A Room by Room Window Treatment Guide for Lawrence Homes

Lawrence Window Treatments

There's a moment in every window treatment project where the choices stop feeling exciting and start feeling like a test: blinds or shades, inside mount or outside, and who's actually going to reach the cord. The good news is that the decisions have an order, and once you follow it, most of them answer themselves. This is the guide we'd walk a Lawrence homeowner through at the kitchen table, in the same order we'd cover it in person, with the parts that usually get skipped left in.

The Four Types of Window Treatments

Price follows family before it follows anything else, and there are four families. Blinds are hard slats or vanes on a tilt mechanism, and they're usually the least expensive way to cover an opening. Shades are one piece of fabric that rolls, stacks or folds, and the range inside that single category is enormous, running from a plain vinyl roller to a motorized solar shade with a full valance.

Shutters cost more than almost anything else sold for a window, because a shop is building and fitting a frame as much as a set of louvered panels. Drapery prices by the yard, so a wide window or floor length panels add up fast, especially once a functional traverse rod gets added to what looked like a simple fabric order in Lawrence homes.

What Drives the Price

Cost tracks the family you picked in the first section. Blinds and simple roller shades sit at the low end of custom pricing. Cellular shades and better solar fabrics push into the middle, with woven wood costing a bit more than either. Shutters and full drapery treatments, especially motorized ones, sit at the top. National ranges run roughly $60 to $600 a window for stock product and $250 to $2,600 a window for custom, measured and installed.

Inside any one family, mechanism moves the number more than color does: a cord lock costs the least, and cordless lift and motorization both add to it. A wide opening in an older Lawrence home costs more to finish than the same product on a newer, squarer one, simply because the install takes longer.

What Happens at the In-Home Measure

A measure takes about an hour, room by room, and the questions change depending on what's on the other side of the glass. Width gets taken at the top, the middle and the bottom of each opening, and height at the left, center and right, with both diagonals checked for square. A bathroom or kitchen opening gets checked for steam and splash exposure as much as for size, while a front room gets checked against its neighbors so the mount type matches across the whole face of the house.

Mounting depth gets checked against what the product needs, and obstructions get noted room by room: a crank on an outward swinging window, an alarm contact, a deep sill. All of it gets written down before anything is ordered for a Lawrence home.

How to Decide What Goes Where

Most people start with fabric and color and work backward, which is exactly why so many end up disappointed. Work through it in a different order: light first, then privacy, then who operates the thing, then the mount, with material dead last.

Light means noticing what time of day the sun hits an opening and where it lands. A west facing family room with a television on the wall in a Lawrence house is a glare problem, not a color problem, and a 3 percent solar shade solves it while keeping the view. Privacy is separate. Is anyone really looking in, or does the room only feel exposed after dark? A front room facing the street usually falls into that second group, which is why a top down bottom up cellular shade earns its keep there, covering the lower half of the glass while daylight still comes over the top.

Mount comes near the end: inside the opening looks cleaner, while outside on the wall covers more light and hides an opening that has gone slightly out of square. Material and color come last, once everything else has narrowed the choice down.

Contracts and Custom Order Timelines

Ordering piecemeal is the mistake with the longest tail. Fabric is dyed in batches, so two shades in the same color bought six months apart can read differently once they're both hanging in afternoon light, and there's no fixing it after delivery. Order a full room together, even if it gets installed across two visits.

Skipping the written contract is the other one. IN law requires a real scope and a total price in writing for residential work over $150, under the Home Improvement Contract Act, IC 24-5-11, and any Lawrence homeowner who signs on a verbal understanding instead is giving up a protection that costs nothing to ask for. Custom fabrication runs two to five weeks regardless, so there's no rush that justifies skipping the paperwork.

Write down the problem in each room before you write down a product, and the house will hang together when it's finished. Keep one product family per floor, and match the mount on openings you can see at once. Order by room too, so the colors match. Lawrence Window Treatments will do that walk with you and put every opening on paper before anything gets ordered. Call (317) 999-5154 to set up a measure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I do inside mount or outside mount?

Inside mount sits within the opening and shows off the trim, which looks cleaner and is what most people picture. It needs enough flat depth for the headrail, and it leaves a small light gap along each side because the product gets built slightly narrower so it can move. Outside mount sits on the trim or the wall above the opening instead. It covers more light and hides an opening that's out of square, which makes it the fallback whenever there isn't enough depth for an inside mount. Bedrooms often go outside; living spaces usually go inside.

What if my window opening isn't square?

It happens more than people expect, especially in an older home where the frame has shifted a little over the years. At the measure, both diagonals get checked corner to corner, and if they come out different, the opening is out of square. A straight-edged inside mount shade can leave a visible wedge of daylight along the top in that case. An outside mount usually solves it cleanly, since it covers the whole opening, crooked part included, instead of trying to fit inside it exactly.

What's the real difference between room darkening and blackout?

Room darkening fabric blocks most light through the material but still glows a little, and it's what most people actually want in a bedroom. Blackout fabric passes essentially nothing through the material itself. Neither one seals the edges, so on an inside mount you'll still see a thin line of light down each side. If a genuinely dark room is the goal, the fix is an outside mount that overlaps the trim, or side channels that capture the edges.