Almost all owners or renters that I’ve known at one time or another have used cheap plastic blinds as window treatments.  I remember my first apartment.  I was making 7 dollars an hour at a local landscape tree nursery and the bathroom was located in between the bedroom and kitchen.   Now I don’t mean that there was a hallway that you walked by the bathroom…no I mean that you literally had to walk through the bathroom to get to either the kitchen or bedroom.  It was a small studio apartment and the challenge I had was privacy.   You see when you would take a shower, there was a huge double hung window across from the shower door. It didn’t have any type of window covering on it at all. Nothing.  If I didn’t shut the shower curtain tightly, everyone got an “interesting” view of me showering.

So, what was I supposed to do?  Keep on providing free shows to the neighbors?  I’m too embarrassed and modest to do that.  I went to a local retail store after measuring my window and decided I needed some blinds.   Wow was I in for a shock.   Blinds are expensive.  There are honeycomb blinds, fabric blinds, roman shades, pleated blinds, bamboo blinds, and on and on.  I couldn’t believe the amount of choices I had  and also I couldn’t believe that they were all extremely expensive.

Earning 7 dollars an hour didn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room in  my monthly budget, so I really wanted to find a set of cheap mini blinds that could cost me about 20 or 30 dollars.  Because of the size of my apartments’ window and the length that the blinds needed to cover (the window was 5 feet tall) I could only find cheap plastic blinds that were in my price range.

Now I’ll admit, I was fortunate because I only had to worry about that one single window.  The other windows in my apartment already came with curtains and drapes and they were ok.  At the time I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a homeowner on a limited budget to try and buy decorative window treatments for their entire home.  That costs a lot of money.  Thankfully I didn’t need to worry about it at the time.

However, fast forward a few years and we moved into our first home.  Imagine the flashback I had as we moved into the home and wouldn’t you know it….no window treatments or mini blinds here either. So thinking back on my previous experience, I figured that it couldn’t hurt to temporarily spend a little more money now to preserve our privacy until we could save up enough to purchase the window treatments that we really wanted. (honeycomb blinds with decorative window valances).  Thank goodness that I was smart enough to have the cable tv and high speed internet installed ahead of our move in date. Instead of travelling 45 minutes to the store, I did some quick measurements and then went online and found some very cheap plastic blinds and had them shipped to us in 2 days.   The total cost was just over two hundred dollars.  Not too bad considering I had to cover 11 windows. It came out to about 18 or 20 dollars per window.

Overall, I think that buying those cheap mini blinds gave us the privacy we needed at the right time. Since we were just moving in and other items were higher on our priority list, I don’t think it was a waste of money at all to spend a few hundred dollars.   In fact, the very last set of blinds came down this past summer (8 years later) in our spare bedroom. Not a bad life span for a pair of blinds I’d say.

Of course you’ll need to evaluate your situation and your family’s budget.  If you know long term you want some upgraded window treatments, it may make sense to use a little bit of the budget now to give you immediate window privacy with these vinyl mini blinds, and then in a few months or years you can save up enough to get what you really want.  It worked for us and hopefully our experience has proven helpful to you.

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