Hiding the Clutter

Living in a house built in 1914 we have found that people in the past must not have need closets like we do today!  I think the two closets we have in the bedrooms were added on to the house after it was built.  Our only other "closet" is a tiny nook in our hallway that we use to store our vacuum, broom, and other cleaning supplies along with a few boxes of my crafting supplies (I have stuff hidden everywhere!).  It really is just a little nook in the hallway with no door or any type of covering and who wants to see cleaning supplies every time you walk down the hall, not me!  So I decided to use a curtain to hide everything.  Here's a picture of the storage nook, see it really is tiny!  We plan to move the ironing board hanging on the hallway door into a closet once we make enough room in there.

I had bought a curtain from World Market to try out on our front living room window, but it didn't quite work how I wanted.  I really liked the fabric and I thought it would work well for our little nook as it ties in a lot of our room paint colors leading off the hallway.  It was about twice as wide as we needed for the storage nook so I cut it to fit.  I finished the cut edge with some no sew tape from Joann's.

And here's a picture of the finished edge:

To hang the curtain we bought a tension rod in an oil-rubbed bronze finish and matching curtain clips.  The tension rod was too long for the nook so we had to cut it to size using our Dremmel.  Here you can see Brian cutting the rod with sparks flying!  (Luckily everything was a bit damp from a recent rain.)

After we hung the curtain we decided it would work best if it went all the way from the floor to the ceiling to give us more space to hide things :o)  But that left the curtain about a foot short:

I had leftover fabric from cutting it to the correct width, but I thought just adding more to the bottom wouldn't look that great, the seam would be obvious because I couldn't match the patterns on the two pieces of fabric.  So I decided to use a thin stripe (two to be exact) of chocolate brown fabric to go in between the curtain fabric.  For this I had to use a sewing machine.  I measured how much additional fabric I would need to extend to the floor and then got to sewing.

And here is what it looked like after I was finished sewing:

And finally, hung in place:

And from another angle:

Much better, now every time I walk past I don't have to be reminded of the cleaning I need to do! :o)