A Shady Situation
It was a co-op apartment upgrade that sounded great on paper. Our 58-year-old building in New York City was finally getting a window overhaul: full-pane windows to replace legacy double-hung units that sometimes wouldn’t open and other times wouldn’t close. But as the installation date approached, we were so focused on the upheaval of the window frame removal that we didn’t anticipate the shade situation.
As neighbors started to report their experiences, it quickly became apparent that the existing 19-year-old living room window treatments – three separate ones to cover two standard windows and a wide, south-facing picture window – wouldn’t fit the dimensions of the new windows. That meant the adjacent west window would have to get a new shade, too, to match the others. The last time I bought shades, two decades ago, the store saleswoman advised three separate manual window coverings, each with its own pull, for the 100-inch wide south-facing view, because, she said, a single dowel wouldn’t likely support the weight of an 8-foot wide window covering.
Having to lower three shades every night was tedious, and we rarely did
