How you dress your windows is an important piece of your overall design and a lot of thought should go into the style and fabric used for your bedroom window treatments.

How do you know which window treatment is right in your bedroom?

There are 3 basic types of window treatments that can be used alone or in combinations. Here?s some tips on these basic types and what style of room you might choose them for.

Curtains and Drapes

Curtains and drapes are a style of window treatment that most of us can recognize but there?s many variations on this old standby. If your bedroom design is simple, you might choose just plain sheers as these will go well with many themes including a romantic theme, a modern theme and anything in between.

Valances can be used to soften the top of the window. They are great if you don?t want to cover up a great view but also don?t want the window to look too bare. Typically valances are made from fabric but you can build them form wood and decorate them with an aged or stencilled paint to go with your Tuscan or French country design. Fabric valances can go with almost any bedroom decorating theme depending on the fabric you choose and can be used in conjunction with sheers to give you a bit of privacy.

Drapes are an elegant bedroom window treatment. If you have a romantic, French or Victorian theme some heavy drapes in rich fabrics can transform your bedroom into one fit for a queen. Heavy drapes look best on tall windows, but if you short squatty windows like most homes built in the 60's - 80's don?t let that deter you from using great drapes. You can always just keep them closed to hide the window behind and no one will ever know the difference!

Wooden Shutters and Blinds

Indoor wooden window blinds are a great way to add privacy to your bedroom and can be used alone or with curtains, drapes or valances.

There are 2 styles of shutters - plantation shutters and café shutters.

Plantation shutters cover the whole window and have louvers which can be opened and closed to let light in or provide privacy. These shutters go great with a plantation style look, a country look or a coastal cottage look.

The café shutters are the kind that cover only the bottom half of the window and swing open to let light in. These also look nice in a country or beach style bedroom and are perfect for a Paris apartment style as well.

Fabric Blinds

Fabric blinds add a nice touch to any bedroom and can be decorated and embellished with whatever you want. Fringe, pom-poms and ribbon are just a few of the great ways to make these bedroom window treatments stand out.

Roman blinds work well for childrens rooms and informal styles such as cottage or beach style decor. These shades fold up to expose the window during the day and roll down at night.

Festoon blinds are puffy with lots of fabric. They are quite ornate and work best in a romantic style bedroom such as a Victorian, French or Italian motif. Festoon blinds look best on wide windows and might not be good for small rooms as they can tend to be a bit overwhelming.

Lee Dobbins writes for http://www.bedroom-designs-and-decorations.com where you can learn more about popular bedroom decorating styles.

The list is almost endless: Mini Blinds, Value blinds, wood blinds, faux wood blinds, plantation blinds. Which should you choose? Here is some information that will help you to make a decision about which is the right blinds to purchase. Quality and style can vary, so made sure you understand what you need and want.

When people speak of "Express" blinds or "Value" blinds and "Cut Down" blinds are all basically the same thing: pre-constructed blinds that are partially finished and can be used after a Little intervention on hate part of the store. The come in 2" variation in size and the clerk will pull them out of the inventory and trim them down a little for your specifications. The same is done for hate length, depending upon the length of you window. The quality may be very much the same as that used in premium window coverings, but since they are not custom ordered, but already manufactured in the factory (usually in China), they are much less expensive. You do not have any customization choices, for example as to where the tilt mechanism will be located or the way to raise or lower the blinds. In other words, you don't have a choice which is on the left or which is on the right. The color range may also be limited. We are able to offer both faux and genuine wooden blinds in our value line that are made right here in the United States, in McKinney, Texas. You don't have to settle for cheap foreign imports.

There are discount stores that are able to sell the standard sizes of blinds. They are made to fit common window sizes. The materials used for these are not of the best quality and the fit is rarely perfect. You can get a Value blind for about the same cost, and it will fit perfectly and look great. No window is the same; there are always variations in width, Lent and other dimensions. It is impossible for shelf blinds to fit all windows, so they "sort of" fit most windows of that dimension. Both the length and the width of stock blinds have to accommodate a very wide variety of different windows. When you order stock blinds, you will probably end up with gaps at each side because the width is not perfect, and a big bulge of slats at the bottom because you have too much length.

