The Attack of the 118-inch Window

I mentioned on Monday that lately we’ve been incredibly productive—and, it’s true, we had. Notice that past tense? Yeah. It’s like that. In the short amount of time that we’ve lived in our house, I’ve come to notice that there’s a distinct ebb and flow to home improvement progress. One week you can barely keep up with the insane amount of projects on your plate and it seems like you’re constantly busy hanging something or ripping out this or decorating that. The next week…blah. You sit and watch TV from your dining room (because the TV is too big to watch from less than fifteen feet away—a first world problem if I’ve ever heard one) and the most you can work up the energy to do is a load of laundry…and that’s only because you’ve started to recycle your socks.

This week has thus far been one of those sock-recycling-kind of weeks. This is not to say that we’ve been entirely lazy on the house front! I mean, I cooked. Like, every day this week. And not just pizza either. I also did laundry and planned a few more projects and did other necessary things, like work and school. But those aren’t the kind of thing you write up for your blog. At least, not this kind of blog.

Anyhow, this is all a really long way of saying, I’m sorry that I’m behind posting about things that are actually home related. It’s also to say that there’s still stuff I have to show you from last week. Like this project…

Can you guess what project I’m talking about? Maybe this will help…

That’s right! We finally put window coverings over our gigantic, monstrous, glass behemoth! Frankly, it’d been driving both of us crazy for a while. For me, it was the fact that I knew people could see inside our house at night while all I could see was a reflection of myself and the ridiculous mess still inhabiting our front living room. For Denny, it was the idea of all that wasted energy leaking out of the giant hole in the front of our house. And since the weather has been getting increasingly cold and damp, it was definitely time to take action.

We talked about a number of options, like ordering custom-size roman shades, putting up thermal curtains, and a few other ideas, but in the end we decided to stick with a pair of roll-up shades in natural wood. The price was right, the look was dandy, and since the glass is already double-paned, Denny thought that we could probably get away with something lighter than the heavy thermal-block curtain idea (which I was thrilled to hear). So we spent a considerable amount of time trolling Home Depot and Lowe’s before deciding on some 60”x72” designview Panama Natural Roller Shades from Home Depot. We had the guy at H.D. cut a half inch off of each set (we bought two of them) to fit our 118” window, then we took our shades home and prayed they’d go up easy.

I’m inclined to think that they went up pretty easy—but then again that’s probably because Denny did all the work while I did what I’m doing right now: sat on my butt and blogged. Poor Denny. He does all the hard work in our projects, which I inevitably sum up as “...and then Denny measured, drilled, and some other stuff and now look at my pretties!” Talk about understatements.

But…seriously, guys…Look at my pretties!

They turned out so well! I was a little worried about them being bulgy where they roll up, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen sleeker blinds. I was also concerned about how much of a gap there’d be between the two rollers, since the mounting hardware had to be accommodated for, but Denny did some kind of magic trick and decreased the gap to less than an inch! See?

We’re also extremely pleased with the texture of the blinds, which ended up being not too busy but also not a bland wall of beige. Aaaaand…

Ta-daaaaah! No more peeping Tom neighbors! In short, this project was a total “mission accomplished” and we’ve now managed to put up six whole window treatments! Wow! That’s a lot of exclamation points! But I’m really excited, so…yay!!!!!!!!

(Sidenote: I think I’m maybe drunk on the feeling of window-treatment-success. That or I should not have had that fifth cup of coffee just now. Just a thought.)