Our dream of a cool, comfy, and cuddle inducing haven was beginning to fledge. With a zeal found in the all the Prime Geeks confident attacks on his projects, he simply unrolled the mesh on our living room floor, slicing it into 12 lengths. To my amazement… and frankly his smugness, without measuring he somehow managed to attain exactly 12 curtains with only 4 inches remaining on the roll. While grateful we would have enough to complete our project, the fact I will be living with his gleeful “I told you so’s” for the next few months has me peevish. It was now time for me to start my portion of the project.
Now, I might not have mentioned this, but one of the ways I toss my fair bit into the family coffers is by working at home as a seamstress/costumer. Odd materials, weird pattern redo’s, and incredibly tight deadlines are the norm for me. That being said, I will confess a slight hesitancy in running wire mesh through any of my machines… my beloved serger especially. Take my car, set my computer on fire, even smash my mp3 player and I will survive. But go after my sewing machines? Them’s fighting actions, my boy. With a quaking heart and a shaking hand, I slowly started running the panels through George. Yes, my serger has a name. Wanna make something of it? To my delight, he handled the material with ease. I quickly had neatened up the side of each panel to a slightly more professional edge.
But now what? I couldn’t see simply wanging holes into the panels, it would tear in no time. Sewing a small sleeve across the top would make them stiff and unyielding. Back to ferreting around in my sewing closet. Five minuets – and only three small avalanches later – I had what I needed. Grommets from a corseting job I had worked on months before and a roll of cotton strapping picked up at a tag sale for a grand total of .25 for 50 yards. Have I mentioned how much I love figuring out how to do things on the cheap? The most time consuming portion of my part of this project was the rummaging. Once that was done, our curtains were almost ready to hang. One last scrounge found a bottle of copper bb’s hiding in Prime Geek’s crammed closet – a few hundred poured into bottom pockets in the mesh and our curtains were finished and happily weighted down so they won’t fly around in high winds.
The Prime Geek had spent the time I was sewing at a favorite haunt of his - a salvage yard where he can buy all sorts of odds and ends at scrap prices. Our curtains would hang from recycled rods he screwed into the brick surround of our porch. The rods, along with three boxes of plastic shower rings brought our total cash investment to a staggeringly low 25.00 for our new room. To round out our shabby chic montage on the porch, we dragged our old overstuffed couch out into the new three-season room and added a small table to set frosty beverages.
All in all, our red-tec rec room is everything we had hoped for. Privacy for a decent cuddle in the evenings, a cool place to chill when the house gets too stuffy, and an ideal spot to watch movies projected onto the garage door by PG’s home theater. We built the perfect drive-in movie theatre and removed the gas wasting driving part. A Natural Nerds success story.
Popcorn anyone?
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