Project 5: Installing New Blinds

Let me start off by saying it's going to be obvious from the pictures that I don't always post things in chronological order. We replaced our blinds right in the middle of painting our master bedroom this past weekend, so you're going to see some new wall color in the below... but I'm waiting to do the 'before' and 'after' pictures until tomorrow. The new blinds are part of what makes this room look so great. :)

Oh, another word about the pictures... it's really hard to take pictures of blinds because by definition the are black-lit. I could have waited until evening for better pictures, but it's really hard to actually change the blinds without the light. So crappy pictures here we come...

The Master Bedroom's blinds were already broken when we moved in. They were 1" wide metal blinds and no longer rotated close. Our headboard pretty much covered the window and it faces a neighbor's house, so privacy wasn't as big of a deal as the fact that the sunlight just pored on into the room at 6am. LJ and I moved to this house to be closer to work so that we don't have to wake up as early, yet the dumb blinds were causing us to wake up before our alarms when off. After three weeks of waking up around 6 and then trying to get back to sleep with a pillow over my head to block the light, I decided this had to stop.

Here are the old blinds... this is as closed as they got.

Removing old blinds is pretty easy. Most of them have this little metal contraption that is hold them up on either side. Lets call it an end cap. It has a front piece the flips up:

Then you can just remove the blinds and throw them away. What you're left with are just the little metal end caps on both ends:

If the new blinds are the same size as the old you may be able to just pop in new blinds and be done, but we were replacing our 1" metal blinds with 2" faux wood blinds. Faux wood looks just like the expensive stuff but it's much cheaper. Oh, and in my opinion, the faux wood blinds are easier to dust. We went with the cheapest faux wood brand at Home Depot. 

You have to buy blinds that are wide enough to cover the window and long enough to go down all the way. If the standard sizes aren't quite right, they (Home Depot worker) can cut down the blinds. For example, we bought 72" wide blinds four our 71" wide window. We then had them cut down to 70 1/2" so they would fit inside the window. It doesn't cost anything extra to cut them, but it does mean you have to buy them...so measure twice, cut once! As you can see, the blinds we got are WAY too long for this window (64" and our window is less than 3' long). The window is very wide but not very long. There is a way to take slats out from the bottom. I didn't do it for this window (ran out of time) but you should know it is possible. Here's a picture of the blinds we bought:

But back to the install. Our new blinds needed their own (larger) metal end caps installed so we just unscrewed the old ones and screwed in the new ones. Here are what the 2" end caps look like once installed:

Notice how the screws holding this in are both on the bottom? This is not ideal. You're supposed to have on on the top, one on the bottom in a diagonal line. However, when we drilled a hole for the screw we ran into some type of metal sheet blocking the top holes. 

I always recommend first drilling a whole where you plan to screw in a screw. You just use a drill bit smaller than the screw so that the screw still is able to grab onto the wall when you put it in. It makes installing the screw easier and warns you if you're going to hit something like a metal plate.

So, after we got these installed we had to install a middle support piece. The 2" blinds are much heavier than the old ones. What sucked about this piece is that the shape of it made it impossible to use the drill, so we had to screw these suckers in upside down by hand...all the blood drains out of your arms after a few seconds. I had to get LJ to help me.

Once the end caps and middle support pieces were installed we just slid the new blinds into place and closed the end caps.

See that clip on the front? It holds a piece that goes across the top and covers everything to give it a nice clean line.  Here is our 'After' picture with the top piece in place. They look SO much better than the old ones, and even more importantly; they close!

We'll be changing out the blinds all over the house, room by room, but don't worry, I wont explain it to you every time. ;)

Project cost: $75 for one window

Time: about 45 minutes total

Difficulty: Easy. If you can put a screw into a wall you can install blinds. Custom blinds may be nice, but this way is WAY cheaper and not hard to do at all.