Window Treatment Alert: Custom Treatment Heart Attack or Ready Made Disappointment

Gloves off time. When it comes to beautiful window treatments, no pain no gain.

You know those HOUZZ rooms you’re drooling over? Custom window treatments.

Your Pinterest pinboards? Custom window treatments.

Ripped out and saved pages from design magazines? Ditto.

Custom window treatments: Gorgeous. Correct fullness. Correct proportions.

Correct linings. Correct interlining. Aesthetically strategic face fabrics. Hand stitching where necessary. Hung high.

Hung wide. Correct hem length for panels, correct finished length for valances. Someone carefully irons and fan folds them for delivery to your home. Someone else spends 2 hours installing and steaming them at your home. Lots of skilled labor through every stage.

If it were possible to achieve all this with ready mades, whosoever figured it out would be a gagillionaire. It can’t be done.

Why can’t a hot dog look and taste like a prime cut filet mignon? Because it can’t. Different animal.

I had a client COM-PLAIN (!!) to me last year about the costs of our window treatments. Once her first round of treatments were delivered though, she volunteered on her own that they were so beautiful and that she “really understood it all now”. Then she added that the Pottery Barn drapery panels she had simultaneously ordered for her son’s room “looked like crap up on the window, especially compared to her custom treatments” so she sent them back, adding “They’re a different animal.”

I thought to myself, ” Great. You couldn’t have figured this out BEFORE breaking my bananas?”

But I just smiled and nodded.

Think twice before buying that dream home with abundant and large windows. I doubt that dream-home fantasy you had during your first real estate walk thru included “crappy looking” window treatments. (My client’s words…not mine!!!)

Here are your 2 simple choices: Either opt for Houzz and Pinterest-worthy custom window treatments, complete with a sticker shock heat attack – or – live with Ready Made disappointment.

But please… don’t squeeze the bananas!