Thursday, May 21, 2009

Help Please!

As the days tick down until we settle on the new house (next Friday!!), I've started looking into all the "stuff" we need to buy. My current obsession...window coverings for our 2 sliding glass doors. Both our living room and basement have sliding glass doors out to the deck and yard.

Right now they both look like this...
Only without the ugly 80's furniture. But you get the idea. Two huge bare glass doors.

The main problem is that our house is on the corner, so I'm majorly worried about privacy. I feel like any cars that drive by will get a perfect view into our living room. Eventually, we would love to replace both doors with doors like this:

Lovely framed french doors. But unfortunately, after we looked at doors at Home Depot and pretty much had a heart attack over the price, we realized this is quite a ways off.

So we will have to make due and find some nice curtains/blinds/etc. to use in the meantime. My question is, are there any options besides these? The dreaded vertical blinds!

I know they make "nice" vertical blinds, but I didn't know if there was something else that would provide a good amount of privacy and still look nice. We will be using both doors quite a bit, as that's the way we will let Spencer out into the yard, so I don't want anything super hard to manage or like big bulky curtains I'm constantly having to open. But I do want something that lets a lot of light into the room. Also, budget is somewhat of an issue, so probably nothing that has to be custom made or anything like that.

So any help or advice would be majorly appreciated. Even if it's to tell me that vertical blinds are the way to go. Thanks!!!

9 comments:

  1. I mainly leave my doors bare. But if you want privacy I'd put up curtains on either side that you can pull together when you need to. I have verticals but only in the basement--and they are ugly. Oh well. Good luck!

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  2. This is what we got..

    I hate vertical blinds so we are going to use these! They come in several colors too and are super cheap....

    http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10828814

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  3. I would do anything to avoid vertical blinds. If you use tab-top curtains, they are easy to open and close. They have a more finished look than those vertical blinds.

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  4. I love your blog, and have been reading for a while, but I had to comment when i saw this.

    We had the same issue with a re-done room when we moved into our house. Two huge sliding glass doors in the "office." we used a rod and window panels (long curtains!) Got them from Target to a bright but rich red! They ended up making the room! And they have them in every color imaginable!

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  5. I have curtains that I pull aside when let my pup outside. It's not a great system, but I like the look much better than I like blinds.

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  6. Restoration Hardware has some nice curtains that are easy to open and close.

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  7. I would go with a curtain as well. You don't need to have huge heavy ones for them to give you privacy, and really sliding them out of the way totally beats making sure the verticals are straight so you can pull them over, only to have the dog run through them anyway!

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  8. Congrats! We just bought a house too! (Close in June...)

    And I will do ANYTHING to avoid vertical blinds. Sorry I'm not much help as I don't know what we're getting yet...I can't wait to paint/hang pretty curtains! :)

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  9. I just got a great catalog at work today for window treatments specifically. Shoot me an email at ncsulilwolf at gmail dot com - it came with a $100 coupon (off a $450 order)!

    PS - I also have a friend who is a window covering business owner... I'm sure he can ship anywhere! I'll be glad to pass along his info to you, too :-)

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