Newmarket Blinds, Room by Room: Main Street to the New Subdivisions

Start with the room that annoys you

Almost every Newmarket quote begins the same way. Someone points at one window, usually a kitchen or a west-facing bedroom, and says that one is the problem. Then we walk the rest of the house and find that the other twelve openings are fine as they are for now.

That is a better way to buy blinds than picking a product first, and it works across the whole town. Newmarket housing splits roughly in two. The older streets around Main Street and Fairy Lake carry tall sashes in frames that have settled for a century. North and west of there, the subdivision belt through Stonehaven, Glenway and the newer streets runs to bigger builder windows and open main floors. The rooms behave differently in each, so this guide goes room by room rather than street by street.

Kitchens: glare over the sink, film on the fabric

The kitchen window is the one people complain about most, and for two separate reasons that need different answers.

The first is glare, usually late afternoon on a west-facing sink window. The second is what cooking does to fabric. Steam and airborne grease settle on anything textured near a range, and over a couple of seasons a woven fabric by a stove holds a film that no vacuum attachment lifts.

Our default here is a smooth, wipeable roller fabric on an inside mount, set high enough in the opening that nothing hangs into the working area over the sink. Roller blinds in Newmarket start from $80 per window and they are the easiest product in the house to keep clean, which is the whole argument in a kitchen. Skip anything with slats or deep texture over a range. In the older Main Street houses, where the kitchen window is often small and set into a deep frame, the slim 30 mm bracket keeps the roll inside the opening instead of standing proud of the casing.

Cordless is the standard here for a practical reason as much as a safety one: a hanging cord near a sink ends up wet.

North-facing rooms that never quite warm up

Newmarket sits far enough up Yonge that a north room in January is a genuine complaint, not a preference. Those rooms get no direct sun to offset what the glass gives away, so they run behind the rest of the house all winter and the thermostat cannot fix it without overheating everywhere else.

This is the one room where the product choice actually changes the temperature. Cellular blinds hold a pocket of still air against the pane, and still air conducts heat poorly, which cuts the heat lost at the glass by up to about 25 percent. The 19 mm cell insulates better than the 9 mm, and on a north wall it is worth the difference. Cellular blinds in Newmarket start from $120 per window.

Two things make them work properly. Mount inside the frame so the fabric sits close to the glass with as little gap at the sides as the opening allows, since an air pocket only insulates if the air stays put. And keep indoor humidity somewhere near 35 percent over the winter, because a tight blind over cold glass will collect condensation the moment the room runs damp. In the newer Glenway streets, built out on the old golf lands off Yonge and Davis Drive, we see this most often in finished basements and bonus rooms over garages, both of which sit on cold air.

Kids' rooms and the 5 a.m. summer problem

Ontario summer light arrives well before anyone wants it, and a room-darkening fabric on an inside mount will not stop it. Light comes around the edges of an inside-mounted blind no matter how good the fabric is, and in a child's room those edge lines land on the wall at exactly the wrong hour.

The fix is an outside mount that overlaps the opening on all four sides, in a blackout fabric, hung a little above the frame. It looks heavier than an inside mount and it is what actually works. In the family streets through Stonehaven, where a lot of our calls come from parents replacing the builder-basic coverings that came with the house, this is the single most requested change we make.

Everything in a child's room goes cordless. That is not negotiable for us regardless of what the previous blinds had.

Living rooms in the older houses

Near Main Street and Fairy Lake the living room usually faces the street across a short front yard, which puts privacy and daylight in direct conflict. Heavy fabric solves the privacy and costs you the room's best feature.

Dual-band fabric handles both. Open the bands and you keep the view of the street and the trees with the interior softened, then align them when you want the room closed off in the evening. Zebra blinds in Newmarket are the usual choice for these front rooms. On the tall original sashes we mount inside the frame so the casing stays untouched, which matters in houses where the trim is part of what the owner bought.

Open main floors in the subdivision belt

The newer houses bring a different question: consistency. When a main floor is open, four or five windows are visible from any point in the room, and mixing products across them makes the space look unplanned. We usually run one fabric across everything on that floor, then vary the opacity by room rather than the product.

There is an exterior version of the same argument. Whatever colour backs your fabric is what the street sees, so keeping the backing consistent across the front of the house is worth doing even when the rooms behind those windows have different needs.

What order to do the house in

Very few people do a whole house at once, and there is no reason to. We itemize every quote per window so you can stage it. The usual sequence is bedrooms first, then whichever side of the house takes the afternoon sun, then everything else when it suits you. Prices hold for the quoted windows, production runs 2 to 3 weeks per order, and a typical install takes 2 to 3 hours.

Getting a quote in Newmarket

Whether your house is off Main Street or out in the newer subdivisions, the in-home consultation is free and there is no travel charge anywhere in town. Call (416) 890-4554 and we will measure whichever room is bothering you, then price the rest so you can decide what comes next. There is more detail on how we work locally on our Newmarket roller blinds page.