it's curtains for me

In November and December the thermometer dipped down, the winds whipped around our house, and the drafts began.  Our house has really effecient furances (somebody doubled the size of the house in the 70s and instead of redoing the ductwork in the original house just added a separate furnace) and decent insulation, but not so great windows.  Also, we're incredibly deficient in curtains.  Several rooms had none at all, and those that did tended to have really hideous blinds, many of them vertical. My first act on moving in two years ago was to take them all down.  Unfortunately, I didn't put anything back up, chosing instead to study each room and decide what would be best, then redo each room one by one.

Or so I said.  Mostly necessity has forced my hand in each room to gain curtains: first my daughter became afraid of shadows, and as she already had a pretty curtain rod, all it took was a trip to Target.  $60 later I had three purple paisley Simply Chic panels put up, and they've served well since.  Next came our bedroom -- what forced my hand there was my husband's first overnight shift at the hospital.  To effectively sleep during the day, he was going to need some light blocking curtains.  This time I had to buy a curtain rod as well, so $100 and a trip to JC Penney later, we had curtains in our bedroom.

Everything pretty much came to a standstill until this fall when those winds started whipping around.  The drafts started up, but we kept the theromstat down in an effort to save money.  So with the house set at 64, 66 on a really cold day, I sat in the family room with frozen fingers, the draft of the sliding door and three sets of badly installed windows whipping around me.  I was cold, but I was also cheap.  I didn't want blinds in the family room, I wanted rich, thick, room-darkening, insulating curtains -- and with that sliding door, it was going to be pricey.  Best I could manage was a really ugly panel and $150 minimum for curtain and hardware to cover the door -- alone.  And since I wanted the other windows to match, I was going to break $500 really fast.  All this and I wasn't getting the rich, pretty fabric I wanted.

I managed to get to fabric.com and find some very nice chenille upholstery fabric on clearance: for less than $100 (with shipping!) I got nearly 20 yards of fabric, and with it a brainstorm.  You see, our family room is very cozy, but has no doors and opens into a long, long hallway leading to the toyroom, the downstars bathroom, and the basement.  It also opens into the original part of the house, which features an open dining and living area.  So part of my cozy family room is a hallway which in its full expanse well over 100 feet long.  Maybe even 150 feet.  Not so good with the feng shui.  My brainstorm was to put up two panels at the natural borders of the family room, closing it off.  It would make it homier and have a practical function as well: in the winter we could run the fireplace or a space heater and have a lot of heat in a small space.  But once the fabric box came (Over six feet long!  That impressed the UPS man.), I didn't exactly jump up and start sewing.  I didn't have any hardware, and I really suck at putting that stuff up.  I asked my FIL to do it, and my husband, and we all talked about it a lot, but it never happened. 

Then it became January at we got our December heating bill.

$300!  For just the natural gas!!!  Here I am, freezing my ass off, and I'm STILL paying $300!  Boy did that piss me off -- enough, in fact, to start me sewing, and get me to Lowes and get fires under my husband and FIL.  And now I have curtains. 

I can make the family room dark as night at noon, if I choose.  I have rich, gorgeous jaquard-print chenille curtains: gold on red for the windows and door, and cream on olive for the  hallway sections.  (Those are impressive, at nearly 8' in length.)  The curtains hang from ridiculously simple hoop-and-clips from Lowe's, on very lovely gold rods, from the same.  The family room is very cozy and elegant.  But most importantly -- it is WARM.

Because I also bought a small heater at Target for $40.  In less than five mintues this room, whose theromstat is set at 60, can be so toasty you're tempted to take off your socks.  Since the hall-blocking curtains went up, I've kept the house at 60 degrees or less and used this room as a warm-up place.  At this very moment I've moved my laptop in here.  Most of the cats are in here, my daughter has PBS going while she plays with her Playmobil, and we're at a very comfortable 70 degrees.  I'm even considering turning the sucker to low, because I'm almost hot.

I have no idea how much money I'm going to save, and the electric bill will probably go up a bit.  But I'm not cold anymore, and I have very pretty curtains.  And I made them myself, which in the middle of the project seemed like a damn stupid idea, but now that it's done, my frugal heart beams with pride at how fricking awesome they look.

Ha.