It’s Curtains time – or “How to Frustrate the Husband”.

Our new home is coming along extremely well, and now the internal painting had been finished we had the curtain lady around to give us a quote.  What with a whole house lot of sheers (nets),  drapes, a blind or two, plus all the curtain tracks, it won’t be cheap.  But I’d said all along that  I won’t be stitching all these curtains myself – what a big job that would be.

I can remember my curtain sewing marathon of many years ago, when we moved into our first house over the hill in Wainuiomata.  This suburb was known as “Nappy Valley” as it had affordable housing for young families.  We had two young children aged about two and three at the time, and I was working fulltime.  My busy evenings went like this:  arrive home from work via train and then a bus ride and collect the children from day care.  Walk them home in the double push chair, and cook the family meal, keeping hubby’s meal aside to heat up later while he worked his second job.  Bath the children, read them a story and put them to bed.  Put a load of washing on.  Then sit at the sewing machine and yet another set of lined drapes.  Heat up hubby’s meal when he finally arrived home.  Collapse into bed late at night, and do it all again the next day - those were the days! 

Looking at the curtain samples drove Robin to distraction.    I knew what I didn’t want, nothing bright, no florals or anything too garish.  But I wasn’t quite sure what I did want.  We had a sample of our new carpet available and various curtain lengths were laid across to see what took my fancy.  Robin couldn’t understand why I didn’t take the first sample which looked kind of OK.  But that’s not the way it works, is it?  Curtain samples came out, I looked at them, some were dismissed outright, and some were put in a pile to reconsider when I had viewed even more samples. 

Choosing a roller blind for both the kitchen and bathroom windows was easy.  Then after a lot of looking, considering, and checking colours I finally made my choice on the lounge/dining room curtains.  Then the bedroom curtains were chosen.  Done at last, and Robin heaved a sigh of relief.  “What took you so long?”, he wanted to know.  Men just don’t understand these things, do they?  (What did I chose?  You will just have to wait and see!)