IKEA vs. Custom-made Curtains

We’re back from Bali and back to our regularly-programmed home content 🤪

When it came to picking out the curtains for our house, we wanted to keep things simple, especially with maintenance in mind. Given that guests spend the most time in the living room, we made the decision to splurge a little more on custom-made curtains in that space, and purchase off-the-shelf IKEA curtains for our two study rooms. Here’s our comparison of the two!

🛒 IKEA Curtains 🇸🇪

➕PROS

- Cheap!!! VERY cheap. There is a range within IKEA’s products as well, and if you opt for the higher end curtains with more elaborate systems, and perhaps with alternations, the price could add up. But it’s still likely to be cheaper than a full custom-made set.

- Good quality fabric. To the touch, we feel IKEA’s fabric can rival the custom-made curtain. If we were to nit-pick, some might argue that the thicker material of IKEA is not as suitable for Singapore’s weather, but this has not had any tangible affect on our day-to-day experience.

➖CONS

- For all our curtains, we opted to fit them in the recessed area, aligned with the top of the window frame, as we didn’t like the look of going all the way to ceiling. However, this meant that the IKEA curtain was much too long. While IKEA does offer affordable alteration services, in the spirit of going as budget as possible for the less-important rooms we opted for a more creative solution with the knotted ends 😅😬

- For the rod/bracket system that we opted for, the brackets are quite visible, and the one in the middle kind of prevents the curtains from being fully closed 🥲

🧵Customised Curtains (Everyday Curtains)📏

➕PROS

- As curtains are customised to the exact width and length of the window, they fall and fit beautifully overall. We love the pleats!

- Nice and smooth track. It’s slim and sleek profile means that it’s not very visible and it allows the curtains to close fully - though to be fair, we didn’t get the IKEA track, so not sure how they compare!

- In general, a custom system would afford more flexibility for more elaborate curtain set ups (e.g. with day and night curtains etc). Personally, we opted for just a light-filtering fabric that allowed us to just have one layer.

➖CONS

- Custom-made curtains are NOT cheap 💸 It was more than FIVE TIMES the price! 😱

- If we ever want to freshen up the space with new curtains, it’s not as simple as just buying another set off the shelf!

Overall, we’re happy with our decision to splurge on the living room curtains and save on the study room curtains. If you’re really on a budget, IKEA is definitely a great affordable alternative with a wide range of materials and systems that are at a fraction of a price of custom curtains. If you’re deciding to go with custom, we would definitely recommend Everyday Curtains - they had a wide range of materials for us to choose from and the service and installation were efficient and smooth-sailing.

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