Zurich - Curtains

Six Curtains and a Lampshade with 82 Flowers to Fix

I hope that this will be my last blog entertaining you with all my moving-in woes. I have actually been doing some traveling, but I’ll save telling you about that for a later blog/s when I have some photographs available (I keep on forgetting my camera so need to wait for others to send me their photos!).

Anyway, a huge task, well for me at any rate, on moving into my flat was to get curtains sorted. I’m on the ground floor, so everyone can stare into my bedroom and spare bedroom (usually an ironing room!) as they walk past. My flat is on a small footpath off the road, and it’s right at the end, so there aren’t too many passers-by, but I’m always aware of my ironing board there for all to see, along with an increasing pile of clothes….

I’d forgotten that hanging curtains in Switzerland is a bit of a different task than in the UK. Many flats in Switzerland have inbuilt, indented gliding rails for curtains (one for net curtains and one for your thick curtains). This is a good thing because you don’t have to buy curtain rails, find one of the right length, work out what to do if you want both nets and thick curtains, struggle to attach the rail etc.

It does mean that you have to keep an eye out on the curtains you buy and make sure that they are compatible with these gliders. This is easy when you know this is how it works, but I reacall that when I first moved to Switzerland it took me a while to cotton on that I had these glidng rails already installed and to work out exactly which curtains to buy etc. This time, I decided to buy my curtains at IKEA– when I first bought curtains in Switzerland, I think I got them from Globus or Coop, which was no doubt more expensive. I seem to have a lot of windows in my current flat.

It felt like every time I decided on a curtain, it was either not in stock in the colour I wanted or it was in a small size. As it was, IKEA curtains aren’t really designed for Swiss windows. The curtains are quite long and narrow, so I had to buy three for each window (and of course, you can only buy them in packs of two, so it’s a good marketing ploy by IKEA). I surreptitiously listened in on a conversation that someone was having with the sales woman as she explained how to tell which curtains were suitable for gliders, so got the gist from that about what to look out for (there’s a diagram on the back of the curtain packet, which I wouldn’t have known how to interpret if she hadn’t been describing it).

You also have to buy the gliders to attach to the curtain so that the curtain can then hang via the gliding rail (I'm making up my own vocabulary here). Fortunately, the first time I bought the gliders, I didn’t see that there was a choice of sizes. The ones I bought were the correct size (and the packet didn’t mention anything about their size), so I was ignorant about the possibility of failure on that account. If I’d have seen the ones explaining which size glider they were, I would have freaked out at not having a clue what to do!

However, even then, I didn’t notice that some gliders were for you to sew on manually and others were for you to just hook into the specially-designed mesh across the top of the curtain (if you bought the right type of curtain), so actually my second lot had to be taken back.

Another thing I hadn’t realized was how heavy curtains are. I had to buy a rucksack-type bag from IKEA just so that I could carry them back (and even that was almost too heavy).

And it’s such a lot of work! I measured, cut, hemmed (with hemming tape), ironed, hung (it’s quite fiddly getting the gliders to catch onto the glider rail) a total of 16 curtains in the end (I decided to economise by having just 4 curtains in each of the bedrooms [2 x net and 2 x thick] rather than 3; I didn’t put any in the dining area).

It felt like I just didn’t have an evening or weekend free for ages, but finally I did get it done. Fortunately, it’s another one of those things that with any luck I should need to do only once. Phew.