You know, it’s a little bit funny, as the family joke has it. David and Ginny should never attempt an “easy home installation” without having a backup plan that doesn’t include having to find obsure little details on home-repair troubleshooting websites. Or needing a time out.

Still, we eventually succeeded – at least, David figured it out while I lent immoral support.

David attempted to install some double-wide blinds in the bedroom while I was away this morning. I returned to find him stumped, because one bracket was too tight, causing all the other brackets to fail to engage. Thus, the miniblinds we’d bought weren’t much use.

At first, we struggled. Then, we seemed to succeed, but the blind on the side with the too-tight bracket wouldn’t come down. This was when David decided a trip away from the house was a good idea, while I talked to someone at Home Despot, who correctly diagnosed the bracket problem, which was that we had the bracket too close to a mechanism. This was also the cause of the not-coming-down problem.

However, we couldn’t get the headrail OFF to unscrew the bracket and reposition it.

I checked the www.levolor.com website while he went off to Menards to cool off and to find a very,very flat wrench of the right size. The one he came back with was just a smitch too wide, but David got it to work eventuually. After a lengthy removal process, David sent me downstairs.

“Call me when you’re ready to reinstall the headrail,” I said.

He called me back fairly quickly. Aha! the blinds were up and could be raised or lowered. Also aha! The twister-wand thing twirled uselessly, so they couldn’t be closed or opened.

Rats. BUT, I’d seen something of this nature in the levolor.com website FAQ.

However, the fix on the Levolor.com site wasn’t the correct one; I had to go to a third-party retailer’s site to get the right “fix.” Which was “the blinds have internal rods which engage interior gear-joints, and sometimes the rods shift in transit and must be re-inserted back into the joints.”

Levolor Riviera and Mark I Repairs and Adjustments

Now, WHY couldn’t Levolor.com have

1. Cautioned against installing brackets too close to the inner works of the blinds, and

2. Shipped the blinds with little styrofoam spacers to prevent the rods from shifting OR mentioned this problem in their FAQ?

Durrrrrrrr. Seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time, this series of problems was mighty, mighty frustrating. Now the only people who are frustrated are the neighborhood pervs (not that we have any, they are purely imaginary).