Nursery Shades & Blinds

A nursery is the one room where the window covering has a job with a deadline. You need it dark enough for a daytime nap and dark enough at five in the morning in June, and nothing hanging beside the crib that a small hand can reach. The windows are usually ordinary rectangles, so this comes down to fabric and lift.

Which shades and blinds darken a nursery

Blackout roller shades are the straightforward answer. Our blackout roller fabrics are specified at 100% blackout, so no light passes through the fabric itself, and a roller takes up almost no room at the reveal. Order it cordless and there is no chain down the side of the window at all.

Blackout cellular shades do the same job and add two things a flat fabric cannot. The cell structure holds a layer of air against the glass, which matters in a room you are keeping at a steady temperature overnight, and cordless cellular builds down to 12 inches wide and 12 inches high, the most forgiving minimum of anything we make.

Blackout roman shades give a softer, more furnished face if you want the room to look decorated rather than equipped, and light filtering cellular is worth adding on a second window, since you rarely want the whole room pitch dark during play time.

Woven wood shades are the texture option, and on them darkness is a liner decision. The weaves on their own are about 50% see-through. A light filtering liner takes that to roughly 70%, and a blackout liner gives you 100% blackout. The liner goes on the shade and the valance both, so the shade reads as one piece.

Cords, minimum widths and the light gap

Cordless is the lift to choose here, because there are no loose cords anywhere on the shade. The cost of that is width. Cordless roller needs 19 3/4 inches of minimum width on our standard squared and round cassettes and 23 5/8 inches on the squared cassette, because the spring has to fit inside the tube. A manual clutch loop roller starts at 11 3/4 inches, so a very narrow window may have to take a chain with the safety handle that ships as standard.

Width also moves with the fabric. Blackout goods are milled on narrower rolls than light filtering, so a blackout roller reaches 86 inches wide on our standard squared and round cassettes and 94 1/2 inches on the squared cassette, where light filtering reaches 96 and 98 3/8 inches. Cordless cellular tops out at 94 by 94 inches. A motorized roller needs 8 to 10 inches more minimum width than the manual version, and motorized cellular needs 23 inches and caps at 79 inches high.

Measuring and fitting them yourself

What decides how dark the room actually gets is the mount rather than the fabric, because a 100% blackout fabric still leaves a rim of daylight around an inside mounted shade. Measure the opening itself rather than an existing blind. For an inside mount, take 1/4 inch off the measured width to clear the frame. For an outside mount, add about 3 7/8 inches to both width and height so the shade overlaps the opening and closes the light gap. That is the version to choose if early summer mornings are the reason you are buying.

Fitting is a bracket job and takes a few minutes. You need a 6 mm drill bit, the brackets mark at 1.1 inch screw spacing, and two types of expansion anchor ship in the box so you can match the anchor to your wall. Each bracket has four pre-drilled holes, and two screws on opposite sides hold fine on a sound wall. Hook the valance groove onto the bracket latch, press back until it clicks, then confirm both the top and the rear have locked. A bracket seated on the top latch alone holds its own weight and then drops the first time the shade is raised, which is not something you want happening over a crib.

Order samples first if you are choosing a color. Everything here carries a limited lifetime warranty against defects, with motors and controls covered for five years.