Custom Drapery & Curtains Waterdown – Free Installation

Usually. Bring the panel along to the measure and we can read most of what matters straight off it: the heading, the fullness the workroom allowed, the hem depth, whether it was lined or interlined. Matching the exact cloth is the part that often fails, since mills retire patterns and colours move between runs. Building the same shape in a fabric we can still get is reliable, and it is what people are really after when they arrive with an old panel.

Some cloth grabs it and some lets it go. Anything with a nap or a loose weave, chenille especially, holds hair the way a wool jumper does. A tighter flat weave or a smooth lined cotton gives it up with one pass of a brush. Where a dog leans against the panel every day, keep that end to a flat weave and expect to work on it more often than the other side. A vacuum with the upholstery head every few weeks handles the rest.

Up to a point. Rods come in a fixed set of finishes, so a brushed nickel or a matt black lines up with most door hardware without much effort, and anything unusual gets powder coated to order or left to disappear instead. Tracks work the other way round. They are meant to be invisible, either painted out to the ceiling colour or tucked behind a fascia, and in a modern room that reads better than a metal finish trying to match something across the room.

Not if the floor comes up more than a centimetre, and new hardwood over the existing subfloor usually does. Panels are hemmed to the finished floor, so a rise of fifteen millimetres turns a clean break into fabric sitting on the boards. Taking a hem up afterwards is straightforward; letting one down depends on how much was left in it. Simplest is to hang them a touch long and have us set the hem once the floor is down.