paint free accent wall for under 20 bucks [hassle free, mess free, under 30 minute project]

we have oddly spaced windows in our master bedroom and it initially limited our furniture arrangement. we love our house and all the joys and difficulties it brings with it. and marriage has taught us a lot about compromise. [like for instance our headboard]. ian loves it. me not so much. but i know how much he likes it. i love purple. ian not so much. but he knows how much i like it. so for us we have found an incredible balance of give and take. anyhoooo. i decided i wanted to rearrange and put this gigantic headboard in front of a window in the room. it immediately opened up the space but the light peaked out from behind the headboard was less than ideal. obviously i couldn't make the window disappear. so i thought of ways i could "temporarily" make it disappear. i came up with a solution - hang curtains. but that gets expensive we are on a very strict budget! so after narrowing down the wall colors and painting them SW "unique gray" the room looked something like this:

not horrible: but not ideal!

 

so i did some expert blogging research. and here is a tip i find useful for new DIYers! pinterest is "da bomb" but it doesn't have EVERYTHING! so i went to the straight up google search "cheap curtain alteranatives" and i hit the jackpot. genius! flat twin size sheets. they are 96" in length perfect for floor to ceiling and you can get them super duper cheap. i'm not going to reference a specific blog because literally about 20 blogs offered this advice. we got a charcoal gray color at Wal-Mart for $5 each. DEAL! what i will mention is this awesome post that shared how to make your own curtain rod! such a cost saver!!! we skipped a few steps and did things our own way but in the end it worked out perfect. taking her advice we used a 10 ft long 3/4 in electric conduit pipe from Lowes for only $2.75. we then got curtain brackets from Home Depot for under $4 in the Martha Stewart section. so when we got home we divided jobs up. i iorned the curtain. ian measured twice and cut once. we need to take about 5 inches off the conduit. ps. ian was able to cut it with a circular saw and me stabilizing the piece, saving us a few bucks where we didn't need to buy a piper cutter. once cut we brought it inside and made sure it fit where we wanted it to. we then cut a cardboard box to block the widow light and taped it in place. i finished ironing and ian screwed the curtain brackets into place. we used a handy-dandy steak knife in lieu of a seam ripper and ripped a few stiches out of the seam of the sheets to open them up - this also saved us some money because we didn't have to buy curtain clips. we opted not to spray paint the conduit because our scheme centers around gray tones and it fit perfectly into our room as is. basically then we just shimmied the curtains into place and hung them up. it gave us an instant "accent wall" without painting for a grand total of $16.75 (ish). we didn't take pictures to document throughout but the directions are pretty self explanatory. here is our finished product:

no more awkward window

close up on the conduit

there is enough swag to push the sheets flush with the wall but we prefer to have some of the wall color showing through