decor: window shades and sheers

Tony and I moved into our house a little bit over a year ago, and for several months we'd spend our weekends doing home improvement projects. Like painting. Especially painting. Oh, the painting! Walls. Trim. Inside. Outside. Not to mention the mini-demo projects, yard work. Organizing, decorating, re-decorating, discarding. Our to-do list hasn't gone away, but we've tackled most of the high-priority projects.

Our calendar was pretty open last weekend, so Tony suggested we block off Saturday and Sunday for some home improvement projects that we've been putting off. It'd been a while since we've made multiple trips to home improvement stores in one weekend. (Specifically, two Home Depot trips and one Frager's trip.)

My favorite project of the weekend: finishing the window treatments in our second bedroom. One of the shades had been broken since we bought the house, but this isn't a heavily trafficked room, so replacing the shades wasn't a high priority.

I ended up buying vinyl roller shades, which I've always liked because they're sleek looking. And then I saw how much they cost, and that made me like them even more. I ended up with heavy-duty, room-darkening shades, for about $20 each. With the brackets and plastic pulls, the we spent just under $50. Not bad for two windows.

I have sheer curtains on the outside of the windows, so I mounted the shades on the inside. You measure the inside of your window, and the folks at Home Depot cut the shade to the right size for you.  And this is where the two Home Depot trips came in. Apparently the cutting machine at the Home Depot in Northeast has been down since the derecho storm earlier this summer. So we also made the trek out to Home Depot near Landmark Mall. The installation itself was relatively simple and required a drill and a screwdriver.

And, voila, new shades! Happy Jessi.

<3

From the archives:

decor: vintage postcards