Wooden Blinds

I am just in the middle of renovating a house and I'm at that point where I'm about to install the window treatments and have come to the conclusion that wooden blinds will be perfect. The house already has a rustic feeling with lots of exposed wood. The floor has been renewed with cheap bamboo laminate flooring that I was able to get at a discount from a local building supplies shop. The staircase, which was already there, was made of oak and the house has a raked ceiling. After having considered all of the window treatment types including lace net curtains, heavy curtains, Venetian blinds, window bamboo blinds and cheap blackout blinds, I finally decided that if I could get cheap wooden blinds that looked good, they would suit the rest of the house perfectly. Now all I had to do was decide what type of wooden blind would look best, as there were so many alternatives in that category to choose from.

When I started to look into what was available in wooden window blinds I didn't at first realize just how much choice I had. My previous experience with wooden blinds had been relatively limited to what we had grown up with and what I had used in subsequent renovations. There we had some bamboo blinds that my brother had brought back from Bali, but other than that, our house where I had grown up only had curtains. Other types of wooden blinds were nowhere to be seen. As a result, with any houses that I had a hand in renovating, the window treatments tended to be curtains or fabric roller blinds and roman blinds. That's not to say I hadn't seen wooden blinds in other houses people's houses or magazines. But because I'd always used curtains and fabric blinds for window features, I had simply stayed in my comfort zone. But now I had a whole new world of blinds to choose from and in this current house they would look great.

These are the type of wooden blinds that I was most familiar with. They are similar to Venetian blinds with the horizontal slats made from narrow lengths of wood. The slats are solid wood and so do not bend when cleaning which I always found a problem when it came to cleaning Venetian blinds. A wooden venetian blind also only needs a quick dust to keep it clean. The cheapest way to buy them is ready made from a local discount furniture store. If bought this way, they come in a range of sizes but it is likely you won't find one that will fit your windows perfectly. There are two ways around this. Firstly, you can let the edges of the blind overhang the walls on both sides of the window. Depending on the type of window this option could work fine. But if you want the blinds to fit within the window space, you will need to cut them down. This requires taking each slat out of its vertical fabric holder, marking them with a pen and them cutting them to the required length. Once this is done the slats are then reinserted back into the blind. This type of wooden blind will normally come with instructions explaining in detail how to do this.

For both roman and roller wooden blinds there are two categories, both of which are called wooden blinds. The first uses a wood weave for the blind. This wood weave can bend so that it can be rolled up for the roller blind or layered for the roman blind. The other type uses a wood colored fabric for the blind and all of the other parts of the blind including the handle, edging etc. are made of wood.

Vertical wooden blinds can be similar to the wooden Venetian blinds discussed above except that the slats are vertical within the blind and the blind can be moved to the side rather than lifted. As with roman and roller wooden blinds there are variants that use either wood weave or fabric for the vertical slats and solid wood for everything. As a result they are also called wooden blinds.

Wood plantation shutters are constructed with horizontal wooden louvers that move within a wooden frame. The frame is then attached to the frame of the window and can move to the side, taking all of the louvers with it so that the view is completely unobstructed. This window treatment gives a sort of resort type feeling that I thought would go well with the raked ceilings and bamboo laminate flooring of this house I was renovating. Wood blinds of this type can be bought as custom, made to measure wooden blinds. Alternatively, they can also be bought in kit form, which would reduce the price, and I could get the wooden blinds direct from the local discount furniture store. I felt with my handy man know how, I would have no trouble putting them together and within a short time, my wooden blinds would be installed and I could sit back and enjoy the interior.