HGTV Star Erin Napier's Budget Curtain Hack Comes With Big Savings

Curtains may not be the trendiest home design going into 2026, but they're not going out of style completely. That said, curtains aren't the cheapest home upgrades you can make. Depending on style, material, the size of your windows, and how many you want to cover, you could easily spend several hundred dollars outfitting your home with curtains. Thankfully, HGTV star and budget design guru Erin Napier has a budget curtain hack that comes with big savings: drop cloths.

In the pilot episode of "Home Town", Napier utilized hardware store drop cloths, the same kind professional painters use to protect flooring, as an alternative to regular curtains. Writing for her Laurel Mercantile blog, Napier stated that she would have loved to use Restoration Hardware's army duck cloth curtains in white, but at $120 (in 2016 dollars) per curtain panel, that wasn't feasible. Instead, Napier improvised.

"You know what's also made out of cotton duck and costs $10 for a 9 x 12 piece? Drop cloth," she wrote. Adjusted for inflation, that same drop cloth costs around $25, but it is still a lot cheaper than duck cloth, satin, or linen curtain panels. Similar to Napier's unexpected use of old candlesticks as the base of a bird bath, using a drop cloth for curtains showcases her ability to creatively thrift affordable items into tasteful home design elements. What's even better? You can too.

Thankfully, transforming a drop cloth into curtains is not as complicated a Napier design as creating a unique herringbone floor pattern in your kitchen. Instead, if you have a good pair of fabric scissors and some basic sewing knowledge, you can whip up some drop cloth curtains for your home. In an interview with the L.A. Times, Napier explained, "I wanted drapes that look like linen. My mom and I split them in half [and] hemmed the edges."

Before you do this, you need to take measurements of your windows to make sure the curtains hang correctly. Curtains typically hang either to the window ledge or down to the floor. Determining what style you want will dictate how long your curtains are. In terms of width, the curtains should measure about one and a half times the width of your window.

Next, you need to decide how they're going to hang. If you want to take a page out of Napier's book, simply use some ring clips and hang them along a curtain rod. If you are more adept at sewing, you could opt for a more complicated rod pocket, or make curtain hooks out of extra fabric. The simple and efficient style of the ring clips works great; however, the length where the clips hang should also be taken into account when measuring out your curtains. Luckily, if you forget this step, it won't make too much of a difference in your final design.