Is your house ready for spring? My suggestion is to do your spring cleaning now so that you can ignore your interiors and concentrate on your gardens and having fun in the outdoors for the months to come.
I don’t actually like window treatments and prefer the clean beautiful window look. But… I live about 20 feet from my neighbor on a street that has a lot of sidewalk traffic so creating privacy is key. Draperies provide a way of adding color, dimension and texture as well as function.
Every year I change my curtains from a brown copper silk heavily lined to a white linen in April. Then back again in November. I simply store them in an Ikea armoire in the basement. Here are a few reasons why:
CHANGE IS GOOD: My house is small, so I welcome the opportunity for a fairly dramatic change at relatively low effort. Maybe I get bored more easily than most people of their interiors, but it’s far less cheap than having to buy new furniture or move!
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A DEEP CLEAN: I use this as an opportunity to pull my furniture out and clean under it as well as wash the windows, sills and drapery hardware. Doing this twice a year seems to be enough for me but wow, it gets gross fast. Here’s what I found under my furniture: (3) socks, 5 cat toys, 2 pens, a Christmas ornament and cat hair. They all found their way to the trash.
CHANGE OF LIGHT: The white linen allows sunlight to come into the house when we need to close the draperies before the sun has gone all the way down in the summer. I love the added light and white color of the warmer seasons. But when the weather turns again in November, I like creating a cozy, protected space with the darker, heavy draperies.
THE PROCESS:
- Remove the existing draperies and carefully fold them while you are standing on the furniture so that wrinkles are kept to a minimum. Folding in half, slide in the hanger.
- Move Furniture: I take an extra opportunity to move around furniture. You don’t have to do this, but why not? What else is already in your house that would also look good in that spot?
- Hang the new draperies and put the off-season draperies in hanging storage.
The entire process takes about an hour – or the amount of time it takes my husband to go to the grocery store (and I would much rather do this project than grocery shopping, that’s for sure!). Enjoy the process and accomplishment of a productive hour spent on your home.
NOTE: Check out Drapestyle.com for beautiful qualify and customized draperies for your home.