Curtain Problems

JK^2 and I need professional help. Although we do a pretty good job of picking out paint colors for the rooms in our house, we are absolutely horrible at picking out curtains or in home decoration in general. As JK2 put it, on the scale of goodness at home decorating, where 1 is bad and 10 is fabulous, he gets a 1 and I get a 0.5. He's right.

Sometimes we get lucky and have some help. For example, my Aunt Ellen made us this beautiful stained glass window, which we installed this weekend:


It happens that the blue in the window matches perfectly with the paint colors we used (deep blue in the living room and very light khaki color in the hallway). It is perfect. Do you think we planned it that way? I know I didn't. I just like the color blue. :)

So now we have our living room. It really, really, really needs curtains because we live in an urban neighborhood and the houses are relatively close together. We need some privacy.

We love the colors in our living room - deep blue (walls), white (trim) and khaki (sofas). But today we went to try to find curtains and had NO luck! I liked this certain striped curtain at Linens 'N' Things, but Jim didn't think it would match. Jim liked other curtains, particularly dark brown ones, but I'm not a big fan of anything dark brown in the house. We went to LNT and Bed, Bath and Beyond. We left both places empty-handed.

Part of the problem is that it's a relatively big investment. We have 4 windows in our living room, and with drapes and sheers, that's 3-4 panels per window. Thus, although we fell in love with some silk drapes that we saw at Restoration Hardware about a year ago, that is just not going to happen at $200+ per panel.

I should add that we redid our bedroom about 1 1/2 years ago and still have no curtains hanging in there, even though we have curtain rods. We put up blinds until we could figure out which curtains to get, but now nearly two years have gone by.

So following is a photo of our living room. What should we do?? Drapes? What color? What style?


We are seriously thinking of trying to find an interior decorator. We are so bad at this.