I’ve purchased shades from Ruyi (如邑傢飾) located at 68 Mingsheng E Rd. Sec. 2 (tel. 2536-1186). They carry
Hunter Douglas shades which are very nice indeed. Highly recommend it. 
I do it the easy way! I went to Summer Point Jr, saw Jessies lovely, lovely curtains, and simply asked where she got 'em. She’ll let me know in the fullness of time and I’ll post the info. They’re designer-type jobbies. Really, really nice.
Bump on buying curtains …
Our apartment came with installed curtain rods and curtains, but the Taipei sun takes its toll and those curtains are starting to decay. (The plastic rings at the top started to disintegrate long ago, but at least those are easily replaceable.) We’ve got curtain rods/rails on three windows, and vertical blinds on the big window in the living room.
Ballpark figure, how much do curtains typically cost? I don’t know if we’d have to reinstall the curtain rods or if they can just use the same ones. We’d probably want to make the bedroom ones as close to blackout curtains as we can. This isn’t urgent, but for budgetary purposes, roughly how much money are we looking at for this sort of thing? There’s a nearby curtain store that seems friendly - would they typically come and do measurements, or do we go there with numbers? I don’t even know the procedure for this.
Or are forumosans just taping sarongs up to our windows? (Not that I did that for any length of time in my first Taiwanese apartment … or two …)
Wow, you dug this out of the grave! If memory serves, new curtains for my entire apartment (in all the windows except the bathroom) came to around $50,000. Of course, the price depends on the type of curtains you get, and Hunter Douglas is not cheap, but it’s very functional. There’s a type that retracts from the top down so it allows the light in while preserving privacy. They will come to your place and do measurements first and see what types of curtains/shades/blinds your windows can accommodate. You then pick what you like and they’ll give you a quote.
1 Like
Thanks Incubus! So should I assume that $50,000 is somewhat to the high-but-not-excessive end of the cost range? That has me guessing that 20 to 30 thousand would be an “OK quality but not great” price range.
Hmm. One curtain in my computer room is on its last legs, although the cats certainly enjoy pushing through and enlarging the giant hole. But the rest are still fine … I guess this is going to be one of those situations where getting all four windows done at once is cheaper than doing them one at a time over the years.
Curiously, someone else recently suggested having our bathroom redone would also cost around $50,000. And I’d prefer to have that done, but it’s lower on the priority list.
Ah, the Taiwanese apartment. “Boy, it’d be great to have nicer curtains! That would really look wonderful next to the walls … with the plaster-paint that flakes off a little more with every typhoon …”
Yes, fairly high quality but not top of the line. I used Hunter Douglas for less than half the windows, the rest were the cheaper roller shades and blinds. Rollers are the cheapest. There’s also a big price difference between getting import and domestic. If you have cats, I would not get sheers, which are great for softening the sunlight but can be easily destroyed by their claws.
1 Like
Anyone found no drill curtain rods? My landlord says I can’t drill into the wall.
I’ve found them at a few za-huo dian and at Daiso.
1 Like
Try heavy-duty 3M waterproof command hooks (real 3M ones, not a Taiwanese/Chinese knock-off) on either side and also the middle of the window + the lightest rod you can find
1 Like
I got these poles from Nitori that you twist and they extend, supports 4kg curtains and my curtains were about 1.8kg. It worked really well without having to drill holes.
2 Likes