Day Night Shade Repair and Work Camper Appreciation Dinner

Linda was lucky enough to be messing with the day/night shade that sits behind my chair when one of the strings broke. I usually leave it closed because the sunlight shining on my laptop screen makes it impossible to read the screen. Consequently I am always giving her a hard time about messing with my window shade. So I had to give her a bad time about breaking my shade and now what was I going to do since I couldn't even read my laptop! The real issue here is now it's my responsibility to get the repair parts, take the blind down, restring it and get it re-installed. As you may be able to guess I have been teasing her about breaking it since it happened.

We found a fair about of information on the restringing process on the internet (what would we do without the internet!). I ordered a repair kit from the Dirty Blind Man, which arrived while I was working last go round. The kits are quite complete, including replacement string guides, tension springs, replacement string, string anchors for the bottom of the blind and a CD with pictures showing the restringing process. The only problem is our shades didn't exactly match up with the blinds shown on the CD.

I carefully disassembled the blind making a diagram of the string routing. I even took a couple of pictures of the end caps and how the tension springs connected to the end caps. The only place I had to work that was large enough to handle the 4 foot blind was on the floor. Bud was very curious as to what I was doing and how each and every part of the shade smelled. I guess everything was OK because he was finally able to get back up on the couch and watch my progress from there.

Reassembly went fairly smoothly, although it included putting the center rail on backwards. The other little problem I had was with the strings tangling when assembling the upper and lower shades to the center rail. By the time I was done I didn't feel like trying to get the shade re-hung with the valance and all so that waited until today. Re-hanging went smoother than anticipated and everything is back up and working. I left the extra string hanging below the anchors just in case I need to do some more adjustment. The excess string will be easy to trim off once we are confident things are working properly.

Last night we had a work camper appreciation dinner at the club house. The caterer brought in a rolling smoker/grill affair that turned out some really good beef, chicken and polish sausage. Along with the meat they served Spanish rice, beans and pico de gallo and of course tortillas. Excellent food and plenty of beer, wine and soft drinks to wash it all down. As usual when good food is involved I ate way too much!