Cleaning the Privacy Curtains

Dianne here:  This blog will be of no interest to my non-rv'ing friends, but I was so happy with the results I just "had to share."

Cleaning the motor home front privacy curtains was Item #56 on our to-do list this summer (the list is now up to 82, but we've already crossed off about two-thirds of our chores).  We're making good progress!

The curtains were easy to take down.  It just required the removal of a couple of screws holding one side of the track; the curtains slid right off.

There were a few screws along the sides to remove, but that was it.

I expected to just be able to take them down and send them off to the dry cleaners.  Nope....no one would take them (poor Roger had this errand, and drove all over Pendleton and Anderson trying to find a willing dry cleaner).  I guess the problem was the numerous closed hooks on the top that I was unwilling to use pliers to remove.

I jumped onto the message boards to see how others have cleaned theirs.  Some suggested throwing them into the washing machine.  I couldn't bring myself to do this; especially with the hardware still attached.  Someone else who had a Newmar with the same type of stiff, pleated curtains said they had good results washing them in the bathtub.  Alrighty then....sounds perfect.

Since I currently have access to both a bathtub and clothes line, something I won't have when we leave here, I made haste to soak the curtains in Tide for a few hours.  

After that, I hung them out on the clothes line and rinsed them off, both sides, using the garden hose.  It was a perfect sunny, windy day and they dried quickly. 

They had not ever been washed, as far as I know.  The rv is a 2003.  Traveling through the Deep South in the springtime two years in a row, with two dogs and a cat, meant the curtains had to be just full of dust, pollen, and pet dander.  They didn't really look all that bad when I took them down; but wow, was I happy with the clean results.  They look brand new!  I went over them quickly with a pet hair roller before I took them off the clothesline, to get any remaining cat hair from Charlie the "fur machine."  (The front dash is his favorite perch).

I had fears of having to re-iron all the pleats.  As you can see from the photos, my fears were groundless, because the curtains slid right back onto the track, and folded up neatly back into their pleated state, with no extraneous wrinkles anywhere.  

Wish I had something more interesting to write about, but we're just packing things to ship to Texas and getting rid of yet "more stuff."  We've closed on our rv lot in Mission, TX now.  It's horribly hot and humid there in the summers; but then, it's horribly hot and humid here in Indiana, too, this summer!!

The purple coneflowers at the little house are just getting ready to bloom in the flower garden out front; I'll post another photo after they bloom.  Should be really pretty!  There will also be some black-eyed susans and prairie coneflowers.  I might try to collect some seeds before we leave town, to take to Texas next January.