Outdoor patio drop cloth curtains with rust-proof, wind-resistant hardware

The internet abounds with fantastic ideas.  Unfortunately, some of them are not very practical.

Such is widely the case with exterior curtains that are made out of common painter's drop cloths; for instance this example.  

While those curtains shown above may do well in certain geographic regions, can you imagine what would happen if they were installed on an outdoor patio or pergola in the greater Houston area?  Even a small subtropical thunderstorm would probably rip them from the wall, send them into the sky, and perhaps deposit them somewhere in Liberty County.  And even if a storm did not get them, that interior grade of hardware would not stand up to our legendary rain and high humidity (nor salt air if installed near the coast).  It would quickly rust, staining the canvas panels.

Some makers appear to have overcome the rust potential by using shower curtain hardware.  While preferable to interior grade drapery hardware, that approach has the downside of making the resulting patio curtains resemble, well, shower curtains.  Image screengrabbed from this site. 

Making patio curtains out of inexpensive and durable painter's drop cloths is a genius idea that did not originate with me.  After being alerted to its potential by the collective oracle that is social media, I searched for an assembly method that would fit all of these requirements:

1. Rust proof, or at least highly rust resistant.
2. Could stand up to some pretty strong winds.
3. Durable enough to be be left in place for long periods of time.
4. Had to fit the "organic industrial" vibe of our home.
5. Had to appear substantial.  Our patio is 10' x 14' with a 3' concrete surround, which is fairly large. Small hardware would be under-scaled for the space. 
6. Curtains had to be easily movable across the full span of each rod, scooting across with no effort on the part of the user.  This is important for easy sunning and airing-out of the curtains to prevent the development of mildew.  

This maker solved the rust problem by using a galvanized pipe as a curtain rod, and by avoiding clips altogether.  However, the rust avoidance was achieved at the expense of convenience, because it would be very difficult to re-position rod pocket curtains across wide spans without actually climbing up to the rod (which in my case is a full 8 feet above the floor) and hand-bunching each time to achieve uniformity.  Plus this approach looked a bit too traditional for my taste.  

I found much of my inspiration in the genius-upon-genius method used by the Beach Brights blogger who coined the phrase "chain link fence curtains".

This is a fantastic look, but this blogger was doing an interior rather than an exterior installation.  Therefore, (s)he could get away with no strong mounting hardware, no top hem to the curtains, and no reinforcing grommets in the curtains themselves. This was possible because his/her curtains would not be subjected to wind and weather stresses. 

Basically what I did is combine the best ideas shown by a number of these previous makers.  I used the chain link fence hardware coupled with galvanized pipe rods and nickel-coated brass grommets.  The following series of photos provides general construction details and sourcing.

Let's start with the sourcing and yes, I included SKU numbers! (Tap to expand for clearer resolution). Unlike many makers, I was not aiming for lowest price because I was taking a penny-wise-pound-foolish view of this project.  My intention was to maximize durability and longevity - I wanted to create curtains one time and then hopefully enjoy them for years to come with no additional work other than periodic laundering.  Most of these materials listed above came from the Big Orange Retail Giant (BORG), aka Home Depot.  

This assemblage right here became the brains of this particular drapery operation.

The chain link fence tension band and the carriage bolt with the nickel coated brass grommet shown sandwiched in there as a sizing illustration.  Half inch grommets were the best size to function with these other components. 

However, I made a miscalculation in my initial sourcing, and it's worth mentioning here.  An avid Prime subscriber, I found this little grommet kit (tools plus 12 grommets) on Amazon, so I bought it and it proved to work very well.  I then set about purchasing another two dozen nickel plated brass grommets to finish the project...

...only to discover that there is an apparent world-wide shortage of this item in this size.  So instead of buying 24 more loose grommets, I was forced to buy several more of the original whole kits just to get the grommets from them.  Yellow brass - yes you can buy those right now if you want them (yellow brass is severely out of style). But not the nickel plated.  Moral of the story:  Don't make assumptions.  Make sure you source ALL your materials prior to starting a project like this, or else you might end up paying more than necessary for a stop-gap measure. 

