It's Shower Curtains

The shower is a great place for thinking...which might explain why I think so much about shower curtains. Would you believe I have so many thoughts about shower curtains that I've dedicated a whole blog post to them? Well, believe it, because I have.

Buying my first shower curtain was a great "adulting" moment for me (this – right now – also marks the first time I've ever used the word "adulting," and I don't feel great about it....Do I sense a post coming about that particular controversial term?). It was when I moved into my rental house in 2010, and for the first time in my life, became the person in charge of all interior decorating. I did what I rarely do any more, and purchased some of the necessary objects brand new, from Target. One of those objects was a brown cotton shower curtain with multicolored polka dots. I remember thinking it was cute and fun, but not overly feminine should I get a male housemate, which I very shortly did.

My first shower curtain,
now a secret hideaway for office dogs!

That curtain lasted for a few years, but because I never used it with a liner, it eventually developed holes from the mold. I removed it from the bathroom but loved it so much that I kept the undamaged parts of it for future use. Eventually it got a second life as a draft-blocker for the bottom of my desk at work.

Since that early foray into buying home goods like a real consumer, I have evolved into the extreme thrifter that I am today and so far have avoided purchasing any more new shower curtains (but I did recently buy an antimicrobial liner that can be washed and reused, so you might say potato potahto). The last actual shower curtain I bought was an aqua one from the thrift store, which survived two moves and was still in regular use this past summer.

...Until...I got a new shower curtain from Freecycle! This one is translucent white and covered with images of bright tropical fish. I love it! It is just the kind of cheery, nature-inspired kitsch that I used to decorate my bedroom with when I was a teenager. Now that I am a mature 30-something in charge of my own household, I get to extend my tacky decor into the bathroom!

But a new shower curtain doesn't mean I have to dispose of my 7-year-old one, oh no! I'm just keeping that one in storage until the spirit moves me to change up the theme. Since I also recently acquired a hand-me-down curtain from friends, I could easily see shower curtains being one of the many items I accumulate and switch out seasonally—fish in the winter, florals in the spring... translucent curtains during the dark and cold months, opaque ones during the summer when every bit of light blocking can help to keep the bathroom cool... there are all kinds of shower-curtain related experimentation to be done!

But one thing I won't be experimenting with is the hangers that hold the curtain up. No, over the years, I've tried all sorts and I've come up with a favorite and no one is going to change my mind!

In my early days of home-making, I was drawn to ornamental metal shower curtain hooks. The set I got to suspend my brown Target curtain had, if I recall correctly, blue wooden balls at the end of the hooks. I was shooting for a plastic-free lifestyle, but as I learned, metal shower hooks are a pain! They were constantly slipping off the rail. When I tried to bend the hooks into a tighter loop so that they weren't so easily removed, I ended up breaking several of them.

Well, that necessitated the purchase of replacements from the thrift store—naively, I thought that maybe these cool crystalline plastic ones would work because they opening was smaller (they couldn't fall off the rail), but they were even worse than the metal ones—their hook-within-a-hook design meant the curtain would just fall off of them instead

So I set out to buy my third set of shower curtain hangers. This time, I went for the kind I'd grown up with: plastic rings that can be snapped shut. They worked OK for quite a while, but over time, some of the closures stopped working, allowing the curtain to slip off its mooring.

No and no.

It got annoying enough that eventually, I made my fourth and final shower curtain purchase. This time, I went as cheapo as possible—pink plastic C-rings that I think cost 99 cents, 50% off.

And whaddaya know? They're my favorite shower curtain rings yet!

The flexible plastic means they're easy to pop on and off the pole, but the opening is too small to allow them to fall off by accident. The best thing is they can easily be flipped 180° while in position, so the opening can face either side of the shower rail.

 
This enables you to remove the curtain without removing the liner, and vice versa! Wow! Score another win for cheap plastic over more environmentally friendly materials. I can only just hope that my plastic C-rings last a lifetime.

I think that covers everything I had to say about shower curtains, so I guess I'll close the curtain on this post!