The lowest cost blinds you can buy are shelf stock blinds. IN order for them to be so low cost, the quality must suffer, and you end up with light weight, cheap material, poor hardware and mechanisms, small choice in both size and color and of course, no warranty. Blinds such as these will not last more than three, maximum five years.

When you order custom blinds, everything is quality from the beginning. The window is properly measured, and the blind is manufactured to perfectly fit the opening. The error factor is only 1/4 inch on each side, and the length will be the correct length, with no bunching before the strong bottom rail. They are made with quality material and fixtures. The companies that supply such quality blinds are Bali, Prestige, Graber, Royal, Levelor, Hunter Douglas and Timber Blinds. They all have the widest range of colors to choose from, including wood hues. You can also choose faux wood in many wood looks, Tris Basswood or Asian wood and composite wood. Quality design centers, upscale retailers and of course on line companies all offer these kinds of blinds.

Adam Peters is a syndicated columnist on different resources like http://www.home-decorating-reviews.com Find more publications about window blind tips at his website.

 

 Ah, the hard work was done...  Or was it?  I got the roof framed, and it was time now to get it shingled.   Before I get to that, the last little bit of framing needed to happen - the cupola.  Here you can see the base I had constructed while framing up the roof:

You can also see the roofing materials nowhere near I wanted them to be - I wanted them on the roof, but there they are on the ground...  Of course, they are the heavy ones - architectural layered shingles, which basically means each bundle weighs twice as much as a regular bundle...  but I digress... 

Here's a rear view of the building, showing the cupola framing and the rear overhang I neglected to include in the last installment of this unending adventure:

It was much easier to frame up the cupola on the ground, as there were several angled cuts to make and it's easier to make any adjustments where the saw is closer than a run down the ladder...  besides, that 8/12 pitch is hard enough to stand on.  That - and I wanted to make sure I got the weather vane installed properly.  I purchased it from The Weathervane Factory located in Bar Harbor Maine.  I had considered something more whimsical, but in the end I am happy with this purchase - it fits the finished design of the building quite well.  Here is the framed cupola, complete with vane, on the floor of the shop:

And - of course - in it's final resting place on the top center of the shop:

The cupola is a functioning roof vent, along with gable vents at each end - there should be plenty of air traveling through the attic space with this setup.   I used pre-made louvers just to save on time and keep them a bit more maintenance free...   In retrospect, I think if I were to build it now, I would use a larger roof on it - something with a little Asian influence - but, I'm not going to tear the thing down for it!

Anyhow - I had the roof sheathed now, the cupola framed and in place, and all that was left was to heft all the shingles up onto the roof.  By my calculations, it was going to take about 18-1/2 square or so, or 56 bundles.  That's 56 trips up the ladder carrying some god-awful heavy material.  Of course - it was mid August, the hottest part of the year... You can't shingle a roof unless it either the hottest or coldest part of the year, you know.

I have mentioned that one of the reasons I was able to build my own shop was because I had become my dad's caregiver after mom passed away.   Dad had come to live with us right at  New Year's, and did quite well at first.  But it was about at this time that his condition (Alzheimer's) became quite severe.  It made working on the shop during the day difficult at best...  Dad had taken to wandering off on me, wouldn't come out to the shop to "help" me any longer, and I couldn't leave him by himself for more than about 10 to 15 minutes, even if he was sleeping.  Usually I would have to wait for my wife to get home from her work to "take over" for me so I could work on the roofing in the evening.  The nights were long, and the weather cooler in the evening, so it wasn't all bad, I guess...  

We took him in to see a doctor and she suggested we contact Hospice of North Idaho - that they might be able to help us out.  What a godsend those people were...  They came out three times a week, giving dad care and me some time to run errands and get some work done.  I cannot thank them enough for their exemplary service, they were truly wonderful.

