![]() We bought blinds from once before – a blackout accordion blind in our beach house’s bunk room. We ended up ordering Bali Blackout Roller Shades with added smart motorization through (not sponsored, we paid with our own money, yada yada). And well, now she’s a loud and proud convert. And since we only needed five of them, she indulged me. Sherry was extremely skeptical about splurging for them, but I was unrelenting in my #smartblindgoals. When the cost came back (more on that in a second) I’m not going to lie. Long story long, I made a fresh case to Sherry that we should finally go smart on our window treatments and although she was still hesitant, she agreed that we should price it out. So the idea of a roller shade I never have to touch with my hand? Sign me up. Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the cheap plastic-y roller shades of my youth, but I always picture re-pulling a roller shade over and over again to get it to roll up neatly or bracing myself for that sudden violent snap back to the top if you don’t pull at the exact right angle to lock them in a fully-down position. From the street it also makes all of our windows look similarly treated (just big panes of glass) so it’s not super obvious that the bedrooms have roller shades and the kitchen and living room don’t).Īlso, in my opinion, roller shades are practically BEGGING to be automated. We decided to do roller shades instead of blinds since they would “disappear” more when open and that would help maintain that bright, modern feeling that we love in this house. We just wanted to cover the bedroom french doors with these blackout curtains, so even if the smart shades were pricey, it felt extremely fortuitous that we only needed 5 for the entire house to achieve our full-privacy-and-light-blocking bedroom goals. (We aren’t naked in the kitchen or the living room so that’s likely why). We actually bought woven shades for the common areas downstairs in our last house that we never ended up closing. Note: the bathroom window is frosted so that didn’t need covering.Īnother change we made here is that we decided to leave the windows in the main areas untreated to maintain their clean modern look. And instead of 15 windows, we only had 5 windows that needed blinds – 3 in our bedroom and 1 in each kid’s room. Knowing we had to buy them but wanted something smart helped me look at it as an initial investment instead of buying something that I’d feel guilty replacing or spending hundreds to update later. Luckily, the math changed when we moved into our current home where we owned zero blinds or window coverings at all. Even my love of smart stuff has its limits. To retrofit blinds you already paid for and own. And even if we were to try adaptor kits like this one from Tilt – that $200 kit (per window!) would quickly add up to thousands of dollars. We never formally priced out totally new blinds because we knew 15 motorized blinds would be very expensive. We didn’t switch to automated smart blinds at that house because it would’ve involved replacing or retrofitting the 15 existing blinds that we had already purchased throughout our upstairs rooms. And having a few friends who had already automated theirs (who always gushed about how much they liked it) definitely had me considering it more as time went on. But as we began to automate our family’s wake-up and bedtime routine, the blinds just seemed like the next logical step. Should you feel sorry for me? You most definitely should not. Was it a terribly difficult or time-consuming task? No. Each morning and evening I would manually open or close the blinds in 6 windows across our 3 bedrooms. Why Install Smart Blinds or Shades?Įver since we started incorporating smart devices into our last home (this post from 2018 called 10 ways we used smart devices covers what tried and liked in that house) the one thing I was still weirdly eager to automate was our blinds. Let’s start with the question I heard most from Sherry (as I mentioned in my last post, she was very reluctant but has completely come over to the smart-blind-dark-side – er, bright side? I guess it depends if they’re open or closed). So let’s dive into where we got them, why we chose them, how they’re powered, the upsides & downsides, and – of course – how much they cost (please note that I cannot explain why I insist on calling them “blinds” when they’re technically roller shades). Apparently I overshot that deadline just a smidge, but better late than never. And in it I mentioned that I’d share a detailed smart blind post for you “in a few days” because they’re hands down one of my favorite smart home features that we’ve added. So last month I wrote a post about the smart tech we added, ditched, and love most in our house.
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