After spending the previous three days in financial studies class Eric and I rushed all day Sunday to prepare for the impending delivery and installation of the custom Hunter Douglas window blinds we ordered. We had to paint the bedroom window and the hall windows frames as well as remove all the existing windows hardware and patch all the holes.
I picked the shades a few weeks ago and it's been a bit nerve wracking, picking fabrics from tiny swatches in the showroom and hoping the look good in your house with all your things and you color scheme. For the most part I think we did pretty well.
The most time consuming window of the all was the Pella unfinished wood in the master bedroom. We went back and forth on whether to stain the window or paint it white and finally settled on painting it white because that was easier and it would match the door to the sunroom better. Even though white paint was easier, it was still very time consuming to sand and paint that window. Here it is before
And after, painted white
All the windows still need some touch ups around the edges that we will go back and do at a later date.
With the door to the sunroom
For the windows from each bedroom to the hall we wanted to paint the frame because the white on white (or in this case buff on buff) was a bit too bland for us. I subscribe to the super hero school of decorating, where you pick two bold colors and make them the theme for a room. You can do a third color as long as it is pretty neutral. So the colors for the master bedroom are Ralph Lauren Pomegranate (medium bright red) and Open Valley (dark forest green). The colors for the guest bedroom are Ralph Lauren Townhouse (dark brick red) and Lancaster Blue (dark, rich blue)
Here is what the frames looked like before
So we painted the frame in the master bedroom Open Valley
And Lancaster Blue in the guest bedroom
Eventually we will do the other side facing the stairs and do the door frame and top window frame the same way. This just needed to happen before the shade hardware was mounted
For the master bedroom we got Duette Honeycomb shades in Level 5 (blocks all light, complete privacy) for both the window and the door with the LiteRise cordless system. It's super easy to move the shades up and down without the cord. We got the same shade for the hall window only in Level 4 (diffused light, complete privacy. All the bedroom shades are in moss green, a medium soft green
We got that same shade for the guest bedroom hall window, only in Colonial Blue, a medium soft blue
For the big guest bedroom front window, this was the look before hand
This was a hard one to find a covering for since it's a huge window (103 inches wide) and the red color of the wall is so bold that any bold colored shade might look odd.
I decided on Alustra Silhouette shades with a 3" vain in a #4 opacity. There weren't many color choices that this size so I opted for Brightlight, a gray-ish shade with hits of subtle blue-ish green. I'm not sold on it yet, but it's good enough for now. It pretty much just looks gray in the photo
One issue is that the baskets for the cats don't fit on the ledge anymore now that the shades are in. We might have to get smaller baskets but in the meantime the shades are up a couple of inches. This hasn't fazed the kitties at all.
Last but not least, for the living room we did Alustra Silhouette shades in Bon Soir Silver Reflection—the fabric has a slight silver hue that doesn't come out in the photo at all. We did a #3 opacity here since we were mostly concerned with privacy from this window and not blocking light.
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