French doors are a beautiful style element. Made with massive panes of safety glass, they make your space seem more open, creating an illusion or additional square footage. They keep your house classy and are an amazing design feature. Unfortunately, if you have pets or boisterous children, you’ll need to replace that glass fairly frequently.
Also, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Depending on the aspect of your home, you may end up feeling you have too much light. Your living room can also feel quite exposed as the sunlight streams in, especially early in the morning when you’re waddling around in your pyjamas looking for a cup of coffee to wake your inner zombie and make you human.
This issue isn’t restricted to the windows of the French. Any house that was positioned in a certain way can have excess light. The architect’s idea was to brighten up the home, but they do sometimes go overboard, and not everyone likes a super sunny living space.
There are a few ways to deal with this. You could bar the doors and windows with dark blockers, but this is a design disaster. You could replace the windows with stained or tinted glass, or place a coloured film over them. This is effective but can be costly. Plus, you could end up at the other extreme with too little light, and it’s not a reversible decision.
A much simpler option is to install some floor-length curtains. This presents several disadvantages. Your kids and pets can still cause havoc to the fabric. Curtains can accumulate dust, which can aggravate allergies, so they need to be often laundered.
Depending on how heavy your curtains are – and they need to be fairly heavy to keep the light out – but they can be cumbersome to wash and take forever to dry. And when they’re in use, they retain heat and can make the room feel stuffy and closed off.
Of course, the biggest disadvantage of curtains as a light-reduction strategy is that you’d have to keep them closed during the day, which nobody really wants to do. So what are your other options? Well, you could install some roller shutters. They’re affordable and stylish since they come in so many colours.
And they don’t need much space to install. They hang straight down, and when you raise them, they are completely hidden in a small pelmet box at the top of the shutters. It’s barely the size of a curtain box and not at all conspicuous.
Roller shutters offer an extra layer of security because they can be locked from both the inside and the outside. They can withstand fires, rough winds, gale forces, and other natural sources of destruction. Roller shutters also have good insulation qualities, because they are stuffed with foam to prevent heat loss in summer and keep the chill out in winter.
There are two kinds of roller shutters, and each has their benefits. Interlocking roller shutters are opaque when they’re closed, so when you pull them down, they keep out all forms of external light. This can be a bit drastic, especially during the day.
Option 2 is mini-view shutters. They have narrow gaps between individual slats, so they let in a minimal amount of air and light. These are a good choice because they can retain air circulation while dimming bright sunlight. They can also create pretty patterns of light and shadow that can turn your living space into a lovely tropical nook.
Mini-view shutters last for a long time because although they are constantly exposed to strong sunlight, they are coated with a layer of ultraviolet protection. They’re easy to clean. All you need is some warm water and a soft brush or a damp cloth to keep the dust away.
If you’d like to minimize the blinding daytime light without turning your home into a nest for vampires, order your set of mini-view shutter rollers today. You can probably get them in a shade that matches your living room décor, and they’ll keep your room well shadowed.