DIY Curtain Rod

When we moved into our townhouse almost 5 1/2 years ago, it was pretty obvious lots of things needed to be updated.  The back wall of the home is almost entirely 2 sliding doors, one of them being oversized.  Both sliding doors had these awful vertical blinds on them.  These blinds were white-ish (I’m pretty sure they started life as white but were yucky now), some were broken & being held up by paper clips, we couldn’t fully open them anymore, my husband was the only one that could close them correctly and no matter how many times I cleaned them, they were grimy & ugly.

Since the main door was wider than normal windows & doors (108 inches wide), I was having a hard time finding any curtains that would fit.  I thought about getting 3 panels for the curtain rod but then I had a really hard time finding a rod that would fit & wasn’t $60!  After searching online for what seemed like months, I found 2 different tutorials that I used to make a curtain rod for our window!  I owe The Tall Chick &  House of Hepworths a million thanks for their tutorials because I am seriously not a DIY/crafty girl (although I want to be!) and I need to have someone walk me through a project and that’s just what their blog posts did!

The first thing I did was head into Home Depot and find my way to the electrical metal conduit. Needless to say, I’ve never needed this section of Home Depot before so I was a tiny bit intimidated but I found what I needed right away.  I grabbed 2 pieces of 1/2in by 10ft conduit and LOVED that each other the pipes were only $2 each!  My husband already had a tubing cutter and I know he’s great at measuring, so I let him take care of that part.  I headed to the spray paint section and asked the woman what the best primer for metal was & she suggested Rust-oleum Clean Metal Spray Primer (which also did double duty when I used it on my painted metal owls.)  I also picked up Rust-oleum Flat Protective Enamel in black.  I also picked up 4 packages of curtain clip rings and 4 curtain rod brackets.

The last thing we needed to decide on was if we were going to leave the ends of the rods as is or add something to it.  I then learned that the things at the end of the curtain rods are called finials.  I looked at some but really, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money.  I looked around & some people used antique doorknobs (which looked amazing but I had no idea where to get any!).  We both sort of suggested cabinets knobs & so I headed to World Market to see what I could find.  After deciding what colors the curtains were going to be (more on that in the next blog post!), I found cabinets knobs that I loved and then we got to work.

First thing I did with the rod was sand it a bit so the paint would stick to it better.  After sanding it, I took rubbing alcohol & some paper towels & rubbed the whole area, making sure it was clean.  My husband secured the rod to a step stool we have, with clamps.  We actually had a hard time figuring out how to paint the rod so we improvised.  I primed half of the rod, waited for it to dry, then carefully slide the rod down & primed the other half.  I left it dry overnight & in the morning, there were some spots I had to touch up from the clamps but it wasn’t bad at all.  After the primer was completely dry, I started spray painting with my flat black paint.  It only took 2 coats and then we let the rod dry overnight.

 In order to get the knobs to fit into the ends of the rod, Daniel cut a small piece from a wooden dowel.  He drilled a pilot hole into each one & threaded the knobs into the pieces of wood.  After I was done painting, he used Gorilla Glue & glued one into the end of the rod but just set the other on in so we can always get the curtain rings on or off.

Installing the curtain rod was pretty simple (once I got the curtains squared away & ironed, which was awhile!).  I am very happy with the results and really glad I took a chance on doing this DIY project.  Next post will be about how I “made” curtains for my windows!