I have a few friends who have had a go at cutting their own venetian blinds. One cut down some privacy eco blinds (white PVC blinds) and managed to do a fairly decent job at it using a jigsaw. Another friend tried cutting back some timber venetian blinds down and ended up hacking up the ends of them pretty good.

I kind of decided early on that for me cutting venetian blinds down to size was not a DIY job, so we have paid people to cut ours down when needed.

As we have fitted out under the house with white PVC eco-blinds we had to cut one of them down to size. The glass louvers in one of the bedrooms was 56cm, instead of the standard 60cm in width, so we had to get 4cm cut off. Thankfully all the other windows were a standard 90cm wide, so we could purchase those right off the shelf, which was nice …

It cost us $15.00 to get the blind width cut down to the right size. For another $5.00 they could have set the height for it as well, but that is a pretty easy job, so I did that one myself.

To get our venetian blind cut down to size here in Townsville, Queensland we went with Ted the Blind Man. He did a good job and had it back to us on the same day.

Below are the details for Ted "The Blind Man":

Ted ‘The Blind Man’
129 Bergin Rd, Cranbrook, Townsville
Queensland, 4814
Australia

Telephone: (07) 4773 4573
Mobile: 0410 642 563

Since we had the back stairs removed from the house we have had a "door to no where". It has looked pretty funny to tell you the truth (as you can see on the left).

The door has been screwed into the frame so that no one could open it, but it has still looked a bit dubious, especially from the back yard.

We are replacing the back door with some floor to ceiling louvers. Louvers should give us a good airflow through the house and help to cool it down, especially with summer coming.

We had considered getting timber louvers, same as the window next to it. After thinking about it we decided to go with tinted louvers. That would allow some more light to come into the stairwell, which is just next to the new louvers.

The screen behind the louvers is a security screen. We didn’t actually specify a security screen behind the louvers, but I was very relieved when I saw them put it in, especially after seeing the kids playing around the louvers. Jessica seems to like to throw her stuffed tiger on the louvers for a view of the back yard.

This week we replaced our Amplimesh Security Screen with a Magnetic Insect Screen. Here are some photos of the window. The first photo is with the Amplimesh Security Screen, and the second photo is our new MagicSeal Magnetic Insect Screen.

The magnetic fly screen has made a huge difference in the dining room with greatly improved appearance, more natural light and increased air flow. Although it is not as secure as the previous security screen, it would take a very determined person to get 4 metres up the exterior wall to get into the house.

We had a fantastic experience in getting the Magnetic Insect Screens. From our first phone call to installation was less than a week! The company that did it was Freedom Retractable Screens. It’s run by a gentleman named Kevin who, with a partner in Cairns, covers North Queensland for retractable screens and magnetic insect screens.

The Magnetic Insect Screen cost us about $300 for three windows, which we felt was quite reasonable. For the three windows that we had the magnetic screen installed we paid the same as we did for one window with the Amplimesh Security Screen.

Here are the contact details for Freedom Retractable Screens:

Freedom Retractable Screens

Phone: 07 4775 4000
Mobile: 0438 136 945
Web: www.freedomscreens.com.au

You can read a bit about the MagicSeal magnetic insect screens on the Freedom Retractable Screen web-site here, and if you want more information then you can read about them at the MagicSeal website.

Technorati Tags: insect screens, magnetic insect screens, magicseal, amplimesh

One one of our upstairs windows we installed an Amplimesh Security Screen. There were reasons for installing a security screen on the top floor of our house, but they aren’t relevant any more, so I would get into it now.

The security screen is extremely secure. The one that we got installed is a stamped metal sheet, which is very strong. The problem that we have with it is that it blocks out pretty much all the breeze coming into that window. It’s almost like we might as well shut the window for the amount of breeze that comes through.

The screen is also very heavy looking and obtrusive. We had it installed on a very nice Stegbar timber window, but the screen really distracts from the beauty of the stained timber window.

I’ve noticed on the Amplimesh web-site they now have a newer product, the Amplimesh Clearguard. This product is stainless steel woven mesh, rather than a stamped sheet of steel. This would probably provide a solution that wouldn’t block out as much of the breeze as the version that we currently have, but still be very secure.