The grommet kit is very easy to use.  You hole the fabric using the included punching tool (the kit also includes a small block of wood not shown in this pic, to place under the punching area)...

...and then you use the included die set and a hammer to pound the grommet (we had a small sledge hammer that worked well).  The result is a professional-looking grommet.

By the way, I washed and dried on the highest heat setting all drop cloths before I began working with them, to ensure I had pre-shrunk them.  

I am omitting step-by-step details because everyone's patio is going to be different dimensions and therefore the measurements won't be transferable, but the general ideas will be similar in each case.  I did my usual DIY thing and measured the project step by step as I went, roughly in this sequence - mount the hanging rods first, do the top hem and grommets next, fit individual curtains to openings, measure for the bottom hems, then complete bottom hems.  Our patio is so tall that I had to be careful with my upper and lower hems. I had no extra length in the drop cloths to play with.  But I did have this goofy dog to play with.  

I basically created a shallow upper hem and chose six fence compression bands for each of the six curtain panels, simply because it "looked about right" when laid out with six.

I did all this work on the patio itself (nice clean sealed concrete post here), hauling the sewing machine and ironing board outdoors to do it.  My whole point in improving this patio is that I want to use it more frequently like the full room of the house that it ought to have been functioning as all along during the past five years.  That full use will require drawing the curtains when the sun is too strong or when the mosquitoes are too thick.  

This might seem like a lot of work on top of a lot of expense for patio curtains, but guess what?  Even if I had wanted to purchase curtains off the shelf, (a) it would have been prohibitively expensive and (b) it probably would not have been possible to purchase an appropriate product at any cost due to the sizing issues.  This patio is post-tension slab integrated - it's not a block of concrete that was poured separately from the house.  Because it is structural, it is sloped to the north and east so that it drains away from the exterior walls of the house.  What that means is that each of the six curtains I made had to be a slightly different length in order to hang the same distance above the concrete.

Another sin you will see on the internet is patio curtains that touch the ground.  That might work in Las Vegas, but we have a super-wet climate, and ground-touching curtains would wick rainwater and degrade pretty quickly.  Therefore I aimed for about an inch and a half of clearance to keep them out of the watery slop zone. 

When you are dealing with a pitched patio floor, the best strategy is to just pin up each pair of curtains and see what looks best, ignoring minor irregularities.  Here on the north side of the patio, I barely had enough length to make a decent hem...

...but fourteen feet away on the south side of the patio, the distance between the floor and the ceiling was several inches shorter.  So I had to hang the partially-finished curtains, find my ideal length, pin it up to that level, and then cut down those hems so that they would be the same depth as their northern counterparts. 

My advice for someone dealing with sloped floors is this:  Don't try to over-engineer this process.  Proceed step-wise, hem the curtains, and be done with it.  These are drop cloths afterall, so they are rather crude and rustic, full of imperfections.  A bit of hem depth difference here and there won't be noticeable as long as they are generally consistent.

The one thing I will say, though, is that pinning and ironing at each step is key.  You don't want the final product to turn out to look too crudely made.
:-)

Because each curtain was a slightly different length, I "numbered" them one through six by sewing notch marks in the upper left corners with black thread.  That way when I take them out of the washing machine, it will be obvious how to re-mount them to the hardware.  Obviously this is curtain number three. 

With every great blog post, there must be a great reveal.  This is a tough one to make even with a wide-angle lens, but here goes.

I made the table runner by cutting a chunk off the bottom edge of my extra drop cloth and hemming the cut side.  It ties the scene together.

Information on additional design elements also seen here:
Patio concrete sealant.
Ceiling paint color.
Repurposed TV-VCR stand as outdoor sideboard (seen in photos farther down).
 Outdoor rug sourcing.
Drainage culvert planters - those contain blueberry bushes that must have specific soil chemistry (we harvested a few quarts of blueberries this year). 

