Last week I mentioned (here) that we had been working on a couple of minor projects for the living room. One is our fireplace upgrade to electric logs, and the other is adjusting our existing draperies for ring clips.

It’s not anything major, but it is really beneficial for us. We bought the drapery panels a few years ago in an effort to help insulate the huge glass sliding door and for privacy. The houses behind our house sit on a hill slightly above us, so they can see over our fence and into our back yard and house.

The draperies were made to just slide onto the rod… so that’s what we did. The problem with this method was that it made it hard to pull them back. Which is a must in our house because we love the natural daylight and the view of the back yard.

FYI: This picture was taken in the summer and does not depict the lack-of-color state it is in now.

So in the end, we found we really didn’t close them that much. Especially since the draperies really didn’t help with keeping the downstairs any warmer. Thankfully, we have electric logs for that problem now. I’m not really sure why we didn’t want to go with the ring clips when we purchased the draperies a few years ago. Oh, well!

I’m pretty sure ML came up with the idea (we will give him the credit) to use our existing draperies and fold the top down to compensate for the added length of the ring clips. Making it easier to open and close plus helping the draperies not look as heavy. I really liked the idea, so off he went to BB&B (Bed, Bath, and Beyond) and picked out ring clips on his own! He came back with two different sizes for me to choose from.

So we took two drapery panels down and began our transformation. Before we attached the clips though, we washed the drapes. The tag said dry clean only, but we went out on a limb and washed them and then hung them back up to dry. We laid garbage bags on the floor to catch any water that dripped off. We are happy to report that they turned out just fine after washing them!

ML being the more mathematically inclined person calculated how much the draperies needed to be folded. Then he divided the length of the curtain, so he would have equal spacing between the ring clips.

We hung both sizes up, so we would be certain which one worked best. It took us all of about two seconds to decide we liked the larger rings best. But we left them up for a few days weeks just to be sure or because I forgot to take pictures of them hanging up.

You can see the difference in the two different size rings on the right. (Sorry for such a dark picture… and ignore Buddy the cat.) So Saturday while we were out and about running errands, we returned the smaller ring clips to BB&B and bought three more packs of the larger ring clips. Then, while I was cooking supper that night (which involved a horrible accident of me rubbing my eye with jalapeno juice, crying my mascara off, and going blind for a few seconds), ML folded the rest of the panels down. Then, he pinned the ends to keep them from looking funny and hung them up with the ring clips.

And since we didn’t harm the draperies by pinning them, if we want to ever go back to the old way of hanging them we can. I’m not really sure why we would though. Now that they are up, we aren’t sure what took us so long to hang them this way. They are so easy to open and close and take up way less space when they are pulled back.

Originally, I felt like we needed a longer curtain rod, but now I really don’t because they take up so much less room. It’s hard to believe they are the same draperies. We also love the look of the ring clips attached to them.

And here’s a little secret… the clips aren’t the same color as the rod. No big deal though because you can’t really tell the difference from a distance.

So anyway, now if we want a little privacy, we can easily close our draperies.

What do you think? Do you have any projects that have been half completed for a while? Or have you made any drapery transformations recently?

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