Curtain Battle Royale

Today we went to war. We won some battles, lost others. Earlier this week, I bought a bunch of curtains at TJMaxx, Marshall's, Home Goods, and Garden Ridge. Oh, and Target. Here's a selection below.

If a curtain didn't come in a panel pair, we just bought one panel, just so we weren't buying a bajillion curtains. We wound up with around 15 total (pairs counting as one). As of last night, we were down to the light brown, wove Nate Berkus from Target and the sheer linen grommet (that was the same length as our silvers). Even though the white sheer linen was our original vision, we had become intrigued with the idea of bringing some warmth and texture to the treatments. But try as we might, we just weren't getting it. We wanted the Berkus to be longer and grommeted, but when we found a similar material with grommets, the length issue still wasn't working. And it just didn't look as nice as our heads told us it  would.

I fell in love with these curtains below, but they weren't long enough, and doing everything at 84 inches instead of 96 just wasn't going to fly. As much as I liked them, I couldn't keep at $40 pair of curtains on the hope they might work somewhere else (we didn't find an immediate spot).

We wound up going with the white linens and will use other decorations to warm up the area. We're thinking of re-purposing the kitchen uppers as a reading bench under the window.

Since we had all of these curtains, we ran around the house putting them up in different rooms to see what we liked. We don't want too many drapes collecting dust, but it is a nice way to spruce up a space. The dining room curtains were nice but dark, so we through up the Raw Silk and some patterned sheers - and the space completely changed! 

Pardon the apparent darkness. It's much lighter in here, but my camera was refusing
 to flash due to the snowy light coming in.

The room is still incredibly mismatched right now as a dumping ground and we haven't removed the wallpaper, but we now have renewed interest in the room. It was weird, even though we usually left the navy curtains open, so much more light seems to be flooding into the room. My camera didn't want to show you that, though, because it was so focused on all the light that it kept darkening the shots. Manual settings were overrode.

So at this point, we're batting 4 out of 15. I also grabbed a pair of curtains for the kitchen, which I rather like and Mike is iffy about. It's a point of contention. Much of the kitchen is up in the air.

These also have that linen sheerness to them, and I find them rather cheerful. We're playing around between blues and greens (with a gray base) for the kitchen palette, so I feel like this will give some guidance but still be flexible. Of course, we need to figure out whether or not we're going to paint those cabinets. A decision that probably won't happen until the upper cabinets come down (soon!!) and we see how it changes the feel of the room.

So the day started out well. Bedroom curtains done (minus the decision on shades down the road), dining room curtains surprising done, and kitchen curtains done(?). The rest of the done kind of spiraled down from there. We thought curtains were wrong. Oh ho! No. Rugs bring a whole new form of torture.

Next up: Battle of the Rugs