High Ceiling Headaches and Hacks
Executive summary: I made the mistake of not measuring the height of the ceilings in the new condo before going out to buy curtains, meaning that my purchases ended up being too short! But I employed three easy fixes that were quick to pull off and hopefully look intentional rather than accidental …
I don’t usually spend much time thinking about the height of my ceilings. It seems that they’re generally the standard 8 feet, or they’re obviously vaulted or double-high or something. My mistake, because it turns out that the condo has 8.5-9 foot ceilings (which I learned is more common in newer builds), and it threw all my plans and pre-purchases into disarray. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had very limited time to take measurements in here, and I acquired the things we’d need in advance to try to facilitate our move with two little kids running amok. So I picked up 98” window curtains from IKEA, as they’d always been ample before in the length department … but it turns out they’re somewhere between 1-3” too short, depending on the room. T_T And while I was there, I also grabbed three copies of the same shower curtain we’ve been using for a decade without ever imagining they would barely graze the edge of the tub, with the built-in shower curtain rod hung so high. Who knew that practically all shower curtains are 71”x71” and that it’s nigh on impossible to find longer ones? Ughhhh.
These rude realizations hit me in the hours leading up to and on the day of our move. Cue the Googling to scour the collective human consciousness for quick and easy remedies. I was not in the mood to spend thousands of dollars on seven sets of custom window curtains, not after everything we just paid to get this place ready for move-in, so I needed a way to lengthen the curtains I already had. A couple of popular fixes for short curtains involve color-blocking (i.e., inserting a curtain of a different color/pattern in the middle), which I was totally ready to execute on … but then I had another idea: what if I added a trim along the bottom, since the curtains are only a couple inches short? Now, most curtains that utilize trim have it running vertically down the inner edge to add a designer touch, but I wanted a fabric trim running horizontally on the bottom to add length. I dived back into the digital rabbit hole searching for what is apparently called jacquard ribbon, and I found a 4” wide one that had a color scheme that could play with my existing curtains. My mom showed up with her sewing machine the next week, and bam! They were done in a couple hours. Now my curtains don’t look like flood pants anymore.
Such a simple fix to just add a little trim along the bottom!
But wait, the fun doesn’t stop here! The trimmed-out curtains ended up being basically the perfect length (thanks, mom!), with one exception: my mom erred on the longer side, just in case, and it turned out that the curtains in our primary bedroom were now scrunching up slightly on the floor (designers call this the “kiss”) instead of ending a hair above the floor (which is called the “float”). I am a much bigger fan of the latter, as I find the former less functional – it has to sit and “break” just right to kiss the floor in an appealing way … which mine weren’t. So now my too-short curtains were too long, what to do, what to do? Well, I had used a simple curtain ring-and-clip combo everywhere in the condo, but I remembered that in the past, I’d had a different way of hanging curtains. Enter the IKEA Riktig, which hooks into the gathering tape at the top and can be attached to rings. With this ring-and-hook setup, I was able to raise the curtains by about an inch relative to the ring-and-clip combo, which is exactly what I needed to float the primary bedroom curtains. Tada, another speedy fix completed!
These hooks can be attached to the curtain rings to raise my curtains an inch higher off the ground.
If the fixes for the window curtains were quick, then the hack for the too-short shower curtain was practically instantaneous. In my internet sleuthing, I saw a picture of a shower curtain hung from two sets of clear shower rings strung together, and a caption so nicely calling them retro. I thought, I’ll take retro over a flooded bathroom any day. So when I had to go out for groceries, I ran into the Target next door and grabbed three sets of clear hoops (for a grand total of $6!!) It took me just a few minutes to string them three deep so that the shower curtain can now function as it’s supposed to. Idk if it’s retro or janky, but it works, and is way easier than searching to the ends of the earth for an extra long shower curtain.
Probably the easiest hack I’ve ever seen.
My other issue with our high(ish) ceilings involves wall decor — everything just looks a little smaller on the walls than I’m used to. They say you should hang your art at eye level, no matter the height of the wall, so I went with that and maybe nudged them upward a tiny bit so they’re more my husband’s eye level (he’s 6-foot) than mine (knock off 9 inches). But hey, no one ever said whose eye level we should be using as reference. If I had a magic wand, I’d scale up the size of our decor by 10%, but I hardly want to replace all my art for that small of a difference. So it’s something I’ll live with and likely won’t ever get around to changing. High ceilings are supposed to make homes feel more spacious, which I should be happy about, but it’s honestly caused me more trouble than I’d anticipated … which is none, since I didn’t even realize initially that we didn’t have standard 8’ ceilings in here. Well, we all make mistakes, and at least this one was easy to hack my way through in the end.