How to Hang Curtains

With last week’s two posts on the curtain updates in my living room and foyer, I thought I’d give you the behind the scenes tour of how I get those long panels up and into our walls. I’ve done a tutorial before on how I hang up items in plaster walls, take a look here. I use that technique on all of the curtains I hang in the house. I’ve got it down pat.  Today I’ll show you my tips and tricks for how I measure to put up brackets and where I put them around the window frames and how to hang curtains.

The windows in our house are quite tall, with 7 foot ceilings, the frames are about 90 inches from the floor.  Which means the longer curtains they sell in stores don’t even fit, so I customize them myself.  But it gives me plenty of flexibility to hang the rods where I’d like them to get everything to fit just right.

Here is how to hang curtains.

To start, what you can do is actually put the curtains on the rod, climb up onto the ladder and estimate where you need to put the brackets. It’s a bit tricky to balance, so you could always measure. Try to do it and take a picture!

There’s a bracket to the wall in my left hand there too.

I usually mark at the wall where the curtains will just graze the floor. If you want the pooled look and have curtains long it doesn’t matter.

This is probably much easier to do with two people, but hey, I do what I can.

Then I get a little scientific. To set the curtain rod to hang consistently across our three windows, I made a template. I simply trace the curtain bracket that goes into the wall onto a piece of cardboard. Paper would work, but something heavier is better.

Then I poked out the holes where the screws go into your wall.

Since I know where I want my bracket to go into the wall, I measure that distance on the wall and then draw the lines onto the cardboard and cut the cardboard to that length so it sits on my window trim easily. Line up the edge of the frame with the line on the paper if you want them right at the end of the frame.

In my house this distance is usually about 7 inches or so. I usually then mark the distance out from the side of the window trim the same distance and that’s where my bracket goes in the wall. Up and out, that’s where you measure and mark the wall.I know some of the standards say 4 inches, but that just doesn’t cut it here. The top of my window trim alone is 8 inches! In this place more = better.

This pic is in my office where I hung curtains on a bay window. But you can see how high up the brackets are.