We tackled a little home project over the weekend that was very satisfying: we replaced several of the window shades.

The previous owners had installed these soft, white cellular shades on all the windows on the upper floor of our house, and we never changed them. They are the kind that have a plastic tab at the bottom, and you use that to pull them down or push them up. They are inoffensive looking (to me) and they filter the light nicely – by which I mean they dim the rooms but don’t make them dark – and they offer privacy. 

Over the past, oh, year or so, they have begun to show signs of age. The shade in our bathroom stopped working fully. You can pull it down to its full length, but it declines to rise more than halfway. Then a little horizontal tear appeared in the shade in Carla’s room. And then, this weekend, the one in my bedroom just collapsed, fully, leaving the entire window naked. I wish I had taken a photo of it. It was quite comical, like an old timey slapstick film where a character’s old timey bathing costume pools around his knees. 

Typically, household failures of this sort follow a trajectory of “oh no!” and some poking and prodding to see how to correct the issue, maybe even some light googling, and then we learn to live with the thing, and now everywhere I turn things are broken. It’s not a great way to live, but it is difficult to deviate from so well-worn a path. 

However. This shade failure was, to me, an emergency. The shade is in our bedroom and the window it covers looks out over our street. And in no way do I want my across the street neighbors or any passersby on the sidewalk to be able to look up and a) see me in bed or b) witness me crossing the bedroom in my pajamas, which is often only a T-shirt. My husband tried to duct tape the shade in place the first night, but it kept falling off in the middle of the night. So we googled and I pushed and we went to Lowe’s and bought replacement shades. 

I would have purchased the same shades again, but ours came from J.C. Penney and I don’t know where a J.C. Penney is, in relation to my home; nor am I sure they currently sell home goods. I suppose I could look it up but I am choosing ignorance. What we did purchase were the shades our local Lowe’s had in stock. They look virtually identical to the ones we had. 

The installation is simple enough: You drill a couple of little brackets into the window frame (we were able to use some of the holes from the previous shades’ brackets) and then you clip the shade into the brackets and voila! All done. (I wonder if my husband would want you to know that clipping the shades into the brackets is NOT as simple as it should be, and that the brackets can be stiff and difficult to clip into place. But in THEORY it is very simple.)

We got a kind of shade that you can cut to size. We measured the windows so we could cut them, but when we were standing in the shades aisle of Lowe’s, I got a little nervous about altering the shade permanently before we were able to see if we could hang them. Luckily, the shades they had in stock were only about five inches wider than our windows, which I figured wouldn’t look too weird. Also in the plus column for not cutting them to size was the fact that there was a cutting station in the shade aisle and it said “Out of Order” on a big red sign. 

We got the shades (they were more expensive than I expected – about $80ish a piece) and brought them home and my husband and Carla installed them while I made dinner. They look fabulous (by which I mean they look exactly like the previous shades did) and the one in the bathroom WORKS and I am very pleased. 

Extra pleasing is that we got a blackout shade for Carla’s room. We have been talking about getting blackout curtains/shades for her room since she was about a year old, which is when we discovered her propensity for rising with the sun. And now we DID it, and I am writing this at 8:30 in the morning and she is STILL ASLEEP, which is unheard of. 

We have yet to install curtains on any of the windows on the lower floor. But maybe the success of this little project will spur us on.