Master Bedroom {Rug & Blinds with a DIY fix}

Hi everyone. I've made a couple of tweaks in our master bedroom over the past week or so. If you'd like a visit to our bedroom before and a little side project, check 'em out.

In the midst of sprucing up the playroom and wracking my brain about a rug for that space, it dawned on me that the $20 IKEA rug we've had in the master would go great in the playroom. Freckle Man and I were the ones who deserved a nice new rug, not the dirty hellions that are our children. I picked up this cute hand-woven rug on Overstock.

Now, the next item on the list for the bedroom was buying and installing some shades. I just never would get around to closing the curtains because they'd hang all weird from being pulled back all the time. So I just left them pulled back. Which was, er, inappropriate at times. We really needed some blinds.

I bought two sets of bamboo blinds at Lowe's and had them to cut to size. The only problem was they were WAY too long for our windows. The only way to get the width we needed was to get a ton of length. Which made them super bunched up at the bottom. So, I found these directions on ehow.

Take the blinds down was a piece o' cake by lifting the cover and unscrewing the wing nuts.

I marked off where my window ended, laid it out upside down on our dining room table and then cut a few inches below the next available ring for attaching the cords (see the arrow). The directions weren't an exact match for my type of blinds so I had to just go for it. It was a little terrifying.

Then I cut all the other two sets of cords and tied them to their rings.

To anchor the blinds and give them a finished look at the bottom, I had to cut off the large end piece of the blinds that was left hanging with the extra blinds. The directions said to attach the cords to this piece but mine weren't set up that way. After having a minor hot glue gun fiasco and accidentally stapling the blinds to my dining room table, I finally had the two pieces put together. A few staples ultimately did the trick.

Then, I repeated the process with the other set of blinds and hung them all back up. The last thing to do was to take care of the super long cords...both for looks AND to keep Freckle Girl from strangling herself (she would totally find a way).

 

With a quick trim of those and putting the little knobby pieces back on, I was in business! The blinds look and work so much better without all that extra material. And you can't see my hot glue/staple carnage since that whole mess is on the bottom of the end piece. Voila!

What have you been up to lately? Any fun DIYs?

xoxo,
Chris