As a result, I don't have any photos of progress on the roof so here it is magically complete, about a week after Labor Day:

It took me about a month to get it from the picture before to that one.  First to go up was the class A chimney for the wood stove, the mast for the electrical service, then the fascia board followed by the shingle underlayment   Here you can see the mast for the electrical service, and my temporary scaffolding re-erected after being torn down when the roof framing was completed:

It was no fun doing this side of the roof - an 8:12 pitch gets hard to stand on after a while, and I'm no fan of heights...  It took all of my courage at some points.  I did use roof jacks for this side, which made it easier. 

It ended up taking about 19 squares of shingles to complete, I used the heaviest kind (of course!), an architectural "layered" shingle that has a 35 year warranty.  What I really remember is how exhausted I was by this time...  When I did work on the shop, it was at a frantic pace.  The shingles were heavy, of course - and I can still feel the pain in my shoulder from lifting them into place.  I had to wear tape over my fingertips, as rubbing the stone on the shingles had worn my fingernails down to where they were bloody.  Worst of all was that Dad was a 24 hour a day job, as he had no sense of day or night anymore. 

Dad was rapidly getting worse, and I stopped work on the shop to spend time with him.  He passed away on the 21st of September.

The next month was spent bringing him back to his home to be buried next to mom, and to get together with family to decide what to do with their estate. 

Getting back, it was well into October.  Life was about to change for me - no longer tied to the house, I needed to get back out into the workforce.  My focus now was on updating my resume and on storing what I had received as an inheritance from the estate.  When I started the shop, we had no idea how long dad was going to be with us, and there was a finite amount of money to work with.  We had it worked out where once the shop was complete, dad and I could start working out of it, making money out of it, hopefully enough to allow me to remain as his caregiver.  It turned out that wasn't to be, the time with him was too short, and the shop was incomplete.  I wasn't far enough along with it for it to work for its income, so it would have to take the back burner while I once again joined the 9 to 5'ers.

When everything was settled, I did spend some time on the shop buttoning it up for the coming winter.  First was to put some siding on the cupola so the flashing would keep out the rains:

Next was to get the windows and doors installed so the building would be enclosed:

It was finally starting to look like a building!  The overhead door is a 10' x 10' "residential" door from Overhead Door... I'm quite disappointed in it, it's not a very tough door and the panel with the windows is too high to look out of - the only other option would have been to have them be too low... 

I also got the electrical panel hooked up so there was power, but that was about it for the winter.  The next thing I knew, I was reporting daily to a new job and my time for working on the shop was drastically cut back to a few hours a week.  With the cold weather and darkness of winter approaching, not much would happen until spring could shake off the icy grip of what seemed to be the longest, coldest winter...  But there were a few things I could do...

Coming up next - knee braces and some other miscellaneous structural work, and hooking up the electrical...

 

A crosscut sled is an improvement to the design of the typical table saw. It allows the "table" to slide over the spinning blade, taking the workpiece with it, rather than sliding the workpiece itself over the blade. It also provides a convenient place to mount stop blocks, T-track, and other gadgets, if so desired.

This allows for a safer and more accurate cut, especially on small pieces. No more needing to hold your hands close to the sharp blade, trying to control kickback, or needing a Rube Goldberg-esque configuration of blocks, clamps, featherboards, and fences.

First I cut a scrap of 3/4" birch cabinet ply from the BORG. It is only 5 ply, but works fine for many uses. I didn't measure the base of the sled, but it is around 30" x 18". For a sled the exact measurements aren't as important as squaring it to the blade is.

I next cut some 1/2"x4" reclaimed oak boards to make the front and rear fences. I like to use reclaimed wood whenever possible. Partly for cost and partly to preserve the good wood on the market for a little longer. These boards had some embedded nails that could not be removed. So I cut them out on the table saw, leaving several shorter boards. Two were more than long enough so I cut them to match the base.

