Basement window blinds

The room with the shortest day

Upstairs, this site’s whole business is deciding how much light to refuse. Below grade the arithmetic flips. A basement window is small out of proportion to its room, set high, and often looking at the inside of a window well or the underside of a deck; what daylight it gathers is brief, second-hand and precious. Cover it carelessly and the room pays all day.

So the basement brief reads backwards from every other page here: keep the most light that privacy allows, spend as little of the window on hardware and gathered fabric as possible, and be honest about which openings need covering at all. A blind downstairs has to justify every lumen it takes.

Built to no standard size

Nothing about a basement window is standard. Foundations dictate the opening, so the windows come short and wide, or tall and narrow beside a walkout, or square where a coal chute used to be — set high on the wall, often in a reveal too shallow to hold a bracket, sometimes in a sash that tilts inward to open. Stock blinds are cut for the windows upstairs, and it shows the moment one meets a basement.

Made to measure is not a luxury down here; it is the only way the covering fits the opening rather than approximating it. On a window this small the approximation is expensive — a few centimetres of miss is a lit stripe or a lost slice of scarce glass — and the odd proportions decide products too. A short drop favours mechanisms that hold themselves to a few centimetres at the head; a tilting sash wants a blind mounted clear of its swing; a shallow reveal sends the whole assembly onto the wall above, made wider than the hole so the edges seal the light leak a small window can least afford.

The opening that might be the way out

Some basement windows carry a second job: they are the room’s exit of last resort. Where a lower level holds a bedroom — and finished basements increasingly do — the window somebody sleeps beside has to stay usable as a way out, and a covering can quietly ruin that without anyone noticing until it matters.

The rule we specify by is simple: the covering must surrender the opening instantly. One motion to clear, workable in the dark by feel, nothing fixed across the window, no loops or trailing cords to catch on anything or anyone. That leans the choice toward a simple cordless roller or a shade that lifts clean and away, and it leans the mounting outside the opening so nothing lives inside it.

We are careful not to play inspector — building rules are their own subject and not ours to quote from a web page. What we do promise: tell us which rooms are slept in, and every covering we fit there will treat the window as an exit first and a window second.

Ten o’clock, at ankle height

After dark a grade-level basement window becomes the most public glass in the house — lit from inside, at footpath level, offering its little rectangle of your evening to everyone who walks past. The upstairs windows show the street your ceiling; this one shows the room.

It is also the case where light-filtering fabrics quietly fail. A woven screen keeps its promises only while it is brighter outside than in; the moment the lamps beat the sky, the weave becomes a scrim with you behind it. The evening layer down here should simply be opaque — a solid roller, closed slats, a cellular — and because the same window is rationing daylight, the right arrangement is usually two-state: fully open all day, honestly shut at night, with nothing clever in between.

The bedroom and the desk downstairs

The two rooms basements most often become are the two with real light requirements.

The basement bedroom is the one place below grade where blackout earns its keep — not against the modest window, but for whoever sleeps days: shift workers, students, the visiting in-laws. The window is small, so the fabric wins easily; the perimeter is the real opponent, since on a small opening the edge glow is proportionally loud. An oversized mount outside the opening closes most of it — always arranged so the exit rule above still holds.

The basement office fights glare instead. A high window behind a monitor puts a bright stripe exactly where the afternoon’s focus goes, and the fix is a blind that stops at any height rather than choosing between all and nothing. A venetian’s tilt is worth having here for a second reason: angled up, it throws the window’s brief sunlight onto the ceiling, which is free lighting in the room that needs it most.

The measure, below grade

A basement measure spends as much time on the surroundings as on the opening. What is outside — well, walkway, deck, grade. What the wall does in winter, because a cool damp wall votes for synthetic materials and for hanging the blind clear of the glass so air keeps moving. What is above the frame, where bulkheads and ducting like to live exactly where a bracket wants to go. Which rooms are slept in — the question that reorders all the others.

Then the openings themselves, each one individually, because in a basement no two match. The quote comes back sized to the millimetre, materials named, with the exit windows flagged as such. The visit costs nothing, and down here it routinely saves the price of a blind by concluding that one window should stay bare.