Lessons Learned Installing Curtain and Drapery Rods

I have begun a project that involves hanging curtains over two windows and drapes over two sliding glass doors in my photography studio.  I bought some Levlor rods at JoAnn Fabrics.  The instructions on the box were very simple and any instructions you may find on the Internet appear to be simple as well, but don't let it fool you.  There is nothing easy about installing curtain and drapery rods.

It looks like you might be able to get them all installed in an hour, but this project took me all day.  It took all morning to install the rods over the two windows, and all afternoon to install the rods over the two sliding glass doors.  Believe me when I tell you that I made every mistake in the book, and if anything at all could go wrong, it did.  When all was said and done, I had a bad case of tennis elbow.

First off, if you install them into wood, you just use the screws.  If you install them into drywall, you use the plastic anchors and the screws.  You are supposed to drill a hole the size of the anchor, hammer the anchor into the wall, place the bracket over the anchor, and drill in the screw.  However, that didn't work for me.  It turned out the majority of the wall was drywall, but the last quarter inch was solid wood.  It's impossible to hammer a plastic anchor into hard wood. 

So, I had to improvise.  I placed the bracket against the wall first, hammered in the plastic anchor as far as it would go, and then drilled in the screw.  The brackets ended up being a bit unstable, but if worse comes to worse, there's always Super Glue.  You can see in the picture below, how the plastic anchor refused to push past the wood, and the screw wouldn't go in all the way either, because the drill stripped the head before I could get it in further.

My biggest mistake was that one window required that I install the brackets into wood.  I had been so intent on installing the plastic anchors into the drywall, that I drilled for the size of the plastic anchors into the wood.  The anchors are much larger than the screws, so by the time I realized my mistake, the holes were too big for the screws and there was no room on either side of the strip of wood to drill new holes.  I was essentially drilling into a trellis. 

I ended up having to force the plastic anchors into those bigger holes, which isn't easy, and I almost split the wood.  I recommend planning everything out on paper before laying a hand on your tools.

My next big mystery was that despite measuring exactly three inches above the window and one inch above the window frame, the rods were uneven.  I could clearly see that they were lower on one side than the other.  In the picture below, the rod is lower on the left than on the right.

After paying closer attention to the rod itself, I realized that had I studied the rod ahead of time, I might I have noticed that one side of the rod is thinner than the other side.  That's how they get one side to slide inside of the other side with metal rods.  So, if you are installing metal rods, I recommend that you install one bracket an eighth of an inch higher than the bracket on the far end.  Better yet, get solid wood rods.

Lastly, for some reason, I was provided with four brackets. I wondered why, because you can't slide the rings past the brackets. I only installed three of the brackets, one on each end and one in the middle where the curtains and draperies meet, but had I mindlessly installed all four brackets spaced out evenly for the sake of stability, I would have regretted it. I suppose I could have placed two brackets side-by-side in the middle, but what's the point?

As you can tell, I'm not a carpenter. In upcoming posts, I'll share my experiences in constructing homemade curtains and drapes.