Fair question to get out of the way first, why is a blind manufacturer writing about curtain rods at all? Because we spend our whole working week around windows, curtains get hung alongside our blinds on most of the projects we fit, and honestly we have watched the same three or four mistakes repeat themselves for years now. A curtain rod, or a curtain pole as most of the UK trade would call it, looks like the easiest job in decorating. Two brackets, a handful of screws, done before lunch. And then at nine in the evening the whole thing is lying on the floor with a fistful of plaster still attached to the bracket, and somebody is on their phone looking for an emergency plasterer. Nearly always it is one of the boring early steps that got skipped. So here they are, the boring early steps, in the order that actually matters.
Measure the wall you have, not the window, and go wider than feels right
The pole wants to run well past the window opening, fifteen to twenty centimetres each side at the very least, and more than that if the window is a wide one. People resist this because it feels like buying too much pole for the job. But think about where the fabric goes when the curtains are open, it has to stack up somewhere, and if the pole stops at the edge of the frame then that stack sits permanently over the outer strip of your glass, blocking daylight you paid good money for.
Height has the same instinct problem attached to it. Ten centimetres above the frame is the minimum I would ever fit, and going higher than that, halfway to the ceiling even, makes the window look taller and the room along with it. Poles get cut to length anyway, so measure the wall you have rather than the window sitting in it.
Find out what the wall is made of before the drill comes out
Everybody skips this bit. It is also the single thing that decides whether the pole stays up, which is a frustrating combination to keep running into.
Tap the wall around where the brackets are going. A dull solid sound means brick or block. A hollow knock means plasterboard. And directly above a window you will quite often hit a concrete lintel, which will shrug off an ordinary drill bit entirely until you switch the hammer setting on and give it a proper go.
The material dictates the fixing and there is no negotiating with it. Brick takes an ordinary wall plug and is glad of it. Plasterboard needs a proper hollow wall anchor, either the spring toggle sort or the self drilling sort, because a heavy interlined curtain hanging off bare plasterboard plugs is not a question of whether it comes down but when, and it is usually the first time somebody tugs at a stiff curtain. Better again, find the timber studs and screw straight into those, because wood beats every anchor ever invented. A cheap detector will find those studs for you, and it will also find the cables, which love to run diagonally away from the corners of window openings. I have met the aftermath of a drilled cable. You genuinely do not want to.
Level the pole in its own right, not off the ceiling
Here is a mistake that seems entirely logical right up until the moment you stand back and look.
Measuring down from the ceiling at both ends assumes the ceiling itself is level, and ceilings, particularly in older houses, drift about all over the place. Copy the ceiling and your pole faithfully reproduces its slope for you. So level the pole in its own right, spirit level, laser if you happen to have one, and then, before you drill anything at all, put pencil marks up and go and stand at the far side of the room for a moment. Have a proper look at those marks. A pole that is three millimetres out will catch your eye from the sofa every single evening for years afterwards, and a pencil line moves a great deal more cheaply than a drilled hole ever will.
The brackets, and the third one that nobody bothers fitting
Pilot holes sized to the plug, drilled to the plug’s depth rather than burying the bit all the way to the chuck. Plugs in flush. Brackets on.
If you are into plasterboard anchors, stop tightening just before you think you are finished, because overtightening spins the anchor in its hole and then that hole is ruined and you are moving the bracket. And here is the one the instructions never insist on strongly enough. Any pole past roughly two and a quarter metres, or any properly heavy curtain, wants a third bracket in the middle of it. Long poles bow. Not on day one, they look fine on day one. Give them a winter with heavy fabric hanging off them and they bow, and by that stage the fix has become a redecorating job rather than a two minute job with a screwdriver.
Hang them, then actually stand there and test the draw
Rings on, and remember the outermost ring sits outboard of the bracket, trapped between the bracket and the finial, because that is what stops the leading edge of the curtain wandering about when you draw it.
Then draw the curtains fully shut and fully open a few times over before you tidy the tools away. You are looking for a smooth run and a decent overlap in the middle. If you find yourself stretching fabric to make the pair meet, the curtains are too narrow for the pole you have very sensibly bought, which is a fabric problem rather than a fixing one, but it is far better found on a Saturday morning than on the first properly cold evening of October.
And then the windows where no pole is going to save you
This is the bit we know better than anybody, because these are the windows that reach us after the curtain plan has already died.
A triangular or apex window has no sensible curtain answer at all. A straight pole run across a sloped opening abandons a wedge of glass exactly where the low evening sun comes through it. That geometry is the entire reason our SonaApex shaped blinds exist, made to the measured angles of the individual window, with the light gap control we hold the patent on keeping the fabric tight to the slope the whole way. A roof lantern is worse still, because there is simply no orientation of pole that survives glass lying overhead, which is what our electric skylight blinds and their tensioned side tracks are there for.
Even on ordinary windows, if the real motive behind all this is warmth, then the curtain is the soft furnishing and a honeycomb blind is the actual insulation. Our honeycomb cellular blinds hold a layer of still air against the glass, and blind plus curtain together works beautifully, physics coming from one and softness from the other.
Get the early steps right and a curtain pole is a genuinely satisfying morning’s work, up properly once and never thought about again. If your window has an angle in it, or the glass is above your head, put the drill down and send a photograph to contact@sonashades.com instead. That is the point at which curtain hardware stops being the right tool for the job, and roughly where we start.
