Custom Roman Shades for 10 BUCKS!

I am always eager to create a cozy and well decorated living environment. When James and I moved to Portland, my spark to decorate fizzled. We lived in Portland for 18 months, and I never put pictures in the frames hanging on the wall! James and I noticed that we felt “blah” when we were in our apartment, and I have learned throughout my wellness research adventures that your living environment is one of the most important elements to your overall well being; therefore, James and I are determined to create a cozy and well decorated living space in our new apartment in Boston.

The first step in our design plan is to create a budget. We sold everything from our Portland apartment that we could not bring to Boston on Craigslist and collected a small profit! We saved the money and decided to use the money for our new apartment.

Lucky me, my friend Alyssa enjoys saving $$ as much as I do and she forwarded me an amazing “how to create low-cost Roman Shades” blog post. The same day she forwarded me the post, James and I found 2 FREE shades supplies on the side of the road!

I collected fabric at JoAnne’s and Mardens and a bottle of Fabritac and solicited some help from my friends and family at the Atkinson’s household and within a short period of time, we created this little beauty!!

Office shade

James and I worked together to create the remainder of the shades for our apartment. Each shade takes about 1.5 hours to create, and did I mention that there is NO SEWING involved!!?

Bedroom shades "roman-ed"

Bedroom shade- down

Living Room Shade- Down

Living room shade "Roman-ed"  (James is an excellent vanna)

I will share the total cost of the supplies:

1. Mini blinds (2 free)+3 more= $16

2. Fabric: $27

3. Fabritac $6

4. Trim: $4.5

5. Total: $53.50/ 5 shades= $10.70 per CUSTOM shade!!

We are on our way to a cozy, cheap, and well decorated apartment! If you are interested in creating Roman shades you can view the directions here: Little Green Notebook