Pole 2 (pole)

Those nice people at Housing Units opted to replace our broken finial with the one from their display rather than make us wait while they re-ordered a pair, so I arrived home yesterday feeling well chuffed with the world. Here's the offending finial. Well, not the offending one, because that was broken. This is the replacement. It suffers from not having anything protecting the glass-brass interface, so you have to be really careful when screwing the glass ball onto the pole collar not to tighten it too tightly. The collar then slips over the pole end and is fastened by a small grub screw. Look nice, don't they? Although I think on balance I would go for one of the many varieties of metal finial if I had the choice over again. If we end up breaking any when we do any more decorating in here, I'll definitely replace them all.

Finding myself with a spare few minutes at the end of the afternoon today I thought I'd give Nikki a pleasant surprise and put the second pole up. Having already fitted the first one, I knew the drill (haha!) and it took less than half-an-hour to get the pole up and hang the curtains.

And here they are. It confused me for a while that, even though I thought I'd fixed the pole at exactly the same distance from the ceiling as in Nikki's side of the study, and the curtains are the same length, these hang almost to the bottom of the radiator while on her side they're about halfway down. Sometimes I can be sooooo sloooow. Nikki pointed out that she has no cornice on her side. I'd measured from the ceiling on her side, and from the bottom edge of the cornice on mine. Doh! But I couldn't have put my pole any higher without it looking silly. Maybe we'll have to hem these so they look the same. I don't really like them hanging over the radiator and sending all the heat out through the windows anyway. Still, another tick in the box and the study is one step closer to being "really" finished.