Using a curtain to make storage space

Pay no attention to the boxes behind the curtain.

We welcomed our first houseguests this weekend, which served as the perfect impetus to tackle some of the bigger projects on our “eventually we’ll get this done” list.

Namely, we needed to get the third floor guest room in order. Or at least get it set up well enough that guests could stay there.

We’d always planned to make the third floor a guest room, as the house was marketed as a three-bedroom home. (We’re using one as the office and the finished third floor is the third.) But upstairs was full of boxes of stuff, and some supplies leftover from my chevron curtain project.

When Aaron’s sister made plans to come visit with her daughter from Wisconsin, we needed to get in gear so they’d have a place to stay.

So we upgraded our bed and moved the old bed up to the third floor. Acquiring a bed is a pretty good first step.

See what I mean about our wonky ceiling? The left side of the roof pitch narrows down to less than two feed above the floor. What am I supposed to do with that space?!

Next, we had to work around one of the quirks of this house. The third floor ceiling is slanted with the roof pitch. And one wall gets really, really short, to the point that the “ceiling” meets the wall about a foot and a half above the floor. So there’s a ton of space that a person can’t functually use.

But I still have boxes that need to be stored upstairs.

So in a stroke of brilliance, I decided to hang a curtain midway up the ceiling to create a faux wall and hide the boxes nestled in under the short ceiling. And then I used that as a backdrop for the bed, as well, so the areas where our guests would move around the most would have the tallest ceiling.

I found a long, long curtain rod at Ikea for about $5, plus a couple of brackets for about $2-3 each. A little bit of labor for Aaron, and the rod was hung.

I actually had the most trouble with finding fabric to fill the space. It’s about 9 feet wide, and I needed it to be almost 5 feet tall to hang from the rod to the floor. My instinct was to buy three yards of fabric and hang it horizontally. But most fabric bolts are only 40-44 inches wide, which wouldn’t be tall enough if I hung it on its side. And I didn’t like any of the fabrics I could find in a larger width.

Although it wasn’t the original plan to use three separate pieces of fabric for the backdrop curtain, I really like the way this ended up looking. Barley likes it, too.

So I opted to use three panels of the regular width fabric and hang each from the rod vertically. It worked out better, I think, because I can pull apart the panels to get to the boxes between them instead of getting in from one side or the other.

It also looks prettier than having one solid color or pattern the whole way across.

I’m very happy with how it turned out. It got a great reaction from our guests, too!