Here is a close-up of the galvanized pipe, chain link fence hardware, and grommet-fitted drop cloths.  Two of our patio openings were between 5 and 6 feet wide, and so we installed plain rods in those.  The north opening was a full ten feet wide, and so it needed the center support shown here in addition to the two end supports.  If you have any doubts about how I put this three-pair assemblage together, check the sourcing list near the beginning of this post. 

I'm pleased.  The fabric softens up a space that was previously all concrete, brick, and cement board.  

Looking back whence I came. 

The interior wooden table tends to get used for meals, reading, and chatting.  This bistro table is usually reserved for wine. At this point, the chiminea to the left is mostly reserved for storage of home-grown onions, because obviously we cannot light a fire there LOL. 

Some people put weights in the hems of their patio curtains, but I chose not to.  I like to see them blowing around a bit and I am hoping that the movement will help discourage birds from entering and nesting on the patio (I had to wait until two batches of mourning doves fledged before I could even start this project).  Here you see the potential of the curtains to block late-afternoon sun. 

This is an awkward tunnel-vision photo, but this gives a sense of the effect at night.  The off-white curtains, when drawn, are bright enough to bounce the porch light around sufficiently well so that I can now use the space as I would an interior room.  Previously the view out each opening looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta at night.   

Another night shot, repurposed TV-VCR stand in the background. 

Good luck with your own patio curtain project.  And I must leave you with this closing meme, which is so very true of projects like this, with or without the benefit of sourcing lists!

UPDATE JUNE 10, 2015:
What I said at the beginning of this blog post.  About 48 hours after I finished this project, I was sitting in my brand new little patio oasis blissing out and enjoying the job that was finished when this happened:

It came barreling out of nowhere and that purple part (the most severe storm conditions) passed straight over the top of us.

All hell started breaking loose, with horizontal winds and crap flying everywhere!

So much for my peaceful moment of contemplation.  You can see from the wet mirrors at left that the wind-driven rain was so strong that it traveled ten feet into the patio and hit the wall. 

Prior to this event, it had not occurred to me how heavy these drop cloths could get when totally saturated.  Not simply wet like they came out of the washing machine, but saturated.  And even with all that weight, the wind still tried to pull them to horizontal - the forces were enormous.

There is no question in my mind that if I had used lighter gauge hardware here, the curtains would have been ripped loose.  And probably deposited in Liberty County.  In sooth, a good DIY call, because they are still perfectly fine after all that.

UPDATE JUNE 13, 2015:
Oh good grief!!  We can't seem to catch a break on tropical rainfall this season!

You don't even need to know what the colors mean.  Just know that it's a LOT of rain, and they are currently predicting a 30% chance of cyclone development in the next few days.

I searched and searched the internet for ideas on how to protect patio curtains from severe weather without removing them, and found absolutely no effective ideas except for commercially-fitted plastic sheeting such as would be installed at commercial establishments (e.g., restaurant patios).  I certainly wasn't going to go that route, so I decided that the Keep It Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) principle would find good application here:

Put a bow on 'er - she's done.  I simply rolled up each curtain from the bottom and tied a length of cord around the resulting bundle, securing the cord around the galvanized pipe rod.  This keeps the curtain up under the soffit and away from the deluges of rain.

Internet search strings:  Keep patio curtains dry, patio curtains in rain, patio curtain protection, outdoor curtain shielding.

So far this morning we have probably had two inches of rain, and everything is still high and dry.

I wouldn't go to this much trouble for a normal short-term rainfall event, but what we've got going on right now is not going to be normal.  This too shall pass, and my patio will once again let its hair down.  

League City newspaper, Part 2

Where's Woolsey?

Search hint:  Even without red and white stripes, publisher Leonard Woolsey does bear a bit of resemblance to Waldo, especially in the glasses.  

That's the large-format portion of the pile of "mail" that I excavated from my box late yesterday afternoon, viewed as it was tossed unceremoniously onto my home office conference table.  Knowing that the League City - Kemah Connection newspaper was supposed to have been launched yesterday (paywalled), I was initially disappointed - I thought my address had been passed over (not an uncommon occurrence given the young age of our subdivision section).  I almost threw the entire stack into the recycle bin, but then I spotted it.

