DIY: Installing Holland blinds

Happy New Year everyone! We had a quiet one at home with some of my family around to try out the home theatre, and managed to catch a view of the city fireworks, sipping champagne from our balcony - nice!

So after overeating for the last few days, went out to do a bit of belated post-Xmas house shopping, and managed to luckily snare some nice Holland blockout blinds at Spotlight for 40% off. Normally at Spotlight you can only find one random blind in a nice colour, and it'll be in the one size you don't need. But we were able to find 10 blinds, in matching colours, to suit the three smaller bedrooms plus a few other rooms.

Tools needed: Ruler/tape measure, pencil, power drill, screwdriver, a helping pair of hands. Difficulty 2/10 only. I didn't take any step-by-step photos because things were over so quickly.

Anyway, in most Holland/roller blind ready-to-hang packages you'll get the blind itself, two attachments for either end - one with a chain attached, one without. A couple of brackets to mount the blind attachments onto the wall and some screws.

Position the blind so it's in the centre of the window, with equal gaps (if any) on either side. Hold the attachments on with your hands, and mark with a pencil where the screws should go for the brackets. Double check for level using your ruler/tape measure or a spirit level. Predrill the screw holes, screw in the mounts, then slot in the blind. Should take 10 minutes per window with double checking. And the attachment with the chain mechanism will be about 1cm wider than the other attachment, so the brackets should not be symmetrical if you want the blind to be positioned dead centre.

Anyway, this is Bed 3, using a 180cm wide blockout Holland blind, with a 210cm drop. The window drop is much less, only about 100cm, but the excess length just stays on the roll. This blind is mounted in the reveal - ie within the window frame itself.


You can also get double Holland blinds - with a blockout blind combined with a translucent blind, that allows light in but not vision for privacy. Because the upstairs bedrooms had to have translucent glass in them anyway to meet Rescode, we decided that all that was needed was blackout blinds. However we may look for double Holland blinds for the sitting room, as it has clear glass and faces the street.

In Bed 4, because we had to have custom sized windows for some reason, the blinds are slightly too large to fit in the reveal, so I decided to mount them outside the reveal.


You can have Holland blinds cut to size if you wanted your slightly large blinds to fit in the reveal, but not too fussed with it. I've heard conflicting stories as to which mounting method gives you the best blockout (light reducing) effect. Checking the three bedrooms we put the blinds in this afternoon, one faces east, one faces south, and one faces west, so it's hard to make a direct comparison. Tina thinks the outside reveal mount reduces light the most, but in all cases the blinds darken the room significantly, to make sleeping no problem.

Now, just to get some custom window coverings for the master. Final tips, standard off-the-shelf, ready-to-hang blinds are normally 60, 90, 120, 150, 180, 210cm wide - so if you're in the planning stage of house building and want to avoid custom sized window coverings later, check that your windows are standard sized :) Or use curtains, which can be drawn to any size. We were trying to avoid curtains in this house, but we may have to use them in the home theatre to get the most complete blockout effect there.

T&T