Shades & Blinds for a New Home

Moving into a new home means every window is bare at once. A new build arrives with paper shades or nothing at all, and a resale often comes with tired blinds in a dozen different sizes. You need privacy in the bedrooms on the first night, but you also do not want to fill the house with stopgap blinds you will replace in a year. The better approach is to plan the whole house once: decide what each room needs, keep the look consistent from window to window, and order shades made to the openings you actually have. Every shade here is made to the width and height you measure and shipped direct to you.

Choosing shades and blinds room by room

Bedrooms come first because they are the rooms you need covered on day one. Blackout roller and blackout cellular shades darken a bedroom or nursery for sleep, and a cordless cellular shade lifts from the bottom rail with no loose cords near a crib or bed. Living rooms, kitchens and home offices usually want daylight with privacy, which is what light filtering roller and light filtering cellular shades give: soft, even light while the sightline in is closed. Zebra shades suit a room where you switch between view and privacy through the day, and solar shades handle large sunny glass, cutting glare and heat while keeping the view.

Consistency matters more than it sounds. From the street, a house reads as one set of windows, so most homeowners pick one or two neutral fabrics for the front of the house and save bolder choices for rooms seen only from inside. Matching the cassette color across rooms helps too; our roller cassettes come in white, beige, grey and black, and white or beige blends with most builder trim.

Sizes and options to plan around

Most new home windows fall well inside our ranges, but a few limits are worth checking before you order a whole house. A chain operated roller starts at 11 3/4 inches wide, while a cordless roller on our CB-235 squared cassette needs 23 5/8 inches, so check narrow bathroom and stair windows if you want cordless throughout. Cordless cellular is the forgiving one, from 12 to 94 inches wide and up to 94 inches high. Light filtering rollers reach 98 3/8 inches wide on the CB-235 and blackout rollers 94 1/2 inches. Any roller over 100 inches high moves to the large cassette with a 43 mm tube, which reaches 118 inches wide and 120 inches high.

If you are thinking about motors, decide now rather than later, because a motor raises the minimum width: a motorized roller starts at 20 1/8 inches wide on the CB-235 and motorized cellular at 23 inches. For an Apple home, the Matter motor connects directly to HomePod and HomeKit; the Zigbee motor connects directly only to five specific Echo models, and everything else uses the standard motor with a hub.

Measuring and installing the whole house yourself

Make a list of every window by room and measure each one separately, even in a new build where they look identical. For an inside mount, measure the width at the top, middle and bottom of the opening and use the smallest figure, then the height on both sides and use the smaller. Send us the exact numbers; the factory makes its own allowances, including 1/4 inch off the width of an inside mount cellular or woven wood shade.

Roller, zebra and roman shades hang on two cassette brackets. Drill with a 0.2 inch (6 mm) bit, set the screws at 1.1 inch spacing and use the anchor that matches your wall; drywall and masonry anchors both come in the box. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press it back until it clicks, and check the top and rear are both locked.

Start with the bedrooms in our blackout shades and blinds for bedrooms, then work through the rest of the house in our living room shades and blinds. Order a few samples first and look at them in your new rooms at different times of day.