It looks like this.  Don't throw it away without first looking at it.  

I was a bit disappointed at the mode of presentation.  I'm afraid that people really are going to have trouble distinguishing this from the constant onslaught of junk mail with which we all must deal, and I fear that a lot of folks are going to toss it without even realizing what it is (particularly true because its launch was not well advertised, so many local residents are not expecting it and did not know in advance what it was going to look like).

It may, in fact, be the case that GCDN arranged for delivery on days when typical advertising flyers were not scheduled to be avalanching.  But here's the issue with that:  Most of us no longer check our mailboxes every day.  What's the point??  Particularly for those of us who receive all of our important correspondence, bills, bank statements, etc. electronically, plus we have the security of a USPS-issued clusterbox, checking the mail is something we often do only on trash or recycling days, and only for disposal purposes.

This postal worker hit the nail on the head with this response.  If not for eBay and Amazon, I would not traipse to my mailbox at all.  I would attempt to close it and not accept hard-copy mail delivery, period (which would be the Final Solution for the junk mail that I haven't been able to control even though I paid for a service to have it stopped).  Perhaps when Google gets its delivery drones airborne, we'll be able to take that logical next step and be done with residential USPS delivery once and for all.

Screengrabbed from this "Ask a Mailman" site. 

But there's good news in all of this, too.  My initial fear that this newspaper would be a simple post-shelf-life content recycling mechanism was apparently unfounded.  The articles are largely original.  Furthermore, they are picking up on the types of issues I've been hoping to seed on this blog (good news given that I don't reach 30,000 homes).  Cover story?  Five Corners, for which I commenced a post category earlier this year.  Additional content?  Information on the fact that there's a $200 million TxDOT project to improve SH 146 in Kemah and Seabrook, which I also screamed bloody murder about.

Perspective such as this is intended to wake up our local politicians, who arguably are not doing their jobs in getting our practical issues resolved.  The Five Corners fiasco has been lingering for far too many years now.  Screengrabbed from this April 2014 post. 

So there's the potential for the transmission of issues and ideas with this thing.  Write to the editor and publisher of this new newspaper if you have local concerns (editor@lcconnection.com; publisher@lcconnection.com).  Write to me (centerpointe.blog -at- gmail) if you think that bellowing needs to be done on a particular issue.

And incidentally, for those of you who engage in only periodic USPS mailbox excavation mostly for disposal purposes, I found a really neat product that might be of assistance to you.

It's the Barnes and Noble felt tote.  It's a very heavy but small bag.  And oh, the style is divine.  Very modern, just the way I like it.  Comes in three colors.  I like the gray.  They are available at the Clear Lake (Baybrook) Barnes and Noble on Bay Area Blvd. (at least they were as of August 29, 2014).

I think it was designed to be a "book bag" of sorts, but the size almost exactly matches the size of my USPS mail clusterbox.  Typically when I do excavations, I'm struggling with an armload of miscellaneous paper and at least one of the pieces will need to be chased madly down the street as it escapes my control and gets blown by the wind.  With this thing, I just scoop all the junk mail into the bag, which stays open by virtue of the stiffness of the thick polyester felt.  Much easier than trying to use one of those floppy re-usable canvas grocery sacks for the same purpose.  And given that this bag stands upright of its own accord, it is an excellent small receptacle for in-house paper recycling, too.  Nice stylish convenience for ten bucks.

As always, this is a noncommercial blog presenting personal opinions only.  I accept no compensation for recommending any particular product or service.  

League City's next election critically important

Quote from yesterday's Houston Chronicle (story probably paywalled):

League City's recent resolution rejecting refuge for Central American migrant children violates two landmark civil rights acts, a complaint to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development alleged this week.

