Sunday, February 12, 2012

Venetian Blind Installation and Shortening

Our house has six basement windows, five of which have venetian blinds on them. For some reason, the sixth window was easy to ignore, and it's been blindless for a very long time. Finally this week, my wife got around to buying a blind.

She got it at the Home Depot; it's a standard, ready-made 36" wide by 48" tall blind. That's a little too wide, and much too tall, but that's ok. The Home Depot can cut down the width for you on the spot, which my wife had them do, and the height can be reworked by removing slats, repositioning the bottom rail and cutting the excess cord. Going that route is much less expensive than ordering a custom-made blind, but there's one little caution that I should insert here.

Have a tape measure with you, and verify the width dimension before you leave the store with the blind. That will save you a trip back to the store if they get it wrong, which was exactly what they did with the blind my wife bought.

Anyway, to their credit, they replaced the blind so now I can install it. These things are pretty easy to deal with; the mounting hardware is clever, well-thought-out and straightforward stuff. Here's a view of the right side mounting clip in place.

The blind came with two of those clips. It seems that wider blinds will have a third clip to support the centre of the headrail.

Since there are only two clips, I thought it wise to position them fairly well inboard, just to the inboard side of the draw cords. All I have to do now is snap the head rail onto the clips and the blind is up, all 48" of it.

The first time I shortened one of these blinds, I did it by measurement with the blind laid out on the floor. It's actually much easier and safer to do it empirically, with the blind hanging. No measurement error can occur, because there's no need to measure.

The instructions that come with the blind are pretty clear. You end up with what is for all intents and purposes a custom-fitted blind, like so.

Now all the basement windows finally have proper blinds on them. The place is getting positively civilized.

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