Meg vs. The Bedrooms: How to Shorten Blinds

Wednesday: Re-install blinds in the baby room. Shorten the blinds in all the bedrooms.

Today's project was not particularly difficult, but it is rather annoying so I had been putting it off. But it is so nice to have our blinds back up and now at the proper length! Before buying our house I had no idea that you could/would need to shorten blinds. It is just one of those things you don't think about. But as we were walking through, one of our realtors expressed her surprise that they had nice blinds but never bothered to shorten them, since it was so easy. Right then, in an effort to be less tacky than she clearly thought the previous owners were, that went on my mental to-do list for the house. And now, 5 months after we moved in, I finally got around to it!

If you, too, have no idea how to shorten blinds and care to know, here is a quick explanation (please forgive my dirty windows and blinds. I still need to clean pretty much everything in my house):

1. Open your blinds (so the slats are horizontal) and let your blinds down all the way. Take a look at how the blinds hang and how the strings hold them up. Once you get a good idea, the rest should be pretty intuitive.

2. Determine where your lowest slat will be. Then move down and cut the strings halfway between the next slat and the slat after that.

3. Pull out the one slat left below the lowest slat you chose.

4. Pull the little plugs out of the holes on the bottom of the thick base slat. Pull the base slat out.

5. Reposition the thick base slat under your new lowest slat.

Now comes the tricky part.

6. Put the middle string through the hole in the base slat on each side (use tweezers to help pull it through if this is difficult). Once it is through, string a plug onto the end of each string and tie a knot to hold the plug in place.

7. Hold the base slat up against the slat above it, and shove all of the remaining string back up into the hole, then stuff the plug back in to hold it all in place. This is annoying, and hurts my fingers, but once it's done, you're finished. Repeat for all three holes in the bottom of the base. The base slat should sit directly below--pretty much in contact with--the slat above it.

All done, and looking so much better!