Are you having Jornaleros flashbacks yet?!  For those of you who don't know the story, just over a year ago, League City squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on losing that unwinnable lawsuit.  I don't think that the final figures were ever made public, but it was well into the six figure range according to initial reports.  As losers on most points, not only did League City have to pay its own legal costs, but they had to reimburse MALDEF for theirs as well.

This Guidry article cited $357,000, but I don't know if that's the "total-total" or just a portion of it.  

Rather than taking care of League City's legitimate business, City Council wastes taxpayers' money on culture warring where it has absolutely no business inserting itself.  Here we go again with MALDEF and another special interest group.  By this time, MALDEF is well-versed in successful strategies for dealing with the continuing flow of antagonistic crap that emanates from League City, so it will be interesting to see what develops here.

Meanwhile, in the past three or four years, has a single thing of actual municipal value been done with respect to practical issues such as resolving traffic congestion at Five Corners??  Nnnnope.  Does this tell you anything about your elected representatives?

Stay tuned for forthcoming info on the November elections.  They are the best short-term chance we've got at curtailing at least some of this nonsense.

Here are the positions to be elected.  Screengrabbed from this page.  

Five Corners finger pointing

As of yesterday afternoon, they are "fixing" some of the mess at League City's infamous Five Corners intersection (post category here), specifically at FM 518 and FM 270.

The previous S-curve lane divider has been torn out and reconfigured to (drum roll, please!) actually follow the traffic lanes.

This is an iconic Five Corners photo to be sure, with traffic shown as characteristically backed up in my rear view mirror.  

This is what the original construction looked like a few weeks ago.  I wonder would they have fixed it if I had not complained and published this picture??  Never doubt the fact that every voice counts.   

However, this work does not change the overall Five Corners situation, which I (and others) believe is being worsened by all that concrete.  

The barriers are worsening congestion.  Note the black truck can't even fit into the now-overly-short left turn lane FM 518 EB to FM 270 NB. Photo taken yesterday.  

Nobody has stepped forward to explain to the public why stuff like this makes sense.  Photo taken yesterday.  

A reader from the east side of League City emailed me and told me that she complained about this project to Mayor Paulissen.  She sent me a copy of his email reply to her which read, "I just talked with staff this morning about this. This is a TxDot project and we have to work with them."  

But if you remember from this previous post of mine, when I complained to TxDOT, they replied by tweeting, "This project was initiated by @LeagueCityTX".  

So this appears to be a classic political response.  For those of you accessing this post on small mobile devices, the sub-caption reads "No one EVER admits to a (brain) fart."

Base image courtesy of Cheezburger.  

A classic political response of buck-passing.  In response to this, I said to my husband, "Well, look on the bright side - neither one of them is trying to blow smoke up our tailpipes by telling us that this project is a GOOD thing.  Maybe we can work with that as a starting point."

I encourage each and every one of you to email or call both Paulissen and TxDOT.  I believe the TxDOT project number is 097603100 and here is the general contact page for TxDOT Houston District (the easiest way to get to them is via @TxDOTHoustonPIO if you use Twitter).  

But all this bemoaning of concrete belies a larger issue:  

With or without a concrete Band-Aid, they still, after all these years, have not fixed Five Corners the way it needs to be fixed in order to serve the people of League City.  

Who are all these League City residents and where are they when we need them?!

Unfortunately on the issue of Five Corners, we've had a lack of continuity leading to a loss of momentum in public pressure.  Welcome to League City, Texas because that's the story of our collective lives.

Photo courtesy of Bay Area Citizen from this September 24, 2010 article describing a public meeting on mobility solutions for Five Corners.  

Did you know that Seabrook and Kemah are slated to receive TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS for improvements to FM 146?!  

Wrap your head around this:  Seabrook and Kemah, combined population 14,314 (2010 Census), will get $200 million to fix their main TxDOT-related mobility problem.  League City, population 84,112 (2010 Census per Google) is apparently getting diddly squat to fix its main mobility problem, namely Five Corners.  

Yes, I know that more people than live in Seabrook and Kemah drive on FM 146.  But League City has literally tens of thousands of people whose lives are negatively impacted by Five Corners on a daily basis.  And yet somehow we cannot get a couple of million bucks worth of solution for this thing.

