industrial hardware for windows

I could spent hours in the hardware store

I love all of the gadgets in the hardware isles

pipes, nuts, bolts, screws, thingamajigs…you name it!

my latest fascination is the galvanized steel finish

I blame it on Christine at Great Oak Circle

she’s taken a hiatus from blogging and I miss her muches.

but before she took her break I learned so much from her…that girl is stuffed full of great ideas.

like this one for instance;

I know…awesome right? Read the story about this project here.

and that got me thinking

but it got my 18yo daughter motivated! here is her take on it.

that girl! she is so funny. she just hopped in the car one day and off to Home Depot she went.

what’s that about the apple falling from the tree?  yup! that’s my girl.

and she even blogged about it here.

she has Michael Buble serenading you on her blog.

***

When trying to decide what to do for window treatments in my son’s room, there were three things I wanted to accomplish:

1 – complete darkness for good sleeping

2 – something masculine yet different

3 – affordable and preferably an original design

Working off of the steel pipe and flange idea, I could just envision some room darkening panels with those large grommets, sliding across a something like this…

But to my disappointment, I found that in order to have the pipe long enough to span the width of the window, I would have to buy a pipe too long…I could have it cut, but then I would have lost the threads and I loved the cap at the end.  Weight also became a concern as these are steel pipes and of course the longer the piece the higher the cost.

So I scratched that idea and wandered from isle to isle

Mr. Rustique tagged along…he’s such a trooper 🙂

I finally ended up on the electrical isle…I was thinking about tubing, black rubber, inserting a wooden dowel rod to make rigid…I was beginning to feel the excitement build.

but then, it too was more than I wanted to pay…per foot! yikes!

and then the epiphany.

love that word!

this looked like a really cool doo-hickey-thingy.

it’s a top beam clamp

and then I saw this pipe…

a 3/4″ conduit pipe 5′ long and only $2.85!

Mr. Rustique assured me that he could cut it down if I wanted it shorter

no little caps to screw on the ends though…bummer,

but I saw these and they just slipped right into the ends of the pipe.

total cost of all this industrial hardware for son’s window treatment…$14.09

sweet!

I had already gone to IKEA and bought the panels

they are a nice thick twill in dark teal

I only bought one package thinking there was only one panel…what a ding-dong I am.

Turns out there were two 🙂

nice. just like finding money in the sofa.there was one small glitch in my idea…not enough clearance between the wall and the rod for the curtain to slide correctly when the panels are open; they needed about 2″ of clearance.

it was time to put on the thinking cap

thinking

thinking

snap!

turns out we have quite the collection of hardware just lying around our house.

the handy dandy “L” brackets we had left over from another project

they solved the problem

and this addition just adds to the industrial charm

works like a charm now!

we decided to leave the length of the pipe as it was, we can always go back and shorten later…but I’m kind of liking the look of it.

FYI…

I went to hem the curtains with the awesome fusing tape included with the panels and they give you these really great instructions on how to do it, but allow for shrinkage they warn and they provide a formula on how to take into account the 4% shrinkage.

uh…duh!

i have a better idea.

wash first.

then hem.

less brain power.

oh.my.goodness. they wrinkle after wash and dry.

but I am one blessed momma.

son said; “hey cool, they look awesome wrinkled”

don’t have to beg me not to iron yards of material!

believe it or not…these panels shrunk 3″

the photo above was before washing

they’re not that long now.

Now it’s on to ceiling fan shopping 🙂 that means another trip through the hardware section.

happy dance.