Curtains

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Permalink Reply by pechster on October 12, 2016 at 10:37

I'm afraid I don't have a recommendation but thought I should prepare you that it can be harder to put up bay curtain rails than you think in our old Victorian houses. When we tried to put them up we found that there wasn't sufficient purchase from putting screws into the walls to hold the rail let alone curtains (and we ended up with quite a lot of holes in the walls). It looks like a lot of our walls above the windows were mainly brick dust. In the end for the first one upstairs we called a handyman service to do it and after many hours they put up wooden boards fixed in a few points with screws where they could find some purchase and no more nails. The rails were then attached to that. It wasn't a good job - it had cost us a few hundred pounds and we later had to get it fixed by some decorators who were doing some other work in the house. That said the main thing is that they are still up after a number of years.

For the ground floor we were able to do it ourselves over an entire weekend (including the decorating after) you just have to be painstaking and patient and that's with us being very bad at DIY.

Mainly just prepare yourself it may not end up an easy experience and we found it pretty traumatic at the start.

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Permalink Reply by Frances Holloway on October 12, 2016 at 19:23

Thank you for taking the time to lay bare the pitfalls. We do have problems even trying to hang pictures because of the instability of our plaster and lath walls. Will keep you posted if we have any success!

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