Window Treatments: Ideas & Tips for Getting Them Right

You guys, I can’t thank you enough for your sweet words about my One Room Challenge family room makeover reveal – I poured more hours into that room than you would believe and wasn’t sure until the last few days of pulling it together if it was going to be the space I was hoping for or just a big hot mess. I’ve gotten lots of questions about my new space through blog comments and emails, many of which were related to my new window treatments. With all of the new goodies in this room it would be easy to overlook them but can you imagine how different this space would feel and look if the windows were bare?

The details of choosing window treatments seems to be something that a lot of you struggle with so I thought it might be helpful to share some tips and ideas that will hopefully make your decisions a little easier.

Shades vs. Drapes

One of the questions that several of you asked was why I chose shades over drapes and how to decide which of the two to use in your own space. As a general rule, I tend to choose drapes for rooms that I want to soften like our dining room that’s otherwise full of hard surfaces:

and our master bedroom where it’s all about making the space as soft and inviting as possible:

But shades are a better choice than drapes in certain situations including when there isn’t enough room on both sides of the window for drapes (like in our guest room), when you have small windows that start high off the ground, when you have baseboard heating that you can’t have drapes resting against, or when you simply want a more tailored look. In our family room all four of these reasons actually came into play in making the decision to go with shades.

Choosing Your Style of Shade or Drapes

There are TONS of shade options (fabric vs. woven, Roman vs. cellular, valence vs. no valence, solid vs. patterned fabrics, etc.) and drapery options (pinch pleats vs. tailored pleats vs. grommets, etc.) to choose from. Luckily for me, The Shade Store was a sponsor of the One Room Challenge and they have a location within a half hour of me so I was able to visit in person to see (and play around with) all of the many style choices:

If you don’t have a store down the street you can go to The Shade Store online to see the same options virtually and even customize them with different fabrics and boarders to get a good visual of how they would look.

Choosing Your Fabric & Lining

I decided on flat Roman shades pretty quickly because I wanted a simple, tailored look but choosing the fabric took a bit longer – there was drawer after drawer of fabric options including many of my favorites like Robert Allen, Dwell Studio, and Kate Spade.

My biggest tip for choosing your fabric is to make sure you see it in your space before making a decision. I wasn’t stingy with how many fabric samples I took home from The Shade Store – I think I left with about 10-15 swatches – and actually the fabric that I ended up going with was one that I almost didn’t take with me, Robert Allen’s Perfect Stripe in Earth. While it looked quite brown in the store, in my family room it looks more like a soft black which is exactly what I wanted.

It’s also important to see how the fabric works with your paint color, especially if you know you don’t want to repaint! I was actually in the middle of choosing my paint color when I brought my fabric samples home and as soon as I put my fabric sample up against my paint choices, it became obvious that it blended the best with the bottom paint color (BM Cloud White) so that’s the color I went with:

Another tip that I actually learned from the ladies at The Shade Store (thank you Karen and Helen!) is to see how your fabric looks in your room with different linings. I was debating between privacy lining and blackout lining so they encouraged me to take samples of both linings home with me. When I held them up to the window under my fabric swatch I was so surprised by the difference it made in the look of the fabric that it made my decision easy (I went with privacy lined). Obviously sometimes you might know that you want a certain type of lining based on your room (like blackout lining in bedrooms without blinds) but if not, definitely try your options out.

One other tip on fabric is to make sure the type of fabric you’ve chosen is appropriate for the type of window treatment you’ll be using it on. The Shade Store makes it easy by listing appropriate window treatment types on each fabric but if you’re looking on your own, do your homework to make sure your type of fabric and fabric weight are a good fit for your chosen treatments.

Measuring & Installing

Even if you pick the perfect type of window treatment and the perfect fabric, you’re going to end up with a disaster if you don’t figure out the best height for installation and provide accurate measurements for your shade or drape construction based on that height. The best height is going to differ from room to room but a few general tips are to hang all of your window treatments in the room at the same height if you can and to hang your treatments high (whether you’re using drapes or shades) so that your windows appear taller. You can see from this “before” photo that there’s over a foot of space between the top of the window and the ceiling:

but I mounted the shades just a few inches below the ceiling to make the windows appear a bit taller and not be covered up by the top of the shade:

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If you smoosh yourself in the corner of our family room room to get a side view you can get an even better idea of how high above the window frame they’re hung. You can also see my one regret with my shades – I wish I had had The Shade Store make longer side pieces that come down closer to the top of the window frame – they actually gave me that option before I ordered but for some reason I had a different idea in my head of what it would look like and I opted for the standard length – no biggie since you don’t see my shades from the side when you’re in the room but a lesson learned for the future!

While I’ve done it enough that I’m very comfortable deciding on the height for my window treatments and taking my own measurements, if you have any doubts it’s typically money well spent to have the company or person fabricating your shades take your measurements for you. The Shade Store offers measuring and installation services for a pretty nominal fee that is well worth it to for the piece of mind that comes with it.

Cords & Motorization

There are lots of little extras that you can choose with shades – two of the most common are cordless options (great for kids) and motorized shades (perfect for hard-to-reach windows). They both have their pros and cons but the big cons for me were that the cordless shades had a wider header and obviously both options meant my shades would be more expensive so I went with old-school corded shades. Since we’re only going to be closing the shades for the occasional sleepover party that my girls have in this room, instead of installing a cleat on my window frame and wrapping the cord around it, I just tucked the cord into the back folds of my shade so it’s not visible but can be easily pulled out when needed:

That’s about all the down and dirty I can think of to share on choosing window treatments! I will honestly say that I had a great experience working with The Shade Store during the One Room Challenge and would definitely recommend them (I’ve already sent my sister their way!). You can check to see if they have a showroom near you {here} or just poke around their online site (and order free fabric swatches!) {here}.

I’m off to start on some holiday decorating – the first room I’m getting things going in is actually our family room! When I had our contractor build the desk area between our bookcases, I asked that it be easily removable so that I could slide out the desk surface and replace it with something else for the last six weeks of the year. Yep, we finally have the perfect spot for our Christmas tree!

The plan is to get it up and decorated over the weekend (I’d like to get it done before our Thanksgiving company comes early next week) so stay tuned on Instagram {here} for some sneak peeks!

In case you have questions about the source for anything in the pics of our family room, I’ve included the complete source list for the space below (includes some affiliate links – see my full disclosure statement {here}):