When you find exactly what you want: The curtain story

It turns out a 2-day heat advisory following a week of such high humidity and intense heat that caused difficulty in breathing is a great way to motivate me to work on home improvements and the heaps of clean laundry that have been my cuddling companions in bed each night.

An image from my pinspiration board:
urban-romantic glamour

I've been putting together an inspiration (Pinterest) board for my room decor, but I want to do a big reveal complete with pinspiration and ideas. Best friend Kasey has been a major help in getting me going again when I was at the "this will never happen" hurdle: overwhelmed by how many ideas I've had, confused by color choices - especially when I would see something lovely in a store that didn't fit my proposed palette, despair when I couldn't get all the pieces together in one, no, many (very long) shopping trips.

Most recently, I spent two hours in Target looking for light-blocking curtains and after surveying best friend and boyfriend over text messages, decided to buy the very girly, ruffled curtains that match my pillows but not my style and certainly not my pinspiration. The pillows were already a major leap for me, so these curtains - which I had the foolishness to purchase without measuring my windows - were not going to make me happy or proud of my little, city space.

An image from my pinspiration board:
soft color palettes

So, I decided that if I was going to do this right and have a room worth living in, then I had better start it properly. I pulled out my little pink measuring tape from the (also pink) toolkit, got up out of my bed and started working. It turns out my windows are, in fact, perfectly normal and not oversized as I had believed - this makes curtain shopping a bit easier when you have Google and all the .com versions of stores' inventory at your fingertips. After a moment's frustration when I realized that neither Target nor Target.com were going to give me what I wanted - simple, chic and not sheer - I honesty Googled "white light-blocking curtains" and found the most beautiful, perfect curtains that matched exactly what I had in my head but had never been able to find. And, they even have stripes of ribbon that match my pillows! (I do realize that I may be overdoing it with my enthusiasm just a tad, but this is my space, after all. My shelter from the city and haven for after-work activities and vegging, as may be the case more often.)

An image from my pinspiration board: Lilly Pulitzer + Garnet Hill

Now, in order to get curtains that are absolutely everything I had imagined to represent myself as a city-dweller and chic, young woman, I'm gonna have to give a little more. And by more, I mean twice as much for one panel as I paid for both at Target. Sigh. But! I only have to buy one (I think) in order to have the style I imagine. Buy one? I hear you think. Well, actually I hear my mother say, "why would you buy one? And why would you pay that much for one curtain?" (This is where I imagine she thinks of my age and place in life at the moment.) "You don't need that." Oh, but I do! I really do. If I am going to be happy about living a place, then I need to make it my space. I need to settle in and take pride in my surroundings. And so, I will buy that curtain and pray that it fits.

And here are the curtains! Aren't they just lovely? Sigh.