Replacing Blinds with Cordless Blinds

The blinds/shades in the kitchen and the living room are showing their age.  Plus with a grandchild, who will eventually be walking, there is the issue of the danger of the dangling cords, so it seems prudent to replace them.  We already have cordless blinds in both the back bedroom, the guest bedroom, and the computer room, so this completes the set.  We still have corded wooden shutters in the dining/TV room, and aluminum mini-blinds in the office and the front bedroom, but those are really hard to get to, or always in the down state, so the cords are not really a problem.

The blinds we put in the back bedroom seem reasonable, so we went back to Home Depot to get more like them.  Those are double cell cellular shades, made by MyBlinds, or something like that, but when we got to Home Depot, we were told that they no longer do double cell shades.  We priced out just single cell shades, but decided to sit on it a bit.

Going home, I checked the internet and found that Levelor made double cell cellular shades, and they were carried at Lowe's.  So we went to Lowe's.

Linda had picked a color for the paint for the Living Room, and I had measured the window openings, so we just needed to find something to match.  And we did, a 7/16 inch double cell cordless light filtering shade in Color 12R70104 Daylight.  Three shades, each 70 inches wide and 70 inches high.  Inside Mount. We placed the order on 27 Nov 2019, for $600, plus tax taking it to $649.50.  They were delivered on 5 Dec.

Meanwhile, we considered the kitchen shades, and decided to do the same.  But having seen what they did at the store to order them, I looked to see if I could do the same online, and I could.  So on 28 Nov, I ordered 3 more for the kitchen windows.  The center one is 69 7/8 inches wide, while the left one is 22 1/8 and the right one is 22.5 inches wide.  All of them are 58 inches high.  Again, inside mount, cordless, in Daylight color (online it's 12470104).  These were only $377.78 being smaller windows.  These were delivered on 6 Dec.

Installing them took a couple of hours.  First I removed the old blinds.  Then I patched the sheetrock to cover the holes from the mounting hardware for the old blinds.  Next screw in the new mounting hardware, and snap the new blinds in place.  In the living room, I had some trouble with what are probably nails in the headers above the windows where the support hardware was to be installed, so the hardware had to be moved over slightly.

In the kitchen there was no such problem, so again, it took a couple of hours to remove the old blinds and hardware, then install the new ones and snap the shades in place.

In retrospect, now that I have double cell cellular shades from 3 different companies -- Bali, MyShades, and Levelor, I can tell some difference between them.  The one that may (or may not) matter most is that the Levelor shades do not seem to be as well counter balanced.  There is a greater tendency for one side or the other to go down more, so that the bottom of the shade is not level with the window sill.  I can go back and adjust it by raising or lowering one side or the other, but it requires more work.  The other (older) shades do not have this problem.  They tend to all go up or down evenly, staying level at all times.  But I expect most of the blinds to be open most of the time -- we mainly bring them down only when it is particularly cold outside at night and we want the extra "insulation" to keep out the nighttime cold.