HOME/DiY: Curtain Poles & Supports

New draught-excluder curtain over the lounge to kitchen door.

Teresa’s been on at me for some time, asking that I put up more curtain poles and supports, mostly for doorway draught exclusion porpoises. Oh, and Teresa is making the curtains. So it’s a joint effort.

And we also have he added economic impetus of looking to rent a room, and needing to get the property as a whole up to snuff for sharing with a rent paying tenant. So we need, amongst a zillion other things, curtains in the bathroom.

I already did a draught-excluding curtain pole thingy in the kitchen some while ago. And I want all the ones I make around our home to share a design, which is based, I guess, at least to some degree, on the classic ‘ogee’ profile. Incidentally, I’m talking about the two pole supporting doodads!

Making these in the workshop is fun. Although that said, my workshop is in such an awful mess it’s not that much fun! There’s another ongoing project; the new shed, finishing the damn thing, and getting stuff moved into it! Using the router to create the profiles ‘caps’ was especially gratifying.

I did want them all to have curved grooves (is that ‘fluting?’) in the ogee profiles, so you’d get that classic, er… classical look, of fluted verticals surmounted by profiled ‘pediment’ (?) tops. The result is, as Teresa put it, a bit pedestal-like.

I like to paint all the house woodwork in oil-based gloss white. I just feel it’s a classic timeless style, and that it works well in Victorian properties like ours. So I’m doing so with these, inc. the poles, which are 22mm hardwood dowels.

The older yet unfinished kitchen/back door one.

Attaching the ornamental pole supports can be tricky , as getting wall-plugs in to walls reliably in old (or is that any?) homes is a challenge. Then there’s the depth of wood to get through in the wider top part. I’ve developed a method I’m happy with. And so far it’s worked well enough.

You can see on these thicker and as yet unplugged and uncapped kitchen ones the holes for the screws. These get filled with dowels, or just some filler. These kitchen ones are ticker than the others. So the ornamental caps will need to be bigger. Not gotten around to making them as yet!

The next sequence of four pictures shows how, despite masking around these fixtures, I tend to get white paint on the walls. And in this instance (in the lounge the original paint colour – Egyptian Cotton – still matches), rather annoyingly, the paint colour, Asian Silk, which is literally from the same paint pot, doesn’t match! Gaaah!

Later the same day…

Not so easy to see, on account of the use of transparent shower curtain (fabric curtain eventually get mouldy and disgusting!), with all the daylight flooding in! At least the blotchiness of the touched up paint is less noticeable.

A double layer of transparency protects our modesty.*

* Or our neighbours delicate sensitivities?

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