Installing White Faux Wood Window Blinds: a house log

Our house gets truly pleasant sunlight – especially upstairs and especially in the afternoon when the sun hits the front of the house directly. We enjoy it for everything from hanging out to taking photos. And Burger, well, he loves it for simply about anything: napping, grooming, sniffing things, more napping.

But the beams of sunlight streaming in also highlighted a shortcoming of this house: no window blinds. I think we took it for granted that the bedrooms in our last house came with pleasant white faux wood blinds, so it was kind of a shock the first night when we realized we had nothing for privacy or to keep the light from creeping in early the next morning.

So after way too many nights of undressing in the dark and waking up at the crack of dawn, we at last went out and picked up a stack of these puppies. They are Home Depot’s in-stock faux wood blinds. We splurged slightly on the “premium” version because they had wider slats (which means less window obstruction when they are open) and they also promised better light blocking and had a break-away cord for brought in kid safety (no loops, simply pulls, and the pulls break away under the weight of a child). Fortunately it was only a small upcharge, since dressing 11 windows swiftly brought in up to over $350 (and that was with a coupon). Gulp.

But they were a necessary evil that each room needed (especially the bedrooms and bathrooms where a certain amount of privacy is not simply appreciated, it is expected). I say “evil” because we do not consider them to be exceptionally fairly – even if they are an upgrade from vinyl blinds – but the function trumps any gripes that we have about form. And once you layer in some curtains the windows end up looking fairly strong.

Installation was a bit tedious, but straightforward thanks to some good instructions. Having to hang eleven blinds and then make a few adjustments turned into a bit of a time suck (this project took about 6 hours total, broken up over two days) but it is beyond pleasant to have privacy and early-morning-darkness in the bedrooms and bathrooms again.

Hanging them in short involved screwing two brackets into the side of the window frame, and then sliding the blind into place.

We were lucky that our windows were all standard sizes, so Home Depot had them on the shelf (they offer free cutting services if needed – but we were glad we did not have to stand there while they cut down 11 blinds for us). I did get to customize them for our house by adjusting the length, which I did after each one was hung. I simply took out the bottom slat, cut the strings that held all of the extraneous slats that we hoped to remove, and then reattached the base slat to the shortened strings and tied that to hold it in place (this post shows that step in more detail if you’d like extra photos/info).

One new issue that we never encountered when installing these before was that the side pieces of trim that came with each set of blinds needed to be shorter to fit against our window frames for some reason.

So I broke out my miter saw to give each of them (all 22!) a trim so they’d sit flush against the window and still attach correctly at the corner. The pieces of scrap wood in this picture are simply blocking that I used to keep the trim in place without risking my fingers.

Much better.

They simply snap together, so shortening them on the end did not interfere with how they attach.

Then all that was left was to enjoy some privacy and some light control. They are still looking fairly basic because we do not have curtains hung in most of our rooms yet.

Although we do have them in Clara’s room…

We also hung the curtains that Sherry sewed for our last dining room in the guest room.

We owe you folks photos of how each room is looking these days, so Sherry’s planning to shoot some pictures for you this weekend and write a “one month in” post for Monday. And speaking of the lady wife, we were simply talking about how the first few months in a house consistently feel like you are bleeding money. Seriously, someone get us a tourniquet. So although this is our third house and we should know how this goes by now (addressing all those do-this-first items simply seem to add up) we still find ourselves walking out of Home Depot saying things like “Over $300?! Are these blinds made of gold?!”

P.S. Since Google Reader is breaking up with all of us in four short days (aka: closing down forever) we have been forced to find a new reader, so we have converted over to Feedly (it imported all of our go-to blogs truly easily and we liked its clean layout) but we have also heard good things about Bloglovin. So this is simply a little “remember the milk” reminder, except it is “remember to switch readers because Google’s about to dump us all.”