Dear Jessica Brennan,
Now that it’s almost time for you to buy your first house, you will be thinking about window-coverings (I know you are) and I want to give you some good advice. Blinds are annoying. Not the ones that fold down nicely on rollers, but just about every other kind of blind is well, dumb. Let’s start with horizontal blinds. You pull the string on one side and somehow only half the blind goes up, who created this system? You then spend a week or so, trying to get the other side down level with the first side and never pull them up again for fear of them being stuck and gnarled for all eternity. Impossible, useless and stressful. How do you clean these things too? I know there is a special blind cleaning thingy, but let’s face it, it doesn’t work. Horizontal blinds are ugly, dirty and flawed in every possible way. You can also cut yourself on them. If you buy a house that has them, for your own safety, throw them out.
This brings us to vertical blinds. They too do not work. These blinds can boast looking awful in almost any room and even worse from the outside looking in. If you ever go to a hotel and they have these things, check out before you regret staying there. If they have these blinds, you can easily tell what the comforter is going to look like on your bed. Yuck, just leave before they have to carry you out. Vertical blinds are generally in strange colours like grey-blue or peach and “dated” doesn’t begin to describe them. Vertical blinds are awful. If you buy a house with vertical blinds, ask for a discount on the sale price and do yourself a favour, take them into the backyard and burn them.
The only fun blinds are the cheap zippy ones that you pull down and let go of quickly to scare the cat. They look awful and smell like vinyl but one zip of those babies when your sister is dead-asleep is worth a lifetime of giggles. These may be one of the most under-rated forms of entertainment on the planet. If you are fortunate enough to buy a house with zippy vinyl blinds, have a zippy-blind party before you replace them with proper window coverings, and keep one set for a day when you’re feeling blue. You won’t regret it.
Love Mum
xo