We also got a Amplimesh Security Door for the front door on our front verandah. We have the same problem with it blocking the breeze, but because it’s a much larger surface area it doesn’t feel as obtrusive as it does over the smaller window.

Technorati Tags: amplimesh, security screen, stegbar

I posted an article a little while ago about 10 Advantages of Curtains over Blinds. It was written by someone else and had some good points about why curtains are a a better window covering than blinds. As we slowly get closer to finishing under the house we wanted to look at more options for our window furnishings.

Below is another article that I found, but this one covers information on different types of blinds. Upstairs we have all blinds, so we are probably lean towards getting blinds under the house. We’ll see though, as curtains would be nice in the master bedroom.

Here are the Seven Types of Window Blinds covered in the article:

• Window Shades
• Window Shutters
• Sun Control Blinds
• Wooden Blinds
• Bamboo Sliders
• Hunter Douglas Blinds
• Vertical Blinds

Discount Window Blinds – Save Money With These Secrets!

If you’re looking for information on discount window blinds there are many different styles and textures and colors to choose from in the marketplace today. I’ll give you a number of ideas to think about, ways to save money and reveal some facts and secrets.

When shopping online, you’ll find many affordable, even cheap and discounted window blinds for sale. These include minis, vinyl, wood, faux wood, window shades and shutters.

Consider window shades. They can give your home the privacy that you want whenever you want it, just pull them down. Elegant window coverings today are a major decorating element of your home and are a decorative accessory in their own right.

How about window shutters? They cost more than other types of window blinds. They even come elegant today almost like adding some very fine furniture to the windows!

Consider sun control blinds. Using these will give you the utmost control of the sun so you can experience the outside from within when you want to. There are many choices of discount verticals on the Internet today; more than 220 different fabrics you can choose from. Even the cheaper wooden ones have a very rich wooden look and of course at much lower prices.

The true wooden blinds are carefully designed to bring the beauty and highly insulating qualities of wood into both your home and office. They come in either painted or wood stains. Also you can select roller, blackout roller and Venetians.

Cheaper but nice bamboo sliders offer a simple and yet more elegant option to vertical. Unsightly and even hazardous dangling cords can be replaced with remote control blinds. The slats to verticals are easily adjustable in length and don’t require any sewing or gluing.

Top quality Hunter Douglas blinds are well known for their “on the cutting edge” technology. These are available at Costco among other outlets online and offline. Levelor has long been a brand name that everyone knows. These are also called woven wood shades or sometimes matchsticks. They bring the eternal beauty of the outside inside and provide good insulation against the summertime heat and wintertime cold.

Store ready-made vertical blinds are available in a wide variety of natural colors and are fairly low maintenance. The removable veins are readily available in washable or “wipe clean” fabrics if needed.

Cleaning tips: if you own verticals, use downward strokes only to remove any dust. An excellent method of removing dust from vinyls is to use a cloth that is chemically treated. Or if you put them in a tub, after you take them out, you should carefully rinse and wipe them down and let them air dry.

The direction that you clean the woods is also important and differs from vinyls. Make sure to tilt all the slats downward before cleaning them.

Many of the dealers in window blinds offer excellent discounts. It’s easy to find discounts that will suit you and your budget. You may be able to find close-out sales. If you know any builders you may be able to get them to go along and buy the blinds at their wholesale outlet using their builder’s discount. Check out the prices at Costco. They may have the cheapest price around.

Discount window blinds are readily available online with a little bit of looking. They are always a good value and will add beauty and warmth to your home; at the same time they can block any sunlight from going through your windows. From the wooden Venetians to the newer more modern wooden verticals you’ll find that choosing from this wide range will add a nice touch of style and luxury to your home and still be environmentally-friendly.

For more info on buying the best quality discount window blinds online and offline go to http://www.DiscountWindowBlindsInfo.com for money-saving tips, help, facts, reviews and advice on all types of window blinds including verticals and shades

Technorati Tags: window blinds

As we are hopefully moving closer to the time that we will actually be able to move into the ground floor of our house we are starting to think and talk about our window furnishings.

We have been quite partial to timber venetian blinds as we had them in our first house, and have them on all the windows upstairs in this house. That said, there are some things that we don’t like about the horizontal timber venetian blinds, and we have thought about what we might be able to do instead.

