One of the items on my Christmas to-do list was to do something with the window treatment situation in the family room.  Incase you didn’t catch Kerry’s perfectly imperfect post on our family room, here are some pictures.

Hard to tell in this picture with the sun, but the window on the left has no paper blind on it. It’s naked. The things would not stick in this room for some reason and that one in particular fell down like 30 times before we gave up on it.  The rest were just stuck to wherever they would stay…

I couldn’t tell you how many times we stood on the couch, did three bounces then attempted our highest jump to slap these suckers up.

These paper shades weren’t hung because of laziness.  In fact, we tried hanging 3 different shades before deciding that we didn’t like them.  This has been a 7 month ordeal.

My first idea was a cordless bamboo shade from Macy’s, since we had a lot of gift cards from our wedding left to cover the cost. I wanted bamboo shades to bring in another wood element since the room felt very fabric heavy. They were custom order, so I only ordered one to see if we would like it. Apparently it comes directly from China and took about TWELVE weeks.  So we got it, hung it, looked and each other and immediately hated it.  That was attempt one.  I wish I rehung it and took a picture.

Attempt two is also undocumented.  Since I was stuck on the additional wood element idea, we thought maybe we should do the 2 or 3 inch blinds in a dark stain.  Do you have any clue how hard it is to find those things in a stain as dark as our entertainment center??  Most in-stock wood and faux wood blinds come in white, light wood and cherry.  We would have had to special order blinds which would have cost us more than $100 each… we needed 5.

Attempt three, a woven shade from Lowe’s.  The first time we hung it, it was completely sheer.  So we decided to pick up some privacy liners, which required going to two different Lowe’s to get 5 of them.  Then we attached it, which was no easy feat with Macky around.

And when we hung it it looked like this…

Definitely not right. I needed time to properly sew this thing on and since I was extremely frustrated with it, I sidelined it for a few weeks.  Plus we only have weekends to work on things, so just finding 5 shades and privacy liners took up about 2 weekends.  So I finally did get it right and…. we hated this one too.  The brown was too dark and it looked cheap.

So then! I decided to forgo the wood aspect and go with good old fabric roman shades.  We already have them in our office, formal living room and kitchen.  The ones in our living room and office are from Lowe’s Allen + Roth line and we love them.  Our downstairs windows are all 72 inches long which is actually the standard in-store length for these shades.  The problem was that they have limited colors… we have blackout version in smoke in our living room and the ecru in our office.  We ideally wanted blackout shades again, since Mike doesn’t like that he can’t see the TV during the day.  We tried one of our ecru ones from the office and the color clashed with our accent chairs.  I wanted a dark brown, but Lowe’s didn’t carry them.  So I thought I’d try JCPenney, where we got our custom sized kitchen shade from, but the 72 inch shades were custom also and would have been about $90 each, plus shipping.

We then decided to give the white roman shade from Lowe’s a shot.  I liked the idea of the white since it wouldn’t make the room too dark and would keep the bright and airy feel.  It wasn’t a blackout shade, but for $25 each, could we really go wrong? Then we hung it and the white was too white against our mantel…

I was bummed and very confused.  What the heck was the solution? Then a light bulb went off in my head.. I could dye them off-white! This was my new mission, until I realized there is no slightly-white dye.  I would have to take my chances with a diluted beige.  And the color we needed wasn’t even off white, since our Ikea curtains in our kitchen are off white, as are our cabinets, yet the trim work in there looks bright white.  So I could potentially ruin this shade trying to dye it.

I scratched my head for a few more weeks, then realized this was really stupid.  We should just go with the white shades.  Mike wasn’t a fan, but I told him that when we have people over, our shades are always up.  They are only down for us and really, I’m sick of seeing the neighbor in his kitchen every night since he has no blinds either.  So last weekend we went to Lowe’s and we were only able to get 2 more in the size we needed.  Then this week THE SHADES WERE RECALLED.  No, no this could not be happening. I panicked a little, because I am the most paranoid pet owner ever (for good reason) and these shades are all over my house.  I read about the recall and it wasn’t a mandatory recall, so we decided we think we’d be okay.  The shades have a very sensitive safety release, so sensitive that we often accidentally unhook the entire shade.  So we knew that if Macky really got stuck in there it would release.  We also try to put them up before we leave the house.  But now the problem was, could we get the other two shades we needed??

Today we traveled to another Lowe’s and found the other two shades we needed and strangely, there was no sign, no warning, nothing about the recall.  If I didn’t read the news religiously, I would have had no clue.  So long story short, today we finally hung window treatments in our family room!!

Adios paper blinds! Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out!

Macky shared my resentment.

“Peace out paper!!!”

They just need to be steamed at this point and we’re good to go!

And right now, we can watch Dexter without worrying whether or not Jordan Chase is stalking me through the naked family room window.

That sense of relief alone is worth it.  Doesn’t the fire look photoshopped? It’s not, totally real.

So there ends the Window Treatment Saga of 2010. Hopefully. I still want to go to Lowe’s and ask them for 12 of those release clips I just read about. Better safe than sorry!

Oh and I think I want to add some curtains…. but first I need a break from worrying about these windows 🙂