My wife and I recently purchased a Lennar NextGen home in Cypress, Texas that includes an in-law unit. We are happy to have my mother-in-law living with us. Lennar homes have an "all included" feature that means that the newly-built home comes move-in ready. One aspect of this readiness is that all of the windows come with wooden blinds whose cost has already been included in the price of the home.
I was happy with the wooden blinds. They looked great, and they were already paid for. My mother-in-law had wooden shutters in her prior home and wanted to replace the blinds with shutters in the in-law unit. Though I was happy with the blinds, my wife really liked the idea of wooden shutters on her mom's part and also on our part of the house too. So we compromised and got wooden shutters throughout the whole house. Joking aside, in hindsight, this was a great decision as the shutters look fantastic and provide better functionality. Also, having one side of the house with shutters and the other having blinds would have seemed half-done.
Since my mother-in-law had shutters in her former home, she gave us the phone number of Sister's Interiors that installed her shutters. My wife called them, and they were happy to supply shutters for our new home.
To provide us with a rough estimate, Sister's Interiors needed a count and sizes of the windows that would need shutters, so my wife measured each window opening with a tape measure. I collected my wife's measurements into a spreadsheet and emailed that to Sister's Interiors. Sister's Interiors used her measurements to quote us an estimated price. We accepted that price and set an installation date.
Since each wooden shutter is constructed to fit each window exactly, the measurements have to be accurate and precise. With this in mind, a Sister's Window technician visited our home and captured his own measurements. These more precise measurements are used to determine the final price.
Sister's Interiors would have removed the existing wooden blinds for $10 per window. Rather than incur that cost, I removed the blinds myself. After struggling with the first window, I got the hang of it. Raise the blind completely, pull off the decorative wooden face place, remove the faceplate clips from the blind, use a screwdriver to slightly push up the bottom of each bracket, lift up the bracket flap, remove the blinds, remove the screws from each bracket, and take down the brackets. With 20 windows, it was a Sunday morning I will not soon forget.
The windows were installed in each room. Although there were 20 windows, there were 32 shutters to install as some windows had upper and lower sections. The upper sections originally did not have blinds.
The type of shutter that my mother-in-law and wife selected was called "clear view." Unlike traditional shutters, these do not have a post in the center. This makes the shutters almost disappear when fully opened.
In addition to no post in the middle, the shutters have an upper half and lower half that can be opened, angled, or closed separately. This is equivalent to raising or lowering blinds partially.
Each shutter is attached to its frame via hinges. This allows the shutter to be opened like a door for easy cleaning of the windows. This is improved functionality over blinds as even with blinds fully raised, they are not totally out of the way when trying to clean the far corners of the insides of each window.
Even using professional measurements, the installers found that some of our window wall-openings were not perfectly square. They were able to make small adjustments, e.g., trimming some of the frames outside in the grass, as part of the installation process.
Rather than discard the fairly new blinds that had only been in our new home for a few months, I posted that we were getting new shutters on NextDoor.com and that we had wooden blinds available for free. An appreciative neighbor took them off our hands for use in her old home. We were happy to see them avoid the landfill. We love our new shutters. We find them easier to open and close as compared to raising and lowering blinds, so we open and close them more often. Our rooms now have light when we want it and privacy when we need it.
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