This is what failure looks like.
We decided to hang curtains in our bedroom this weekend. No big deal, right? It’ll take maybe an hour for four windows, right? Wrong. When you live in a house built in 1890, everything is a big deal. Two trips to the hardware store and at least three hours later… we admitted failure.
Our goal was to hang a double curtain rod (from Ikea) along with a pair of grey patterned curtains on the outside rod and a single yellow crinkle semi-sheer on the inside rod (all from West Elm). We have white wood moulding around the four bedroom windows, which you can see in the photo above, so we decided to hang the curtains a little below the top moulding, just so we wouldn’t cover it up completely. It would look something like this (don’t judge my terrible drawing!):
Before drilling anything, we did some research on what would be the best screws and anchors to use on old plaster walls. Because these walls can crumble really easily, using screws alone runs the risk of the screw pulling out several inches of wall leaving a giant, horrible hole in the wall and your curtains crashing to the floor. That would be very bad. Our curtains are all fairly lightweight and the Ikea curtain rods are just plastic, but we still wanted to be sure that they’d be secure on the walls. We did some Internet research and also talked to a guy at the hardware store, and everyone suggested using anchors, which basically lock the screws to the wall. We settled on some anchors called pop toggles, little plastic wings that open up inside the wall, can hold up to 40 pounds, and look like this (photo from here):