Blinded By The Light

Our kitchen faces West and even though it's on the main floor of the house, the kitchen window towers over the street below. This is a nice feature when you want to have a view out the kitchen during the day. However, at dusk you are blinded by the setting sun making cooking or doing dishes a constant battle. At night, when the lights are on inside, it sends out a beacon of light into the street that attracts the gaze/stare of all walking and driving by. You're pretty much on display for the world to see which is not cool. And of course, there are no window treatments at all on the windows. Project time!

Before

Rewinds a few days: David was really gung-ho about getting cheap 1" vinyl temporary blinds until we remodel the kitchen. Finding just the right size blinds at Lowe's was easy. 28" blinds will fit our 28 1/2" opening juuuuuust right. We got home, opened the packaging and were shocked to see that our 28" blinds were not 28"....they were 27 1/2". Fast forward to a closer inspection of the packaging box and we notice in small print it says 'blinds are 1/2" size smaller than stated size to allow for hardware installation'. Basically, the blind people thought it would be a good idea to idiot-proof their blinds for people who don't know you need to allow a 1/4" space on either side of the window and we are stuck with blinds 1/2" too small! Just enough so that the blinds won't work. Grrrr....

Fast forward back to today: As I was preparing to return the ill-fitting blinds, I decided not only am I fed up with these annoyingly cheap and idiot-proof blinds, but I didn't want to have to look at another set of them which are 1/2" bigger until we remodel. If I'm going to go through the process of installing blinds, why not just get ones that we can use forever? I have always been a big fan of the 2" faux-wood blinds (they look like wood but are easy to clean and care for) and decided that was the way to go. Since David is out of town he doesn't get a vote. I win!

Back to Lowe's I went armed with a 10% off coupon I found online (I'm obsessed with finding discounts on everything I buy). I had my fancy new 2" white blinds cut to the CORRECT size of 28" and brought those suckers home. It only took me me an hour and a half to install hardware, adjust the length by removing slats, adjust the five million cords, adjust the stop-motion plastic thingys and adjusting the final length of the entire set-up. And that was just for the first blind. It took me a solid two and a half hours to install these 'quick and easy installation' blinds. It was quite a task but they look fabulous and fit perfectly!!

After

I just realized you can also see the old kitchen faucet in the before pic and the new one David installed in the after pics. The kitchen faucet didn't work at all when we got the house and it was one of the first projects we did when we moved in (pre-blog). We found this faucet with a sprayer that fit into the old holes of the sink for $45 at a going-out-of-business sale at a local plumbing store by David's office. Score!