How Window Treatments Enrich Your Living Experience

Window treatments are a great option to dress up your windows and to enhance the décorative appeal of the interiors of your house. Besides making the home interiors look more hospitable and welcoming, these window coverings also ensure that you enjoy a comfortable and pleasant atmosphere inside the house. Excellent heat insulation to prevent heat gain during summers and heat loss during winters, greater light control to effectively diffuse or block out bright external light for glare prevention, protection against the UV exposure, and safeguarding your privacy are some of the ways in which window treatments add value to your day to day lives.

By reducing heat exchange between the interiors and the exterior of the house, window coverings enhance the energy efficiency of your heat control appliances such as the air-conditioner and the thermostat. You save real money on your power bills. By preventing glare and UV exposure, window coverings ensure that you have a better media consumption experience when indoors and your indoor furnishings are protected against the damaging effects of UV radiation. Likewise, window treatments also uphold the sanctity of your private space by safeguarding your privacy.

What to Do if You Have Pets or Children at Home

Window treatments are a great addition to the home décor in so many ways and are pretty safe when properly installed. However, when you have children or pets at your home, you need to go to extra lengths to ensure their safety. Pets and children are quite enthusiastic, curious, inquisitive, and often unpredictable. They love to run around the house and interact with everything inside your home.

Pets and kids often find window treatments amusing and they want to tug at them or play with them. Pets in particular like to pull at the window coverings or insert their heads in between the open sections such as the gaps between blinds slats to look outside the window. Similarly, children also find window treatments amusing to play with. However, this playful indulgence of the pets and kids alike can result in the window coverings getting damaged beside the window coverings falling down if pulled too hard and hurting your pets or kids in the process.

So, if you have pets or kids in your house, the risk associated with window coverings in your house also increases. So, you need to make extra efforts to ensure that your window coverings are child and pet-safe. Enhancing the strength of the mounting mechanism, opting for more resilient window coverings, and keeping them beyond the reach of your pets and kids are some of the steps that you can take.

5 Things You Should Look for in Pet-Friendly Window Treatments

Pets are no different than other members of the family. They are loved, adored, and cared for just like any other family member. The pets are your playmates, they cuddle with you, they shower you with their unadulterated and unconditional love. Hence, it is only logical to ensure that your house and its interiors are pet-safe and friendly to your pets.

The pets are very playful, adorable, and full of energy. They are unhinged in their innocence and inquisitive by nature. Hence, they like to run around in the house, pick anything to play with, and can damage those things or harm themselves in the process. Pets often take a special liking to the window treatments in the house and often indulge in curious probing of the same.

Hence to ensure that your window treatments are not damaged and that your pets are safe, you need to consider a few aspects while selecting window treatments for your house. These aspects are important for making sure that you have pet-friendly window coverings. Let us look at them in greater detail:

• Operational Mechanism

The prefabricated window treatments offered by different brands come with a pull cord mechanism by default. However, these pull cords can be a bit messy and unsafe especially if you have pets in the house. Loose hanging pull cord can be an easy target for your pets to nibble at or tug at. If too much force is exerted, the window coverings may fall down or get damaged. Your pets can also get hurt.

Hence, if you have a pull cord mechanism in your window treatments, make sure that you secure them well. You also need to make sure that the pull cord is beyond the reach of your pets. Therefore, you should shorten the pull cord if it is too long and secure them well and high enough so that the pets can’t reach them.

• Durability

Pets can scratch the window coverings with their sharp nails or even tear them down in case of fabric window treatments. Hence, to ensure that your window coverings last long, you would be better off opting for more resilient and tough window treatments. Wooden blinds, shutters, metallic window coverings are some of the options that are quite durable and can withstand a playful assault by your pets.

• The Variant of Window Coverings

As discussed above, window coverings with a pull cord mechanism are the most prominent window treatment option out there. But these are not really pet-friendly. Hence, it becomes crucial to look for alternatives that are a better fit for a house with pets. Cordless window coverings and their motorized variants are some of the best pet-friendly options you can look at.

While cordless window treatments are operated by moving the window treatment by hand, they get rid of any loose pull cord that the pets can access. However, you still have to manually walk up to the window coverings to operate them. This can become a bit of a hassle sometimes.

This is where motorized window treatments come into the picture. The motorized window treatments make it very easy to operate them by giving you the option of controlling them via a remote, your smartphone, or even your voice command. Since there are no loose strings and you can control these window coverings from anywhere without having to be physically present in the same place as them, these window coverings become as pet-friendly as it gets.

• The Orientation of the Window Treatments

Window treatments are available in many different orientations such as horizontal, vertical, diagonal, etc. with each orientation having certain benefits of their own. Now, it is no secret that the pets love to probe the window coverings in their playful enthusiasm. Hence, the orientation of the window coverings also becomes an important aspect of ensuring that your window coverings are pet-friendly. Vertical window coverings are easier for your pets to access as they open and close sideways and are directly mounted on the window or the door frame.

Hence you can not install the window coverings high enough to prevent your pets from accessing your window treatments. Horizontal window treatments, on the other hand, can be installed both on the window frame and on the wall above the window frame. Hence, you can install these window coverings high enough to prevent your pets from accessing them.

• The Material of Your Window Treatments

If you have pets in your house, you need a more durable and resilient window covering option for your house. Pets often look to play with the window treatments and can damage the same in this process. Hence to give more strength to your window treatments, you will be better off by not opting for fabric window coverings. Materials such as wood, metal, and synthetic material such as PVC, faux wood, etc are far more durable and can withstand the assault from your pets.

These are some of the important aspects that you need to keep in mind while selecting window treatments if you have pets in your house. Making your home interiors pet-friendly is your responsibility and these aspects will help certainly help achieve that.