Yesterday people moved in to the last of the six townhouses across the street from us. The houses were being framed when Dd was born in 2018 and the first people moved in in March 2020, just when everyone with the option, shifted to working from home. Blinds became very important, for us and for them!
Gather round, while I tell you the story of our blinds and the leaky windows behind them.
We bought our blinds in four batches from The Shade Store between Dec. 2018 and Sept. 2020, because they are not cheap, even with Jack's professional discount. Prior to that we had paper blinds on the second floor and no window coverings on the third floor. I mentioned the new neighbors across the street but our downhill neighbors also had trouble adjusting to the reduction of privacy caused by our house. In the first year, on two occasions they asked us not to open our (cumbersome, rarely opened, paper blinds) so that they could have privacy in their yard, and I think their house which has few curtains. We said we were saving up to buy blinds and they offered to split the cost with us. We declined and pointed out that virtually no one in our neighborhood has outdoor privacy. Yikes.
Our windows started leaking a little over a year after we moved in. I am still annoyed that they apparently did a crap job installing them, but I am thankful that all of the cost of repair, which must be ridiculously high at this point, has been covered by the subcontractor. 2020 reminded us that there are worse problems to have. As I write this, I only know of one leaking window in the house, behind the kitchen stove, and I am expecting a call about it tomorrow.
Let's mix it up by going top to bottom, rather than in chronological order!
On the third floor we installed white painted boards just below the highest windows and attached the blinds to them. This means that we can never block out all of the sunlight, which is fine for the third floor, with the exception of a few late summer dinners where the sun is in just the wrong place. We did this because the west windows of the kitchen, where there are actually three stacked windows are too tall for any of the type of blinds we wanted to buy, and top-down electric blinds don't exist. The opening at the top doesn't intrude on privacy and in the summer we keep the operable upper windows that are kid-safe and rain-safe open almost all the time. I'm pleased by how you can't really see the wood we mounted the blinds on at all.
Jan. 2019 and May 2019 with Dd brightening things up
We did the third floor west wall blinds in Jan. 2019 and the third floor north wall blinds in March of 2020, which was good timing with the new neighbors across the street.
At one point, I thought we should wait until the windows were all fixed before spending money on nice blinds, but it seems unwise to put any hopes on the end of window repairs.
To appreciate the blinds in our bedroom, I must include some picture of just how bad the west wall of our bedroom has looked at different points.
Here is the initial water damage from Dec. 2017, which prompted the first round of window-repair scaffolding for about 2 months at the beginning of 2018 (when I very much wanted to take first-trimester naps at lunch time but there were men inside and outside my windows).
Aug 2018, "fresh" $5 paper blinds March 2019 "black out" paper
while Dd shared our room
The fall of 2018, when Dd was a newborn, was the third attempt at fixing the bedroom corner leak. A guy from a new crew took the complaint seriously and cut out the drywall in the corner, going up about three feet to trace the leak. I guess I was too annoyed by the window and enamored by Dd to take a picture of it. It remained all chopped up for months though. At some point they replaced the drywall, but it leaked again (along with others) and they came back with the scaffolding (round 2) in Sept. 2019.
May 2019 - blinds that open from the top or bottom!
Sept. 2019, nice blinds with scaffolding
During this second round of scaffolding they accidentally broke the window over the front door. Then the took it out, realized it would be better to leave it in until the replacement came, re-installed the broken window and ordered a replacement without measuring the window. The very large replacement then came and did not fit, so it was taped up in Seahawks colors for several weeks but did not guillotine anyone walking in or out the door.
Here's Dd enjoying scaffolding round 2, just before his 1st birthday.
Moving now to the office, we installed the blinds in March 2020. Unlike the third floor, where we were able to hike the patches in the wall where we had to cut out drywall to put in the wiring, in the office the holes were much closer to the ceiling where a picture would look quite odd.
Here's a picture where you can't see the patch in the wall!
So how do we like the blinds? Mostly they are great and we can't believe how long we made it without them on the third floor where it's easy to be blinded by the sun or feel like you're in a fishbowl. The electric blinds really are pretty cool. They have a remote and so you can raise or lower a whole batch of blinds with a few clicks and you can program them to close or open at certain times of the day. In the office, two of the blinds open halfway every morning so that the plants I have by my desk get sunlight even on weekends when I would forget about them.
On the other hand, they have a sticking problem and a couple of them look like this when they are lowered. After a few agonizing minutes they mostly unstick themselves, but it looks pretty terrible at first. The company readily sent out replacements for this issue and for the cases where their measurements were wrong. We ended up deciding to stick with the stickiness and used the replacements on other window, so we got a couple of free shades for our cheapness.
All that remains is to keep getting the windows fixed and to put up the five blinds on the south wall of the kitchen, which have been sitting in the office, waiting for us to make time for them. It will be interesting because we'll be putting glass behind the stove but over the blind, to protect it from cooking. Wish us luck!
Luck! Long time !
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