I dream of having a whole house of Pottery Barn items someday. The store is just so glorious. But, until that dream becomes a reality, my goal is to decorate our house in that style with little sprinkles of Pottery Barn items… at a much lower price.

One area where we’ve done that – the family room. We knew pretty quickly that we wanted some beautiful drapes in the family room that would make the wall with the TV an accent wall and that would also soften up the area. I thought that by adding drapes, it would make the wall less about the monster sized TV and more about the overall feel of the room. We wanted to room to be cozy, inviting, and classic. I mentioned a few months ago that we ordered beautiful drapes from Pottery Barn (with a coupon -thanks Mom!) and were super excited to hang them up.

One of the hardest parts of the whole process was lining up both curtain rods to be at the same height. Since our house is older, our ceilings aren’t exactly level so we weren’t able to just measure from the top of the wall down. We had to carefully go back and forth measuring bottom to top, top to bottom, and any which way to make sure they were even. Then, we used a level to make sure the rods wouldn’t be lopsided. Once we were comfortable with that, we had to screw them in and hang them. We are not big fans of hanging curtain rods and get frustrated every time (not at each other, just at those stupid rods). It’s worth the effort though because they always end up looking wonderful at the end.

We had a feeling they would be too long after hanging them up and that feeling was confirmed immediately. We kept them hung up for a couple of weeks to decide what length we would prefer. I highly recommend that because you never know until you actually have them hanging in front of you for some time. Once we thought we knew what we wanted, I asked our superstar seamstress (aka my mom) to come over and pin them up. We pinned them shorter, longer, and in between to figure out what we liked best. We decided to have them just kiss the floor so they almost looked like they were puddling on the floor but not long enough that they were full puddles (if that makes sense). The reason for that is, as I mentioned before, our house is old and the walls aren’t all perfectly equal in height. We wanted both drapes to be the same length and feared that one side might end up hovering over the floor while the other side was puddling on the floor. To be safe, we decided to make them a little longer so you would never be able to tell the difference. It worked! They look perfect and you can’t even tell they were hemmed at all. My mom did such an amazing job! I’d explain how she did it but, to me, it’s all magic. I’m not quite sure how she does it so well. 🙂