I jointed them on my 4" Rockwell jointer, making sure the unfinished face and the bottom were exactly 90*. The bottom will be glued to the base, and the face will control the workpieces. I used a homemade pushblock for the face jointing. It is just a scrap of plywood with some rubber shelf liner stuff attached with spray adhesive. No fancy handles. Just enough to keep control of the workpiece.

Once the oak boards were jointed, I checked for square on the sled. My digital angle gauge is perfectly square, and makes for a convenient square when I'm too lazy to walk across the garage to get a "real" square. If the fence on the jointer is square, the workpiece will be too. And this jointer is perfectly square.

I cut some thin strips of oak 3/4" wide to use as rails. I placed these in the slots on the table saw and used shims to raise them just proud of the table saw surface. I then set my fence to fit the sled base so the blade is centered. A square table saw fence will also ensure the front and rear edges of the base are also square to the blade. This is critical because those edges will set the alignment of the fences!

I applied glue to the rails and clamped the base down to the table saw. I was unable to get a clamp on the front left corner so I piled a bunch of weight on that corner. Surprisingly it worked well!

After the glue dried I trimmed the rails to fit and tested the glide. As is normal, the glide is too tight. I used a cabinet scraper to pare down the rails until they would slide in the slots on the table saw with just a medium amount of force. I want the fit tight because once the rails are waxed it's perfect.

I had debated about using mechanical fasteners to hold the fences on, as I have for my previous sleds. I decided against them because they would add complexity without much strength. For a sled this size there is no need for screws.

I set the boards on the sled base again and drew lines so I could easily tell how wide to make the glue on the base. I then applied a nice even layer of glue to both the sled base and the rail, one rail at a time. Several clamps hold it together to dry.

Check the square several times throughout the process. The clamps will often draw the fence one way or another (a good argument for "parallel clamps" that don't do this) and require adjusting. Small position adjustments will usually resolve any angle issues.

Once both rails have been glued and allowed to fully dry, use a card scraper to clean up any glue. Especially on the inside of the sled. Bumps of glue squeeze-out will throw off the perfect square you are going for!

Now is the time to apply wax to the rails. If you haven't waxed your table saw lately, this would be a good excuse to get that done too.

Smear the wax on liberally and allow to dry 5 minutes. Then buff with a clean cloth. I prefer microfiber cloths for both tasks, but any soft cloth will work just fine.

Check the glide again on the table saw. There should be zero side to side play, yet the sled should move smoothly the entire length of the saw surface with just a push from your pinkie finger. Feel free to scrape the rails a bit more and re-wax if needed.

Check your saw blade is a good one for plywood or laminate so you don't get any tearout when cutting the initial kerf. I forgot to check when building this sled, so I got some tearout from using a 24 tooth ripping blade. It may not be critical, depending on the location of the tearout. Luckily for me the tearout was in the middle of the sled, not at the fence.

Sneak up on the cut, moving the blade up just 1/8" of an inch at a time until the kerf is exposed in the sled bottom. Don't worry about making kerf cuts up into the fences. You'll do that automatically when you start cutting workpieces with the sled. Right now you just want a clean kerf to begin with.

Take your time, moving the sled over the blade slowly. There are no awards for speed, and you will just risk tearout of the plywood or fences.

Check that the rear fence is square to the blade. Use your square (a real one this time) and hold the edge to the face of the blade, not the cutting tips. If it is not square you'll have to cut it apart and start over. But if you followed these instructions, you should have a rear fence that is perfectly square to the blade. Do some test cuts to confirm.

At this point you can either be done and call it good, or apply a finish. For small "throwaway" sleds like this it really doesn't matter. the bed of the sled will be chewed up before the wood surface shows any signs of wear. So a finish will be just for appearances. My reclaimed oak boards had a poly finish on one side, I didn't apply one. And I saw no need to remove it either. On some of my sleds I apply two coats of shellac, especially if they're made from MDF to provide some moisture protection. Like, in case I spill coffee/tea/kool-aid on it.

But I'm perfect and would NEVER do THAT!