Our house has an unusually short sliding glass door, adorned with vertical blinds. Nothing terribly wrong with vertical blinds, but they lack flair.
When hung low on an already short slider, the blinds make the whole thing look rather squat. And compared to the rather tall window in the family room, which is directly next to the dining area, it looks like they’re miles apart.
The only thing making me a little reluctant to ditch the verticals is this…
An asterisk.
An unclaimed asterisk that was mysteriously drawn on said vertical blind.
Oddly enough, my 12-year-old son admitted to drawing a similar asterisk in the dust on our TV (yeah, no pic of that), and even admitted to this artistic endeavor on our piano…
Needless to say, in the hierarchy of bad ideas, the piano carving was certainly worse than the asterisk on the blind, and even though I swear I did not freak out over the piano art, still no one is coming forward and admitting to the vertical blind asterisk.
Oh well. I digress. Back to the curtains.
A while back I joined the drop cloth revolution by using drop cloths as curtains in my family room.
Figured I’d continue the war on bland window coverings and use a large drop cloth for the slider as well. But needed to come up with a clever option for the curtain rod, since I didn’t want to use a support in the middle of the rod, so that one curtain could pull all the way across the door.
So I thought of using plumbing pipe. The hardware store will cut it to size and add threads at the ends, so you can screw it into the flanges. (Be sure to factor in the width of flanges when you’re taking your measurements.)
I bought the black pipe, but it’s more of a gunmetal gray, plus it has writing on it, so I spray painted it black.
After the paint dried, I screwed the left side base into the wall at the same height as the curtain rod over the family room window.
And screwed in the flange…
Then screwed the pipe into the flange. Since it was just me installing without a helper, I left the vertical blind header up and leaned the pipe on the header, then slid the clips on, then screwed on the flange and base and attached it to the wall.
I checked the pipe to ensure it was level, marked the placement for the right side base, and screwed in the right side. Then I removed the vertical blinds header and patched the wall.
Next up, I spent about 2 hours ironing the 9′ x 15′ drop cloth.
Finally, I clipped the drop cloth and voila! Goodbye vertical blinds, hello industrial chic curtains!
Open…
Closed…
Looks like my sliding glass door is wearing an awesome pair of old khakis! Love it!
My little dog likes them too…
And guess what? The whole project cost just under 60 bucks!
Dropcloth – $22
Plumbing pipe & accessories – $15
Spray paint – $7
Curtain ring clips 3 @ $5 each – $15
TOTAL – $59
Window covering and rod for a sliding door for 60 smackers is almost unheard of. Almost. Except for here. Plus I love the way it looks! Don’t you?
Showing off this project at…
