I am not particularly gifted at home repairs or home maintenance… or home cleaning. I was doing laundry this evening when it struck me: I washed the kitchen curtains back sometime in the summer, and they never got hung back up. They got very neatly folded and stuck out of my reach on a shelf in the laundry closet. Since it’s been cold around here lately, I decided it’d be a good idea to hang them back up, providing some more insulation and privacy – the old white sheer curtains that the owners left up are up year round, but we usually have them overhung with the big, bright, stripey curtains.
The curtain rod has curtain rings hung from it, but we’ve never had – or been able to find – the requisite clamps that go in the eyelets that are connected to the rings. I had previously jury-rigged our tab curtains to the curtain rings by putting safety pins through the folded-over tabs and threading the safety pins through the eyelets on the bottom of the rings. “I am a domestic engineer now,” I said to myself foolishly, “and I want these curtains to be on that curtain rod CORRECTLY. This cannot be that hard to achieve.”
Upon further inspection of the curtain rod, I found out that I’d have to unscrew the finial at one end of the rod…. and it’s the only finial. Like so many things in this remodeled home, the person who did the renovation seems to have misjudged the width of several doorframes and windowframes by the length of one finial. You don’t notice until about 18 months after you move in, at which point you say, man, I should really clean those curtains. The cat hair is obscuring the pattern on the drapes on the bottom ten inches of the drapes. So I unscrewed the finial. No dice – the curtain rod didn’t budge.
Upon even further inspection of the curtain rod, it was screwed down at both ends. So I unscrewed one end, and the track that holds the sheer curtain up fell down at one end. It was at that moment that I discovered the curtain rod upon which I wanted to hang the stripey, heavier curtains actually is attached to the sheer curtain’s rod by brackets that slip OVER the brackets holding the sheer curtain’s rod in place. I popped the first one off the leftmost end of the curtain rod assembly. Easy.
The middle one didn’t budge. It was firmly locked in place under the narrow lip of the trim surrounding the doorframe. I got it about a quarter of an inch up, and then noticed it was cracked along one side. I pushed it back down, and the left corner of the bracket snapped off and tumbled to the floor.
I gave up at that point. I’m going to have to go get a rubber mallet from the garage tomorrow, bang the underside of the brackets to get them off (which will scratch and groove the trim above the curtain rod assembly), then unthread the curtain rings, put the curtains on, and put everything back together. I love being a homeowner.