Three rules about curtains, one of which we learned the expensive way on a building in Hulhumalé.
Curtains look like the simplest thing we make and they generate more complaints across this trade than suits do. Almost all of it comes down to three rules.
The first is that you measure the track and not the glass. A curtain that stops at the edge of the window frame looks like a curtain that is too small, because the eye reads the whole wall. Track goes fifteen to twenty centimetres past the frame on each side where the wall allows it, and the curtain is measured from the track, which means the track is fitted first. Shops that measure the window and then fit the track wherever it happens to go are the reason so many curtains do not close properly at the middle.
The second is fullness. A curtain needs about twice the track width in cloth to hang in proper folds. At one and a half times it looks thin, and at exactly the track width it is a flat sheet with a hem, which is what you get when somebody quotes you a suspiciously low price per window. This is the single biggest difference between two quotations for the same window, and it is almost never written down, so ask. Our quotations say the fullness on them.
The third we learned on a nine flat building in Hulhumalé. We were asked to measure from the architect's drawings so the curtains would be ready when the building was, and we said no and delayed the order by three weeks until the flooring was down. When we measured, the finished floor in three of the flats was eleven millimetres higher than the drawing said. Eleven millimetres is nothing until it is subtracted from a floor length curtain, at which point twenty seven curtains in that building would have hung visibly short for the rest of their lives, and they would have been our fault.
So: the drop is measured after the floor is finished, in the room, by somebody standing on a ladder with a steel tape. Not from a plan, and not from a photograph.
Two smaller things worth knowing. Floor length curtains should stop about a centimetre above the floor if the room is cleaned by mopping, which every room in this country is. And on a west facing window, either go pale or put a blackout lining behind the cloth, because an afternoon of that sun for eighteen months takes the colour out of a mid tone fabric and the lining is cheaper than making them twice.
