How to Measure for Hanging Curtains

Video Transcript

"I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to show how to measure for hanging curtains. Now there's two type of curtains that, or two basic type of curtains that you're going to look at. You've got sheers such as this which are made just to accent the window. And when we look at sheers, they're hung in such ways so that they pool a little bit at the floor. So when you're measuring this you want to keep in mind when you look at the length of your sheers, you actually want to take about a half of an inch or an inch off your measurements so that you get that pooling effect. Now with regular curtains that are more for either blocking the light or for accenting your window, you need to take into consideration how long those need to be. So the first thing that we want to do in measuring is we want to look at our rough opening on the window. So we will push this back to get this out of the way, and what we want to do is we want to take the inside to inside dimensions so from this side of the window all the way over to the right side. So in this case, it is thirty-five inches. And then we want to also measure - take two - actually take two different measurements. We want to measure the height of the window and the opening here is seventy and a half and then we want to measure from the floor. Eleven inches. Now a good idea to keep all this straight is to take a plain piece of paper and to draw you a rectangle on there and then put these dimensions on there. And that way it'll help you keep clear the type of curtains that you want to hang. So in this case if we wanted to add more length to this, we may hang the curtains halfway between the crown and the window opening. So in this case we'd want to add - that's about twenty-four inches, so we would want to add twelve inches in to where we would hang our curtain rod. The other thing to consider about your curtain rod is the length of this rod. So with this window, we have this curtain rod which is mounted two inches above the window and it extends an inch on each side. And actually to the curtain rod that would be two inches. So we would need a curtain rod that is at least able to cover a thirty-nine inch. And then the other thing to consider in measuring for your windows, all your panels of your curtains come in - will cover a twenty-five inch. So essentially we have a thirty-five inch so we got away with two panels, 'cause this, we could actually cover up to fifty inches with these two panels. So those are some things to keep in mind when you're measuring curtains - measuring your windows for curtains. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to measure your window for curtains."