Making a cheap curtain rod shorter

Part of owning two houses, however temporarily we hope it may be, is learning to use what you have even when it really doesn't work. In other words, make things work. I used this philosophy while hanging the curtains from our old house in our new living room. The windows here are shaped differently and there are three here compared to two at the old place but for whatever reason it worked out perfectly that I didn't need to buy any new curtains at this time. Eventually I will either need new curtains or new blinds as these are only sheers but having an 8 ft fence around the house helps a little.

The biggest problem I ran into with using the items I already had on hand was that I had several of the cheap metal curtain rods and two of them were so long they would have fit windows twice as wide as what I needed them for. Now some people would have just spent a few dollars to buy new ones that were the right size but it was raining and I didn't feel like leaving the house and I had sheetrock dust on my pants so I decided to make it work.

 I used a wire cutter snippy tool that MAY actually be a tin snip but not a very good one if that's what it actually is so I'm going to call it a wire cutter. It takes a little muscle and a lot of wiggling with each tiny tiny snip you make but it worked well enough to eventually get through the metal and then bend the end back into shape. I had to take quite a bit off so I needed to cut both the inner and the outer rods but there is a small plastic piece on the outer one that you can see in the first picture that hides any ugly ends. Slide the two pieces back together and you're in business!

This would have been even easier with an actual tin snip like this one Great Neck Saw 10in. Aviation Tin Snip 17623 (Google Affiliate Ad) so if you have access to one, please use that for heavens sakes. My second picture shows how bent out of shape the excess piece got and how ragged the end of the actual rod was and I think these would have been better with a sharper tool but it really didn't matter in the long run.

Have you ever fabricated a curtain rod to fit your space? Have you seen the pinterest photos using pipes and fittings for curtain rods? I wish I didn't have curtain rods on hand so I could do something like that.