Curtains!

Steve and I purchased curtains for our living room.

This was not recently, mind you. This was years ago, when I was actually pregnant with Nicholas. And it was then that I first realized that buying and putting up curtains, while on the surface a simple task, is actually quite complicated and more like performing dental surgery on one's own self with an ice skate.

The curtains we ended up with were dark purple, which was great, but this summer I bought new sheers to put behind them. Since the dark curtains were also very matted with cat hair, I sent them off to the dry cleaners, and we spent all summer with simple sheer curtains hanging in our windows, set off by the dark tie-backs and the valences up top... it was actually a nice look.

But since the days are getting shorter and colder, I thought it would be time to put the other curtains up again. And while I was at it, I could give the actual windows a swipe with windex, just to get the dog snot off of the panes. Again, sounds easy, right? Yeah, until someone handed me an ice skate and told me to open wide.

I don't know what it is about tasks like this that causes everything to go wrong. First of all, it turned out the new sheers were about 6 inches longer than the purple curtains, so after hanging the first window I had to take everything down and quickly hem all eight sheer panels. They are still too long, but not horribly so. Then I had to re-hang, which again sounds easy, but the thing is I couldn't always get the curtains rods on the anchor thingies... and then the curtains just wouldn't hang right - they looked funny. Then I had to find ways to attach the tie-backs that had been ripped out of the wall. And then, hanging my last window curtain, I realized that one window panel was about 3 feet shorter than the others, and it was then that I remembered purchasing the curtains 4 years ago, going to 3 different SEARS stores, and still not finding eight panels in the right length, so buying one much shorter than the others and putting it behind the TV, which was of course the FIRST place I had hung curtains, so I had to go back and undo that one and then re-do it and then re-do the last one again.

All in all, what I pictured taking me an hour ended up taking me five.