have been slowly changing up the decor in our living room with more "inky" blues and the pale blue curtains were not cutting it anymore. I knew that I wanted to make a bigger statement, so definitely something with a pattern or color...or both! I did some scouting on my new favorite obsession Pinterest and I noticed a theme. See if you can guess...

If your guess was stripes...you were right. A few problems presented...Matt did not like them. Wah, wah, waaaaah. He said they reminded him of a lighthouse, and then that was all I could think of when I looked at them. Secondly, this type of curtain starts around $60 a panel, and I needed at least four panels. That is around $240. That is not bad, but it was more than I wanted to spend. So I started "googling" around and found this...

Sorry that the picture is sideways :( I tried 100 ways to straighten it out and just couldn't. Anyway... these are painting drop cloths made into striped curtains! I found them here on Dana Millers blog: House Tweaking. She gives a great tutorial that I followed to make the curtains.

I started out by heading over to Lowe's to get drop cloths and paint. I bought three drop cloth panels each 6' X 9' they were $12.48 a piece. What a steal compared to the $60 a panel that I was looking at paying before. Next, I choose the color and ended up with Admiral Blue Olympic, No-VOC interior paint, in eggshell. I bought a quart thinking that would be plenty for $9.98. That would be three curtain panels for under $50 ($47.42 to be exact)!

I needed Matt's help to measure out the spacing and make sure that the lines...lined up. I did not want them to be wonky!

They did line up perfectly, they only look crooked because they are not lined up together on the garage floor. I did not want them to be too dark so I opted for a alternating pattern with a big ~~cream~~ white space in the middle. Here is one of the three panels:

Now didn't that look easy? It wasn't! This one panel took two hours of work. I promise that I am not a slow painter. First, lining up the frog tape for the stripes took a good amount of that time and two people. Once we had the lines straight, I had to start painting. Because it is fabric the paint soaked right in which meant lots of reloading the roller. I got one panel finished and had used 3/4 of the quart of paint that I purchased. I was finished for the day, but on Sunday I went back to Lowe's and bought a gallon of my paint to finish the last two panels (making the total for this project $71.90 with the addition of the extra gallon). By Wednesday they were finished and ready to hang. I am in love! Just one thing, I wanted to change out the curtain rod and clips that we had in the living room. The curtain rod was a textured white, and I purchased silver clips from Target a while back, but wanted a cohesive look for the next curtains. I chose Oil Rubbed Bronze spray paint by Rustoleum (which I had on hand). I laid everything out on paper bags. It took several light coats to achieve the look I wanted (oops, I forgot to take a shot of the curtain rods).