Affordable Bay Window Curtain Rod

Before my Mama left she helped me dress the window in the livingroom she helped me transform. Although I'm not sure I ever showed you my new livingroom!! Here it is- before we did the windows. Note the new baseboards and the beautiful new gray walls. I still haven't put anything up yet on the walls, and we need a chair in here- but the hard elements are there!!

Pretty isn't it?! I don't really have a proper before picture- before I knew it we'd pulled the room apart and it was being transformed. But here's a snapshot I took the night we moved in:

Peach walls, awful floral drapes, mini blinds that I'm pretty sure had been chewed by the previous owners dogs, and our stuff scattered around. By time my Mom got there I'd gotten the boxes unpacked and my stuff sorted out- but the rest was pretty much the same.

Something that's always bugged me was undressed windows. I never understood it when my friends moved into a new rental and refused to put up curtains or blinds- to me, my own window dressings were one of the things that turned somewhere into mine. And now that the rest of the room was all prettied up there was no way I was putting those grody mini blinds and floral curtains back up. But have you ever priced out curtain rods for a bay window?! Spensive!

A while ago I found this tutorial via Pinterest on how to make a curtain rod with EMT conduit. After looking at it my Mom was pretty sure we could modify it to create a bay window rod- so we went to Home Depot to collect our supplies! It cost us approximately 55$, however the lowest- priced bay window rod I could find was 80$, and I wasn't fond of the style.

We followed the tutorial exactly, except that in the corners we cut two dowels at a 22.5 degree angle (because that's the angle of my bay- your milage may vary) and glued them together. So instead of finials, we had the dowels bridging the gap. For the finials we took two knobs off my kitchen drawers (which are getting new hardware when we redo the kitchen). We then sprayed the whole shebang with Krylon spray paint in Steel. Then we put it up! You can't even see the dowel corners because the curtains cover it. Voila!

Pretty good eh? The red grommet- top curtains are from Bouclair, and so are the faux-wood chocolate blinds we put in the windows. (Bouclair will cut your blinds to size for you for free!)

I love my new curtains and blinds!! I think they really bring the whole space together. Now I just need to get around to putting something on the walls!