curtains, finally!!

living room window - after
Originally uploaded by Julep67.

Over the weekend, we took a drive up to IKEA in Ottawa. My brother lives in Ottawa so we got to visit him and do some shopping.

Seriously, I'm so glad (at times) that we don't have an IKEA store here. I'm afraid that our house would be even more IKEA-y than it is. Since we moved into the new house (in May), we've been making do with sheets on some of our windows. The house came with window coverings but some of them were in very bad shape.

In the living room, the window had a grubby looking lace sheer on it. The folks who lived her before smoked so you can imagine the colour of it! Not nice. For the first month or so, we made due without anything on the big window. Eventually, I broke down and found a blue sheet (because the sheets must coordinate with the furniture!) and hung it up. I use the term "hung" extremely loosely because I just sort of tucked it in around the screens.

In our bedroom, we got a little more creative. I bought a tension rod for the smaller window and we picked out and installed a really nice curtain rod over the large window. Again, I was able to coordinate sheets to the room (thank goodness we have a lot of sheets!!). On the large window, I clipped matching green flat sheets to the rod. This created two panels. On the tension rod, I hung a folded sheet over it and it didn't look that bad. I mean, it didn't look horrible but it was obvious that they were sheets. At least it wasn't newspaper (which is what I'd put up those first couple of weeks).

At IKEA, we picked up some really nice, heavy cotton, navy blue curtains and a neat grey/silver rod. The curtains have large grommits at the top so I didn't need to purchase anything more than the rod. In the bedroom, we got some funky, patterned curtains. They were from the children's section but I don't care. They have green in them that matches the paint, blue that matches our towels (in the adjoined bathroom) and gold that matches the fleck in the tile in the loo. I need to purchase a new quilt cover though. Our bedding (which was just something we picked up because we needed something quickly for our newly purchased king size bed) doesn't match. Not at all. I haven't taken pictures of the bedroom yet but I will. It looks amazing, I think. I also hung red star "holiday" lights between the curtains and the window so it looks like a really sparkly sheer. The room seems a lot bigger since they went in.

I haven't taken up the living room curtains but I did do the ones in the bedroom yesterday. The living room will have to wait until the weekend.

Oh, also, we purchased two (matching) birch shelves which Mark installed in our bedroom last night. The room just looks so much better, totally different. I really love it. It feels really good to be finally decorating the new house. For the past few months, we've just been so busy that we've done basic maintenance and had biggish things done (like to the furnace and the eaves). Now we're "nesting" and making a mark on the place. We have finally started to put up some artwork too so it is feeling more and more like home all the time!!