Video Highlights:
00:38 – Step 1 – Undo the storm clips
00:50 – Step 2 – Undo the zips at the side
01:14 – Step 3 – Roll up blind to half way
02:08 – Step 4 – Roll up blind to top
02:50 – Step 5 – Tie off the ropes
03:18 – Step 6 – Secure the storage clips
04:36 – Summary
Video Transcription
Hi I’m Jason from the company Blockout Blinds and today I’m going to show you how to put up your external cafe blinds.
Now as you can see we have a patio here and we’ve decided to enclose this in which has created an absolutely beautiful area. Now we want to keep it that way and to keep it that way we want to make sure we use our blinds correctly. So I’ll go through now and show you how to put your cafe blind up.
1 – Undoing the Storm Clips
First of all you might notice we have some storm clips down the bottom here which hold the blinds more securely in place. So you want to release these from both the left and right side initially otherwise the blind won’t go up.
2 – Undo the zips at the side
Once that is done we then want to put the zips up all the way to the top again on both the left and the right sides. So I pull the right zip up all the way to the top and I then pull the left zip up all the way to the top as well. You can see now that the blind is just hanging loosely by itself.
3 – Hand roll up the blinds to waist height
Now we have a cord on the right hand side here which is designed to lift the blind but many people think that it’s designed to be pulled straight from the bottom without any guidance or help. However this may work sometimes but what you’ll probably find is that it won’t roll up correctly and it will bunch up too big and it won’t work. So that’s not how you do it.
What you want to do is go to the middle of your blind and actually grab the bottom rail as such, lift it up to about waist height to where it’s comfortable, then you want to roll the blind up nice and tight as if you’re rolling up a piece of newspaper to give to your kid to use as a trumpet or something and just roll it up until you get to around your waist height, nice and easy.
4 – Use the ropes to completely roll up the blind
Now this is where the ropes come in, using one hand to keep the roll steady, grab the ropes at the side and lift them up until they start catching the blind. Now you’ve got a left and a right rope so you want to make sure that they’re both tight. As you can see there the left one is tight and the right one is loose so just pull the correct one until they are both the same length.
You’re then ready to go. I can now let go of the blind and pulling both cords together evenly I can roll the blind up and as you see it’s nice and tight up the top here ready to store away.
5 – Tie off the ropes
Now we want to tie the rope off to the cleat so I’m going to do that by putting this here and doing a couple of figure of 8 knots. You don’t have to do too many just enough to keep it in place then to get rid of the excess rope, just get your fingers, pull it down around a foot and just loop it around the top of the cleat a few times and that way you keep the cords off the ground as such and when you want to use it again you just simply lift it off and it will all untangle.
6 – Secure the storage clips for leaving the blinds up long term
Now if I’m going to put the blind down again tomorrow I would leave it like this however if you’re planning on leaving the blind up for two or three days or even more it’s really important that you do the storage clips up on the left and the right. What that does is it gives the blind a little bit more support so the ropes aren’t doing all the work.
Once you have these clips secured as you can see here the blind is actually higher up than the clips. So what you want to do is just let the rope down until the blind falls and is just sitting on the clips so they are holding the weight as well. So now we’ll just put the rope back up and one side note is that with pets and children it’s very important to keep these ropes out of reach because what you don’t want is kids or dogs becoming tangled and hurting themselves. So just be really careful and safety conscious when putting up your cafe blinds.
Summary
So there you have it, just in summary
- Undo the storm clips
- Undo the zips at the side
- Grab the blind in the middle and roll it up with your hands to waist height
- Pull the ropes up until both sides are even and roll blind all the way up
- Tie off the ropes using the cleats
- Secure the storage clips if leaving up for more than a couple of days
That’s it! If you do that your blinds will last a long time and you’ll have no issues at all. So thanks for watching, until next time.
