Upgrading Our Blinds for the Nursery

When it first came time to start designing our baby nursery, one thing that was on our must-have list was to install black out window coverings. I debated about adding curtains to our existing blinds, but in the end, didn’t want to mess around with installing a curtain rod. Almost two years ago we outfitted every room in our home with cellular, light-filtering blinds from Blinds.com. On our first floor we splurged for cordless top-down/bottom-up cellular shades. To save on costs, we kept the cords for all the rooms on the second level, but still kept the top-down/bottom-up functionality (see the blinds in our living room space).

I knew I wanted to update the baby’s window treatment with something that not only offered a black-out capability but was cordless as well. I reached out to Blinds.com to work with them on the nursery and they generously agreed to work with me to design the perfect window covering for the baby’s room.

Below is a what the nursery looked like as it transitioned it from Cody’s office, to a placeholder for all of my office furniture, to the nursery as you’ll see it today!

I worked one-on-one with a designer from the company to create the best solution for the room. It was important to me that we look at a cordless option for safety precautions. I know that a newborn won’t be playing with any loose cords, but I want to make sure their room is as safe as can be. Cords can be a strangulation hazard for infants and young children, so it’s important to keep that in mind and either go with a cordless option or coverings with inaccessible cords that can be out of reach for young children. Once we decided on the type of shade (Signature Roman Shade), we customized it even further.

We stuck with an inside mount, added a black-out liner, went with a plain fold and the valance was included. All that was left was to decide on a fabric. The designer sent me varying shades of grays and whites in different fabric types, up to 10 fabric samples are free from the company. Once they arrived, I took them to the local store where we purchased our rocker from and played around with the different options.

I ended up picking Calceta Dove, which complements the chair fabric and doesn’t compete with the wall color. The employee at the store made a good point that if I went with gray, you’d end up with this bright space but a ‘black hole’ of sorts with a gray window. The white allows for a seamless transition with the newly painted trim and is neutral for the space depending on how the room will change in the coming years.

Installation couldn’t have been easier. Each set of blinds or shades comes with a hardware kit. Our previous blinds had three clips that we had to remove to screw in the new hardware for the roman shade, which also had three clips. We remeasured for placement, screwed in the plates, lined up the shade and clipped it into place.

While the nursery is far from complete, I’m super happy with the upgrades we’ve made to the room thus far. I ended up borrowing our IKEA rocker/ottoman from Cody’s office to help decide placement of artwork and where shelving will be installed. Our rug arrives in two weeks, our rocker will be here in December, just in time for Baby Mack’s arrival in January!