While looking around for some ideas I read the following article, which has some great points about 10 advantages that curtains have over blinds. I hope that you find it interesting as well:

When considering the interior design of your home, how you cover your windows is a very important decision, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. At Tracks-Direct we are taking a look at the top 10 advantages of curtains over blinds.

1. Curtains add visual elegance to a room

Where both vertical and horizontal blinds just cover the window and add very little to the look and feel of the room, curtains and their fittings add a certain style. Curtain poles come in a wide variety of styles, from simple metal curtain poles to wood effect ones. Finials (the decorative ends of the curtain poles) also come in all shapes and sizes, so you are sure to find a style that suits your room.

When open, curtains frame a window beautifully, creating a border which is lacking with blinds. Whether pulled up or to the side, blinds cover only the window, whereas curtains can hang below and to the side of the window. Tying curtains back adds a certain elegance which blinds cannot offer.

2. Curtains and curtain tracks or poles can be bent to fit a bay window

Although some vertical blinds can be bent to the shape of a bay window, a vertical blind will take away the lovely effect and leave the room looking more like an office. A curtain track or curtain pole can be made to measure and bent to suit a bay window and the curtains will once again add elegance and style. Curtain tracks are also more flexible and can be made to fit a wider range of bay windows.

3. Increased fitting flexibility

Some of today’s more modern windows and patio doors open inwards leaving little space to fix. With curtain tracks that can be as small as 5mm and some that can even be recess fixed into a ceiling, this will leave plenty of room for a window or door to open inwards.

4. Curtains provide insulation

Typically blinds are thin and offer minimal heat insulation to a room. Compare this with a lovely warm set of curtains which not only keep the heat inside but also cut draughts as they can hang below the window ledge, unlike blinds which stop just above the ledge. Curtains can also be interlined with a thick material to add extra heat insulation.

5. Hand, cord or electric operation

Curtain tracks and curtain poles can be hand operated so that many different curtains can operate on one window. This allows curtains of different widths and drops to stack at different locations on the window. In addition they can also be operated as a blind with a cord to avoid handling the curtains or electrically for the extra security and a touch of luxury.

6. Easy to keep clean

Blinds can be dust traps, especially horizontal ones. As more people are suffering from asthma and dust allergies, curtains are a healthy choice, requiring little care to keep them clean and presentable. The tracks and poles need little servicing and the curtains need only be vacuumed or dry cleaned on the odd occasion.

7. Want a new look and feel?

Although white or cream blinds will fit in with most room styles and colours, they do nothing to enhance it. Curtains can blend in with your room, or can be chosen to enhance or contrast with it. Redecorating? No problem, just choose new curtains to match. Curtains can also have trimmings and contrast edges to pick out other colours within the room. Buttons can be added to pleats, cord can be added to edges or pleats as can a contrast trimming. Curtains offer a much wider scope for design.

8. Curtains can be controlled remotely

As mentioned above, electric curtain tracks can be fitted which allow you to control your curtains from the comfort of your armchair. Although it may seem like the height of laziness, there is a practical aspect to electric curtain tracks. When on holiday, people typically use automated light-switching devices but have to leave curtains or blinds half open. Electric curtains can be set to open and close at set times each day, giving the impression that someone is home. Alternatively a light sensor can be added to open and close the curtains in conjunction with the daylight hours.

9. Curtains are easy to hang

Want to change your curtains? Simply unhook them from your curtain pole, attach the hooks to your new curtains and away you go. Replacing vertical blinds can involve unhooking each blind from the next, unclipping each one carefully (the plastic is easy to snap), and then going through the whole rigmarole in reverse to put them back up. Other blinds must be removed all in one, making it easy to damage them as they are taken down or put back up.

10. Reliable and cost effective

With so many working parts or fiddly clips, blinds tend to be less reliable than curtains on a track or a pole. Combining curtains with a good, reliable curtain track or pole can be a more cost effective option; especially as curtain prices have been greatly reduced since the introduction of ready-made and express curtain making services. And if your requirements change, you can simply hang new curtains on your existing track or pole.

We hope you have found our information about the advantages of curtains over blinds useful. Find out about the wide range of curtain tracks and poles, fitting options and more at Tracks-Direct.

About the Author

This article was written by Kris Theophanous on behalf of Tracks-Direct – offering an extensive range of curtain tracks and curtain poles, all custom made to the highest standard to fit your window. Visit http://www.tracks-direct.com to see the wide variety of products combining quality with value.

