Moving to a new build - what to do about curtains/blinds???

[kmini]

So we are moving into a brand new home at the other end of the country which will be curtainless. Between now and then, there is very little chance I will have time to pick curtains and blinds. 4 bedrooms including a very unique & huge feature window will definitely need some type of covering.

What did people use in the early days on a new house to cover windows and give privacy?

If it was me, I would choose good-quality curtain poles and rails, and fit them well, using good long screws and plugs that go right into the blockwork of the walls, to fit standard heights curtains.

then I could hook up any plain, budget curtains easily, perhaps cream summer ones, on the first day, starting with the bedrooms, and spend more time later browsing round Liberty's at my leisure.

many people make the mistake of using blunt drills and short screws that hardly penetrate the plaster, which make a terrible mess when they later pull out and leave a crater in the wall.

Ikea do incredibly cheap curtains that look fine. They also do them very long so you could cut them to size if you wanted.

We cut out a big piece of cardboard to pop in our window at night until we got blinds fitted (as did most people on the development, so we didn't look too odd!)

We brown taped some old long curtains up. Looked awful, did the job until we got the blinds and curtains fitted properly.

I used cardboard from IKEA flat pack to cover my bedroom windows until I got curtains!

Worked really well.

kiroro ours was also ikea and a very effective black out blind

Try charity shops to put you on. Then redonate when you have the ones you want. Just buy some neutral ones that are inoffensive.

We put up curtain poles in the main rooms as soon as we moved in.

I have a stick on blackout blind that you can change the size of, called Gro blind or something similar. It was about £20 from John Lewis. That could work, although it does detach a bit at times and needs putting up each eve.

Thank you for all your comments! Very ignorant question Pigletjohn, but I'm not sure if I want curtains or blinds. Some rooms will probably be a mixture. You couldn't pre-buy the blind poles only the curtain poles right?

Look on aliexpress or Alibaba. You can get very cheap curtains from China to tide you over until you decide what you want. They start from €2 a curtain including shipping.

Just on the above you need to order two to make a pair as they do not sell in pairs.

for blinds, unless you are assembling yourself, they come on the roller. The end brackets may vary a bit between brands, so you can't rely on holes you drill prior to buying the blind.

If you buy a standard size, there's a reasonable chance that if you later buy the same standard size, it might fit the same holes. But it would be annoying if you drilled the holes and it didn't fit.

Not much risk with plastic curtain rails, because you can space the wall brackets at whim. If you drill and plug the holes before decorating, tapping the plugs slightly below the surface of the plaster, they are not very unsightly.

Thank you!

Ah, I have very fond memories of DH trying to fit a curved curtain rail in our new house. The holes in the plaster, the sweating, the swearing, it pinging off the wall at one side when he thought he'd cracked it, me muttley laughing in the hall so he couldn't see. Good times.