Big Box Store Grass Shades...How to Customize Them for Your Home

We're getting things DONE over here at Musket Court! 

Window Coverings = DONE!

As I've mentioned before, my mom is an interior designer in Dallas. So, being the wonderful woman that she is, she came up to help decorate our house (those pictures are for another day!), but one thing she introduced me to were custom grass shades.
And with her amazing pricing, they came out to be about $200 a panel.

And that dream died a quick, yet painful death.

We're renovating an entire home. My husband is getting his doctorate and thinking about getting his MBA at a top 20 business school. I'm not spending $3,000 for custom grass shades at this point in life. Maybe later...

Enter Allen + Roth grass shades at Lowes: 

These were roughly $12-$24 per panel depending on the needed width and length. 

While they don't look EXACTLY like custom grass shades, they are shockingly close.
And do their job really well. 'Nuff said.

They look amazing with my custom curtains!

 We actually liked them so much, we bought the shades for the whole first level. However, we needed to "customize" them a bit. We wanted the sizing to be perfect. They were perfect in width, but they needed a little length.

Do you see in the two pictures below the 1 inch gap at the bottom?

Cue the 1x2:

In the picture below, there are two pieces of wood. See that? 

The wood strip that is behind the 1x2 (the one closest to the window) is our spacer. 

We used the spacer for every window so the shades are even throughout the house.

Look at those manly hands :)

We attached the 1x2 to the window and attached the blinds to the 1x2. It actually worked PERFECTLY. AND (I know it's bad to start a sentence with "And", but I've always loved doing it), you can't see the 1x2 from outside at all because the actual window frame is so thick.

Now, look at the pictures below. Ok, do you see the washer? 

Well, our house is old. Do you know what that means?

Old=uneven windows and walls.

That is my new reality, I'm realizing.

We used the washers wherever shades needed evening and it worked awesome!
I face-timed my mom and she said that's what all the professional installers use to even out shades. Who knew?!

You can just start calling us Mr. and Mrs. Ingenuity

{Our Bay Window and view}

Going to all this work was worth it because A.) in general, installing window coverings is a good amount of work...this didn't actually add that much more to the project and B.) these were so much cheaper than any other grass shade option we could find, so it was worth the time and effort to us.

And now we're to our last step. You might be saying to yourself, "This is all well and good, but how were you planning on hiding all this ugly 1x2 business?" Ummm, our new name is Mr. and Mrs. Ingenuity. Don't you remember? :)

Included with every grass shade is a grass valance that has the hard and soft strip of Velcro on the back. The soft strip was already pre-attached to the shade. The hard part we could pull off. We didn't want to mess with glue in this project. Mainly, because glue+grass=ruined grass shades...gluing the hard Velcro strip to the 1x2 wasn't an option for us (but you might have steadier hands...if you wanted to save even more money use glue!). SO, we went to Michaels, got a big roll of Velcro with adhesive backs, cut the velcro to the length we needed and attached the hard strip the 1x2. Take a look...

{cutting the velcro to the correct length}

{Making sure the length is right}

{after pulling off the adhesive strip protector (? that was my best guess at the name) and sticking it to the wood}

And here is the finished product..

 

Or you can go here and look at the last picture of the post.
You will catch a veeery small glimpse of how they look with the wood floors.

Hope this helps! Grass shades are becoming increasingly popular but BOY are they expesive! Maybe this will help you save some money too. :)

Have a good week!