We have had two extremely heavy days of rain  the last month or so. They have highlighted to us our leaking front veranda and leaking upstairs windows. The first day was the heaviest recorded in over a decade, and the second day was 18cm, or 7 inches of rain.

As you can see, not everyone thought that the rain was a bad thing… Ah, to be young and care free again.

We had some trouble with our front veranda leaking and also with the old upstairs window frames leaking through the wall, down the studs and into the ground floor.

The problem was not in the waterproofing of our front veranda that our builder here in Townsville did, but rather with the old wall soaking up the water and it running down through that.

The other problem was that the original veranda had a negative slope on the veranda. The negative slope caused the water to pool next to the wall, instead of running off the front of the veranda. This gave the water the chance to soak into the wall and then run down to under the house.

Between the first and the second rain the guys who lifted our house came back and tried to give the veranda a positive slope by packing up the back of the veranda by about 15mm. Although they made a big difference in their adjustment, the water still pooled a bit next to the wall and ran under the house. You can see the pooling of the water on the veranda in the photo on the right.

The upstairs windows should be able to be fixed by adding some colorbond flashing over the existing window sills. When we had our new upstairs windows put in some of the sills were flashed, but not all of them. I’m going to have to fix the rest of them, replace our kitchen window completely and also seal the air-conditioner installation into the master bedroom as it’s a pretty large hole.

I’ll continue to update you on the progress as we look at how to fix the pooling water on our front veranda as well as the leaking upstairs windows.

In amongst all the troubles that we having upstairs we have now received the new windows for the ground floor.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they all look like after they are installed, especially the louver windows for the master bedroom, as it took me quite a bit of time and a few variations to finally find the windows that I wanted for the master bedroom.

We got all of the windows tinted, to help with privacy and to help keep the rooms cooler.

Technorati Tags: windows, tinting, window tinting

Because of the location of our back door is will be nearly impossible for install a normal screen or security door on it. The top of the door jam is right at the bottom of the ceiling. This works fine for the main door, which opens inwards, but it means that we can’t install an outward opening security or screen door because it will hit the roof overhang on the back of the house.

In the latest Handyman Magazine there is a screen door advertised that would work great, except for one problem which I will outline at the end of this post.

The “Bug Off Instant Screen” is a hanging mesh that is secured at the top and then automatically attaches on the sides and bottom with magnets and Velcro. It claims to install in minutes without any tools and it doesn’t damage the door frame. The instant screen door is available in many different door widths and heights and would fit perfectly in our back door.

The problem that we would have with it though, which Tamara pointed out to me as I was getting ready to order it on-line, is that our 9-month old could push right through it and tumble down the stairs. Because it doesn’t actually have a closing or locking mechanism like a normal security or screen door would have, there is no security with it, and there is no way to keep the little (short) people from getting outside through it.

We might be able to revisit this idea once we get our deck up on the back of the house, with a child gate above the stairs of course, but for now we are stuck with the main door always closed…

Technorati Tags: screen door, security door, renovations, renovate, door, doors

Today we had fly screens and security screens installed on all the windows that we are keeping in the house. We are still waiting for the new timber window to come in for the lounge room and the three aluminium ones for the bedrooms. I wrote a bit about this in my previous post, Replacing the Upstairs Windows.

We talked to a few different companies around Townsville when we were deciding who to get to install our new fly and security screens and we decided to go with Garry Neven Blinds, which has about mid-range pricing but they also had more specialized screens that would fit better into our nice timber windows in the lounge room. I haven’t been over to check them out yet, but we will be heading over tomorrow morning, at which point I will try to take some photos of them.

We also got a “Super Mesh” screen installed on the front door. This is a security screen door without the metal grill throughout the entire thing. This is supposed to look better and hopefully not cover up the nice timber door that’s on the front of the house.

Here are the details for Garry Neven Blinds if you are looking for some good security screens here in Townsville:

Garry Neven Blinds
Awnings, Insect Screens, Window Roller Shutters
8 Vennard Street Garbutt QLD 4814
Tel: (07) 47289554 Fax: (07) 47289113

I don’t get anything from them for mentioning them, but let them know where you found out about them since they don’t even have a web-site at the moment.