Aaaah, yes. We’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of images featuring beautifully dressed beds.

In catalogs, magazines, Pinterest...

The neighbor's house!

How is it that they all look so perfect?

Why doesn’t yours look that way?

You make the bed every morning / You wash the sheets once a week / You plump the pillows and keep the dogs off the bed.

(Well . . . At least most of the time ;-)

Yet it still never seems to look as good as theirs.

How do they do it?

. . . I'll tell you . . .

The secret is in the skirt.

Whenever I’m working on a bedroom project and we have to cut some corners to save on the budget, and we are not doing a full bed, I tell my clients to go for one thing in particular: The skirt.

Sure, you could buy a ready-made coverlet or duvet w/cover, some ready-made shams and pretty pillows, but...

The real secret to having a tidy, custom-designed bed, with a skirt that's never too long or too short, and its knickers showing on the corner, is: a custom-made bedskirt.

Shoot . . . Even if you are going for the rumpled, linen, longer-than-the-bed look, it can still get crooked and not fit on top of the box spring. But why?

Because a store-bought bedskirt never really fits.

Custom Always Fits Juuuust Right

A king size bed should be one standard size, shouldn’t it? Well . . . It’s not. And neither is a queen or a twin. The measurements are always off by an inch or two. They all vary a bit between manufacturers.

And the heights! Have you noticed how beds have gotten taller? Beds are now all kinds of heights! And how do you think a one-size-fits-all bedskirt is supposed to fit all those?

I can tell you . . . BADLY.

With a custom bedskirt, carefully taken dimensions of the existing bed will get you the exact dimension of the drop that's necessary for the skirt. It will fit exact, corner to corner, like a glove.

Tailored bedskirt corner | carlaaston.com

When a custom bedskirt is made, the fabric on the skirt is used at the edge of the decking, all the way around. This is done so that if -- for some strange reason -- the thing gets tugged to the point you're able to see some of the deck material, you’ll just see more of the skirt material - not that cheesy white fabric that always gets ripped. And because it fits perfectly, the pleats always land where they are supposed to. It’s wonderful!

Also, if you want to be 100% sure that your perfectly fitting skirt will stay in place and never move, no matter what happens on that bed, use the twist pins seen below.

They twist down into the box springs and secure the skirt into place. And they never come out! (Well, at least, not without a lot of work.)

No more rumpled looking bed!

So, if you have some dollars to spend on new bedding, yet you don't quite have enough funds to dress the entire bed from top to bottom, focus your investment on the skirt.