Curtains in the Kitchen!

Our kitchen window is looking a little fancier these days...

I stumbled on these Better Homes & Gardens valances at Wal-Mart, and at just $11 each, I couldn't say no! It took two valences to make up the width of our window.

In my head, I saw the curtains going from wall to wall at the front of the window alcove (like you see in the photo of the finished product). Of course, a regular curtain rod wasn't going to work for that, so I set out to buy a tension rod. As luck would have it, the width of our window alcove ended up being about two inches longer than the longest tension rod I could find, so we had to get creative.

We bought a bracket-style rod at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for $5.... you know, the kind that's supposed to work like this:

But alas, the bracket option would put the curtains only a couple inches away from the window, not at the front of the alcove like I wanted. Jeff and I put our heads together, and we came up with this solution:

We just un-bent the ends of the bracket rod!

We ironed the two curtains and put them on the rod, and everything seemed to be going smoothly.

We were really proud of ourselves for figuring out how to make it work, until we realized that the bracket rod ends are supposed to slide onto the wall attachments from the front (in a way that only works if the attachments are facing the same direction, not 180 degrees away from each other):

So we got creative again, and Jeff snipped off the bottoms of each end of the rod with some pliers. Once that was done, we could slide them on from the top instead of from the inside!

With the rod securely in place, I just had to spread the curtains out evenly, and step back to admire the pretty window!

Ta-da!

Pretty lace details!

I think the kitchen looks much more "finished" now that the window has something on it, although I'm surprising myself with the direction this room is taking! It's starting to look sort of country-chic-ish to me, which is normally not something I would go for at all, but I'm just loving it! 

We were planning on buying a new table (this one is a hand-me-down from my parents), but I'm kind of loving it in the new house, so I think it's here to stay! The table, the curtains, and the red chair pads... it's all stuff I wouldn't normally love, but somehow it just makes me happy in here!

What do y'all think? Not bad for Wal-Mart, right? Haha!