How to Measure for Curtains

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to measure for drapes. Now, when we're talking about drapes unless you have some specialty windows but if you have windows that are in a eight foot or nine foot application, most of these are going to be standard windows and they're going to take drapes that are the standard eighty-four inches in length. Now you may have some custom applications to that but the easiest way to check for that is to measure from the floor to the top of your window and the floor to the top of your window should be a little bit less than eighty-four inches. So if that's the case then you've got a standard height window. Now, once you know you have a standard height or a non-standard height, then the only thing you really need to be concerned about when you're measuring for curtains is the width. Now curtains come in panels, and those panels are twenty-five inches wide. Now, that doesn't mean we can cover a twenty-five inch width with that curtain, because most curtains are going to be bunched up. So, what you want to do is when you buy a panel, you want to look at how much width you can actually cover with those panels. Now, and what you want to do is for this instance we take this window, this is a thirty-one inch window. So a thirty-one inch is, then pretty much two panels would be enough for us to be able to cover this window, be able to gather it back and still have enough coverage. Now, if we go over and we look at an opening such as this, where we've got sixty inches, now this one we probably want to have at least three or four panels to cover this area. So when you're figuring your panels and the width you want to make sure you have enough width to bunch up those curtains on twenty-five inch panels so you really may only want to plan on about eighteen inches of coverage on your curtain width when you're buying panels. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to measure for curtains."