Week one is worse than people expect
The keys arrive, the apartment is empty, and every window is bare glass. In Dubai that is not a cosmetic problem. The sun is up before half past five for much of the year, it comes straight through unshaded glass onto whatever you are sleeping on, and the room is warm before your alarm. Add a tower fifteen metres away with a clear view into your living room after dark, and week one is genuinely uncomfortable.
That discomfort is the problem. It puts you under pressure to fix the windows immediately, and pressure is what makes people buy badly.
The expensive first decision
The pattern is always the same. Week one is unbearable, so something temporary goes up — ready-made panels from a mall, a cheap roller, a bedsheet on a tension rod. It takes the edge off. Three months later the apartment is furnished, the temporary thing looks wrong and never fitted properly anyway, and it gets replaced with something made to measure.
Two purchases for one set of windows, and the first was thrown away. That is the most common avoidable cost in a new Dubai apartment, and it is not bad judgement. It is doing everything at once instead of in order — and almost nothing about your windows has to happen in week one.
The order that works
Bedrooms first. Always. Not a preference — it is the only room where the absence of curtains stops something working. You can live with a bright living room. You cannot sleep through a Dubai sunrise, and after a week of waking at 5:20 everything else gets harder. Bedrooms are also most likely to need a proper blackout layer, the specification most often got wrong when it is rushed.
Living room second. Not for heat — for privacy after dark, which is the thing people underestimate. A room that felt private all afternoon is fully visible from the opposite tower the moment you turn the lights on. It is uncomfortable rather than urgent, so it is second, not first.
Everything else waits, and genuinely can. Kitchens, bathrooms, spare rooms, the study nobody has furnished. Those windows are small, frosted, or in rooms you are not using at night, and several will turn out not to want fabric at all — the reasoning is in curtains or blinds. You cannot make that call before you know how you use the room. Give it a month.
What to check before anyone quotes
Five things, and you can check them yourself with a tape measure in twenty minutes. Knowing them makes every quote you receive comparable.
- Ceiling height, floor to slab. Not window height. It decides whether a ceiling-fixed track is possible and how much drop you are actually buying.
- What the wall above the window is made of. Tap it. A hollow sound is drywall; a dead solid one is concrete or block. This changes the fixings, and it changes whether a heavy curtain is safe there at all.
- Whether there is a curtain pocket or recess. Many newer towers have a slot in the ceiling near the glass to hide the track. If you have one, use it, and tell anyone quoting — it changes the specification.
- Whether the developer left a track. Often there is one. Rarely is it the right one.
- How deep the window reveal is. If you are considering a blind, it has to fit inside that depth. Measure from the glass to the front face of the wall.
None of that is measuring the windows themselves, which is a separate job with its own rules — width taken at the track rather than the glass, drop from the track down, and stack, which is where the fabric goes when the curtain is open. How to measure for curtains sets all of it out, along with the mistakes that ruin an order.
Handover snagging: the track and the wall
Two things are worth raising while the developer is still responsive, because both are much cheaper to sort out before anything is drilled.
The first is the track. Developer-fitted tracks are chosen to a budget and fixed at whatever height was convenient, which is frequently too low. Mounted at window height rather than near the slab, it loses you visible ceiling, leaves a light gap above the heading, and makes the room read shorter. It may also be light-duty and unable to carry a lined curtain across a wide opening.
The second is the wall. In new towers the section above the window is very often drywall over a metal frame, not concrete. A curtain track loads every bracket continuously, and a bracket fixed into plasterboard with an ordinary plug holds a few months and then pulls out, taking a piece of the wall with it. Fixed into the frame, or with anchors rated for the board, it holds indefinitely. It costs nothing extra to get right and is invisible once the curtain is up — which is exactly why it gets skipped.
The mistakes that cost money
- Buying ready-made for floor-to-ceiling glass. Ready-made panels come in standard drops made for standard windows. On a slab-to-floor opening they hang short, sit narrow, and no amount of arranging hides it.
- Ordering before the AC and paint work is finished. If anything is still being drilled, sanded or sprayed, curtains hung now will collect it. Let the dust settle, literally.
- Forgetting the building needs an NOC. Most towers require a no-objection certificate and approved contractor details before anyone drills, plus a booked service lift. Routine paperwork, but it takes days, and it is the usual reason installations slip. Ask building management in your first week.
- Choosing fabric from a screen. Colour, texture and weight all misrepresent in a photograph, and Dubai light is not showroom light. Which fabrics survive here at all is a subject of its own, covered in choosing curtain fabric for a Dubai home.
- Mounting the track low because it looks easier. Fixing to the window frame or just above it is quicker and it is what most rushed jobs do. It permanently costs you height and leaves light spilling over the top. Go as close to the slab as the wall allows.
If you are renting rather than buying
The honest version: some of this is worth it either way, and some is not.
Worth it in a two-year rental: the bedrooms. You will sleep in that room roughly seven hundred times, and made-to-measure curtains come down in an afternoon and go into a box. The track and fixings stay behind, a small loss against two years of proper sleep. Worth it too is getting the fixing right, since a wall repaired at move-out costs more than the anchors would have.
Not worth it: motorising a rental, interlining, or dressing every secondary window. If you own the apartment and motors are on your list, the question is which windows earn one rather than how many you can fit — what actually goes wrong with motorised curtains covers that, and the answer is a shorter list than most people expect.
And be realistic about reuse — curtains move to a new apartment only if the drops are close. Widths can be adapted; a drop cannot be invented. If you expect to move within two years, say so when you are quoted, because it changes what we recommend.
If the apartment is a one-bedroom and you would rather make one decision than nine, our one-bedroom package covers the whole apartment as a single specification.
A realistic first month
Week one — buy nothing. Check the five things above, ask building management about the NOC and lift booking, and put something temporary on the bedroom window only. Cheap, ugly, and thrown away in three weeks by design rather than by accident.
Week two — book a measurement, for the whole apartment even if you are only ordering bedrooms. You want the plan for all of it and the invoice for part of it.
Weeks three and four — bedrooms and living room made and installed. That is the normal timescale once a specification is agreed, and what happens at each stage is set out in how it works.
Month two onward — the remaining windows, once you know how the rooms are actually used. Your measurements are already on file, so there is no second survey.
Get the plan before you get the curtains
The most useful thing in your first month is not a curtain. It is knowing which windows matter, which do not, and what your walls will take — that is what stops the panic purchase.
A supervisor comes to you free, for about 45 minutes, and gives you exactly that: every window looked at, the wall type checked, and a straight answer on what the apartment needs and what it does not. Order the bedrooms now and the rest later, or none of it at all.
Book your free measurement — no obligation.