product review

I’m finally giving the sun porch a little love. Thanks to a random email from Matt at CellularWindowShades.com, I’ve finally been able to take down the temporary IKEA curtains that had been hanging in the sun porch windows for the past year and half! Good riddance fussy old curtains. Meet my new best friend, American-made top down, bottom up shades.

Sometimes things come along exactly when you need them. When we first moved into the house, I hastily purchased white and blue striped curtains from IKEA. It was a stop gap measure, I assured myself. The previous owners had left the windows of the sun porch bare and instead installed an insulated curtain over the beautiful sun porch doors. This, to me, was a travesty. By closing off the doors with thick, white curtains, you’re losing the joy of having a sunny, window filled room visible from the living room.

I’m hesitant to even show you how bad the curtains looked. In fact, when I went into the archives to find a photo of the sun porch with the curtains, I had a hard time finding them. I must have really, really hated them if I couldn’t even take photos of them! Anyway, here are the curtains the weekend that I installed them back in January of 2014.

Yeah, they just did NOT work in the sun porch. The horizontal lines never quite lined up the way they should have and the overall look was just way too fussy. The only thing I liked about the curtains was that they allowed light to get in while shielding the sun porch from prying eyes.

Not only did the curtains look bad inside the sun porch, they also looked pretty awful outside. The blue stripes – it was all about those damned blue stripes.

I hated those IKEA curtains from the very beginning. There were maybe five minutes after I installed all the hardware and got the curtains up when I was actually pleased with them. And then I immediately hated them. They were cheap, I reasoned, and they were better than nothing in the meantime. But I couldn’t wait to replace them.

When CellularWindowShades.com contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in reviewing their American-made shades, I knew this was my opportunity to finally get back to the sun porch. They offered to send one shade to me for free in order to review it. Once I got the first shade up, I knew I had to go back and order enough to finish off the sun porch.

I’m happy to report that the shades are easy to install. We have similar cellular shades in the condo so I’m already familiar with installing them. I think that even someone who hasn’t installed cellular shades before would be able to do it pretty easily. It’s really just a matter of installing two pieces of hardware (more for wider sizes) and then snapping the shades into place.

The thing that I like about these shades versus the top down bottom up cellular shades that we installed in the city condo is that these new shades go up and down more easily. Back at the city condo, the shades tend to get uneven and need a lot of finessing to make them look good. These new shades, which are cordless and are raised and lowered by simply pulling the top down or the bottom up, stay nice and level.

I wanted shades that would still allow some light to fill the room. I mean, it is a sun porch after all. It should be filled with sun! The view from the street facing windows in the sun porch is not very nice. This is when the top down shades comes in handy. With the tops lowered we’re able to see the treetops and the sky while still blocking out the uglier parts of the landscape.

Now that the shades are up and the dining table and chairs are in the sun porch, it’s time to enjoy those summer meals in style!

Full disclosure: This American House was supplied free and discounted product from CellularWindowShades.com. However, all views in this post are our own.