Lucite Acrylic DIY Curtain Drapery Rod in Brass Gold

Lucite Acrylic DIY Curtain Drapery Rod in Brass Gold

Many of you know my love for photography and travel (and hubby). Well, I also have a love for all things colorful and decorative. I’ve been really wanting to replace all my drapery hardware with Lucite rods, but they are just so expensive to purchase. DIY stuff also takes a while, but this was totally worth it. I’ve pinterested, googled and came up with this look. I will explain how to DIY Acrylic (also called Lucite) drapery rods and hanging curtains with brass / gold hardware. Here is a shot of my bathroom with the lucite rod installed!

1. Acrylic Rods

I googled companies that make acrylic rods and called around several places before settling on Nationwide Plastics in Dallas, TX. If you live in Dallas, you can also pick these up and save on shipping. They are located in Arlington.

They custom make these rods and size them to your request as long as it is up to 8 feet long. One caveat is for larger rooms they have to solder 2 rods together and those are quite expensive. I had to do that for 3 rooms in the house – my sitting, dining and master bedroom.  The fee to connect 2 rods for a larger than 8 feet rod is around 150$. The connector is also acrylic and is flush with the rod so you can not see it at all, especially if you have a bracket over that spot in the middle of the larger rod. I chose the 1.5 cell cast acrylic rod as I found that diameter looks the best for curtains and also makes the rod feel and look stronger. Of note, if you use rings, they can sometimes scratch and damage the acrylic rods as I learned the hard lesson myself – so I will discuss this in the drapery rings portion. Bathroom and dining room below.

2. Brass Gold Brackets

There are many options for brackets – you can also spray paint any bracket to have the same affect. However, I loved these shiny gold brass brackets at Buy Railings and they are the 1.5″ OD (0.05″ Wall) to go along with the 1.5 curtain rod. They also sell ones that have an end cap. Since this rod can not be moved, if you’re choosing full room sized rod, you would need to remove the whole bracket while holding the rod with the bracket to put on curtain rings which is a pain. When you have these open brackets you can possibly slide the rod in and out to place the curtain rings on the rod. Also, these brackets look best when placed only a few inches form the wall and cover the whole window with curtains to have a more dramatic effect and make your ceilings and windows appear larger.

I decided to get a little more creative here and chose to ceiling hang these. I love the idea of ceiling hung drapery because like I’ve mentioned before longer and wider curtains make the room look bigger. Framing the window with a curtain rod makes the room look smaller and has a shorter ceiling affect.  SO, I got the idea to replace all my curtains with ceiling hung rods. This also allowed me to get curtains that did not have to be custom made. Our ceilings are 10 feet in the living room, so I purchased 120 inch drapes. This method allowed the drapes to have the perfect length to the floor. You can also wall hang these as picutres here.

Either way, I think the effect is absolutely stunning.

To hang something from the ceiling you can not use the standard bolts that come with the brass brackets. You have to first install these toggle bolts that butterfly into the ceiling. You can get these screws and bolts from Home Depot. I also purchased longer screws that were gold in color to match the bracket. I purchased these as Home Depot as well. This will allow the rod to be strong enough to hang your drapes. Otherwise, this will all come crashing down since these rods and the drapery are super heavy!

3. Curtain Rings

Pretty curtain rings are expensive! Especially gold ones with hooks. For a small one window project you may be able to find 7/$15 packages. BUT, I needed these for the whole house. Usually one curtain panel will require 7 curtain rings. So depending how many curtain panels you need… that can add up. I needed to replace 22 curtain panels! That would have been anywhere from 300$ – ….. ? whatever.

This website has all the beautiful Lucite drapery and hello, it’s all beautiful but insanely expensive. These gold rings are 8$ a piece here. I needed 150 curtain rings…. This would have been $1200.

Tough lesson: your old curtain rings may scratch the Lucite and leave marks when moving the curtains. I tried to use my old rings I had from my previous rods and spray painted them gold thinking that I could save some money and still have gold rings. NOT. It left marks and messed up my rod in the bathroom. Luckily I realized this quickly and moved on to the next option.

Which brings me to this…. Lucite / acrylic curtain rings! When I googled Lucite curtain rings a few things seemed promising until again I realized the price. Most of these are 5$ a piece. Which still would have left me with $750 price tag. I wanted my curtains to hang from hooks to look more professional, so hanging them on the rod itself was not an option for me. Also, the rings need to be larger than 1.5 inch so they can slide easily on the rod. Solution? What a genius idea I got from stumbling on this blog during my research!

Plastic Shower Hooks Clear – Room Essentials from target for 1.49 at Target! $1.49 for 12. That’s $0.12 cents per ring! Yes! It cost me $18 total to get curtain rings for all of my house. So, how to attach curtain hooks to these? Get washers from Home Depot. I tried several options here, some had too small of an opening to close the shower ring. I figured out that I can use the M7 flat washers. Washers are strong enough to hold very heavy drapery.

When hanging curtains the washers can not be seen at all, and these rings also do not scratch the rod and look firkin amazing (and expensive) (as expensive as the 8$ rings!) This is our sitting room. Of note, I fell in love with this wallpaper from Designed for Living and have not looked back!

4. Drapery

I have several rooms in the house and for the living and sitting room I chose these gorgeous velvet drapes. It looks really rich and adds texture to the room. It was purchased from Half Price Drapes – look at their velvet drapes in Warm Black and Midnight Blue.

Overall, this is a fun project. The most difficult part is hanging these on the ceiling or on the wall as they are heavy and you will need 2 people to do this, so one can hold the rod in place as you install the second bracket. Below is our living room. Loving how everything came together finally!

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Leaf Wallpaper  – Designed for Living

All light fixtures – Arteriors 

Sofas – Restoration Hardware