What is the cause of this?  Really really bad political representation?  If more people would start hounding the decision-makers, maybe we'd get some answers to that.  

Description of the FM 146 improvements screengrabbed from this Bay Area Houston Magazine report.  I'll have more to say about this later.  

Five Corners, Part 5: The scooch and the damage done

In post from a few days ago called Five Corners Futility, I made a statement which I will now explain further.  I said, "I tend to look at right-of-way segments not the way they should be driven, but the way they actually are driven"

This is an example of what I mean by that.  This is FM 518 westbound at Highway 3.  I was driving this time (not my teenager), and I stopped at this red left-turn light. I am presenting an un-cropped picture here as taken from my driver's seat.  What you can tell is that my left wheels were well over into the yellow painted exclusion zone, just as this pick-up truck's wheels were also over.

The road is not really supposed to be driven the way both of us were driving it here, but the left-turn lane for Highway 3 southbound is only half as long as it would need to be in order to accommodate normal traffic.  What happens as a result is that drivers naturally choose the lesser of evils - left-turners universally scooch over like that is so that we don't block the center westbound lane of FM 518 because through-traffic proceeds on green even as accumulated left-turners are forced to remain stopped on red.

FM 518 is so inefficient and so under-designed for its carrying purpose that it's just plain *stupid* to block half the traffic merely because that left turn lane is so woefully short.  Therefore, everybody scooches over like this so that traffic can continue to pass.  It's the neighborly thing to do.  And if you watch this intersection, you'll see that it's universally driven like this.  That's the net result of collective informal driver negotiation.  Nobody objects to this, and I personally have not witnessed any significantly elevated risk because of it.  No left-turner is dumb enough to scooch so far as to put their tires into the oncoming east-bound lane, for instance.

In sum, this is not necessarily what the original engineering foresaw here, but the driver adaptation actually works better than what was intended.  There are only two choices - either we scooch, or FM 518 effectively reduces to one westbound lane at this location.  

In sharp contrast, this is what happens instead when concrete prevents people from scooching in order to naturally accommodate other drivers on the road for maximum efficiency:

FM 2094 eastbound traffic at the FM 518 jog now squanders about one third to one half of its green light to lane congestion because drivers can no longer scooch in this area.  The red arrow points to a left-turner who cannot access the lane here because the lane is way, way too short and already full of cars and the new concrete blocks the previous open space.  The middle lane occupied by me and this dry cleaning van was blocked for most of the green light.because of that, whereas it would not have been blocked before the concrete.    

If you've perceived Five Corners to be getting slower and slower lately, this is one of the reasons - the full effects of the concrete are now coming home to roost.  It's happening because we've been effectively reduced to one lane moving for a big part of each green light.  It won't matter how well the lights are ultimately synchronized if the lanes are this significantly undersized to start with.  If left-turners can't squeeze over because of concrete obstructions, they are going to block through traffic - it's that simple.  And how would that possibly constitute a mobility improvement?  

I'm still waiting for answers from League City on what's going on here (they know I've asked).  It's an even more important question than it may first seem.  On my first Five Corners post, someone commented with a link to this page, which discusses in general terms the "access management" project scope.  The corresponding CIP report (2014 Q1) doesn't give any detail as to design, but it does provide a map that I personally dread:

Crummy resolution, but Centerpointe is in the lower section of the grab and that red squiggle suggests that they might also be planning to concrete up the Highway 3 intersection, which means that we would also effectively reduce to one lane westbound at that intersection, too.  In other words, the functional scooch by me and the white pick-up truck in the pic above would also become a thing of the past.  

I'll leave you with an excerpt from that CIP.  I converted to JPG because Blogger won't allow hosting of other content formats such as PDF.  It'll be a bit blurry as a result.  It doesn't describe the scope of the design, but it does indicate that we're spending about two million dollars on this thing.  I await with bated breath someone's explanation as to why that makes even partial sense.