Blinds - Shortening and Lengthening - Part 2

Continued from Yesterday... To lengthen the blinds I had that were a few slats short, I took the slats I removed from the other blinds in yesterday's post and added them to the bottom of the short blinds. 
 
To do that, I took off the plastic bottom caps off the bottom piece of wood as shown in Post one and took out the knots and removed the caps. 

I then took out the bottom wooden piece from the slat holders so I could put it on the "new" bottom. 

From there, I used a lighter to heat up both ends of the cording holding the blinds in. 

One thing I didn't think of at first on the first "melt" and binding of the cords was to measure the space of the two cords your are attaching and make sure they are the same distance apart as the slat space above and below. At first, I just melted both ends together and it made the blind slats about and inch below the slat above it. I had only melted two of the connections at that point so it was easy to clip them and re-melt the cords and attach them together once they were hot and melted. 

Don't use bare hands to do this. The melted cording is hot. You can use a silicon oven mitt to connect the melted cords together. 

The pull cords are made of a bit of different cording as they pull the weight of the blinds up and down and it didn't melt together as easily as the cords holding the slats. I wanted to reinforce the pull cords as well so I got tan sewing thread and actually sewed the two sides of the pull cord together after I melted them together. 

To give it more strength, I twisted the thread around and around the melted section after I stitched them together. This also served to cover the darker melt marks on the pull cords due to their being harder to melt. 

You can see that the cords holding the slats were just a bit dark where they were melted but really, you couldn't even see the melt area from a foot back as you can see in the pictures. 

After you melt the cords together, I stuck the wooden bottom through the last slat spot and then tied knots at the bottom of the pull cords and used the plastic stoppers to hold the other slat cord bottoms into the holes as in yesterdays post. 

One thing I didn't think about, was that the color of the blinds were different due to one side facing the  the sun all the time and the other was inside all the time so I didn't put the sun bleached side "out" on the longer blinds so there is a slight difference in the color of the slats I added. 

In the room, you really can't see that however as you can tell in the top photo so it just shows with the bright light of the flash on it as you can see in the bottom photo. 

The other thing you can see, because I took a picture, is that one of the connections on the slat holder connections is a bit longer than the others. I could have cut it and re-melted it to be tighter but it wasn't enough that I thought it was noticeable so I left it. I just eyeballed the connection length but could have actually measured it to make it more precise but I was lazy and watching a movie so I didn't worry about it too much. You can see it in the top picture in the center of the eighth slat up. 

I thought it was amazing that I could reattach the blind cords and make the shorter blinds longer but if you thought this was ingenious, wait until you see what I did tonight! 

I keep surprising myself. I will show how I cut metal blinds to fit my window. The hardware store told me it couldn't be done.... But, I did it.


But that's a post for another day! 

I have noticed that my posts have taken on a few themes lately. Light themes and the blind themes which really do with light as well. Very interesting!