POINCIANA, Fla. – Mary Lou in Poinciana had 2 broken slats in her horizontal window blinds from her dog so we showed her where to find new slats and how to replace them.
If you have a project you’d like Erik to tackle, send us an email at GettingResultsAtHome@wkmg.com and next week Erik might just show up at your door!
We purchased:
Nothing
We brought with us:
Flat-blade screwdriver
Needle-nosed pliers
Before your start:
Blinds are rarely custom-made. Usually they come from the store in predetermined widths and lengths so it’s very likely your blinds will have extra slats at the bottom (unless someone has already removed them).
Mary Lou’s blinds had two extra slats at the bottom (the blind set had never been shortened) which worked out perfectly for us because we were able to use those extras to replace the broken ones!
If you buy a new set of blinds and shorten yours, make sure to keep your extra slats so you can replace any that break in the future. If don’t have any extras, Amazon sells replacement slats, sometimes individually, sometimes in a pack. Most hardware stores don’t sell replacement slats for horizontal blinds but they do sell replacement packs for vertical blinds.
Step 1
Pop out the stoppers on the underside of the bottom slat bar. There should be 3. Use a small flat-blade screwdriver to pry out the stoppers.
Then pull the tiny knot out of the bottom of the stopper (you may need to use tweezers or needle-nosed pliers) and slide the stopper up the string so you can undo the knot.
After you undo the knot, the stopper should be free and will drop down off the string.
*Important* – once you’ve released all of the stoppers from the pull-strings, the strings may shoot up if they’re under pressure, depending on the type of blinds you have. Auto-tensioning blinds (the kind that you don’t need to pull on the strings to raise and lower them) mean that the pull-string may pull back to the top, so make sure to hold it! If you have auto-tensioning blinds, before you start, you may want to lift the bottom of the blinds all the way up to the top to compress them, uninstall the blind set and place it on your floor and work on it there so the pull string will not be under tension.
Step 2
Now that the strings are free, you should be able to slide out the broken slat. Also, make sure to slide out the extra slat(s) to use for replacing the broken slat.
Step 3
Slide in the replacement slat.
Step 4
Reattach the pull string. There are two, one on each side of the blinds. Feed the string back down through the blind slat you just replaced and then all the way down through the other slats and through the bottom of the slat bar. Feed it through the bar and then out of the hole where the stopper goes.
Step 5
Slide the stoppers over the end of the pull-strings (there are only two). Then make new tiny knots and slide the stoppers back down onto the knots.
Step 6
Now stuff the leftover strings into the bottom of the slat bar (through the larger hole where the stopper gets pushed into). A screwdriver comes in handy here. Then shove the stopper back into the hole.
You just got results at home!