Shitty Landlords.

As one of my colleagues says, when you buy a house you are your own shitty landlord.  So true! Today's post is a "simple" before and after.  It's also an example of a project that moved way up to #1 on the old priority list out of pure necessity.  

When we moved into our house there were no window coverings, so we ran over to the nearest Ikea (which happens to be two minutes away!) to pick up some temporary shades.  For just $3 these were a major score!  The first thing you have to understand is that this is a strangely placed and oddly sized window.  Evidence below.  And the guest bedroom is identical.

Ignore the big white blob on the floor.  That's there for a future project.

See that guy there in the corner? Well I imagined a fun patterned shade or something.  But since we have to hold off on painting anything until we can resolve our insulation issue my days at the fabric store are few and far between.

This is not ok...

Well, four months later we're just getting to some permanent solutions.  And I'm ashamed to say that we're only replacing the shade in our bedroom now because our neighbors installed a pesky light that makes our room too bright at night.  After a full week of waking up in the middle of the night we couldn't take it anymore!  So off to Ikea we went.

My husband spotted this guy and after some convincing I agreed to give it a try.  For the record, I wanted white.

Once we got home, we measured the window.  Backwards, I know, but we had a rough idea.  It turned out that we needed to trim the rod a bit, which required taking the whole thing apart and using a hand saw to cut off about an inch.

Since we already had to take it apart, the hubby decided to cut off the almost two feet of extra length.

And voila!  Here's the finished product.  Ultimately, we'll paint the walls a light grey and probably go with white curtains on the big (normal) window to keep the space bright and crisp!

By the way, generally anywhere I use "we" I mean "my husband."  Credit where credit is due, you know?