Faux Wood Blinds

Franklin Faux Wood Blinds

PVC where Johnson County humidity would ruin hardwood

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Quick Answer

Here's what to know before specifying this for your house. Room conditions, mount type and lift system all change the outcome, and the answers below explain how each one moves the decision.

  • Service: Faux Wood Blinds for Franklin homeowners
  • Service area: Franklin, IN and surrounding areas
    • A restring, a new cord lock, a tilt mechanism or a dead motor battery gets handled far faster than a new order, because nothing has to be built. New custom work runs on the factory's two to five week clock.
  • Insured and bonded
  • Serving Franklin, IN since 2008
Faux Wood Blinds Services

Expert Faux Wood Blinds for Franklin Homes

Franklin's housing splits in two, and faux wood belongs to the newer half. The 2,199 homes built here in the 1990s and the 2,448 built from 2000 through 2009 present a standard nominal 3.25 inch vinyl jamb with a flat stop, which is the friendliest opening a 2 inch PVC slat will ever meet. Southbrook, at 108 parcels the largest named plat in Johnson County's records for this city, carries roughly 14 to 20 openings per house. Westwind at Cumberland and Bluffs at Young's Creek sit on open former farmland with immature planting, so their baths and laundry rooms take full sun and full humidity in the same afternoon.

Span is where faux wood gives up. A 2 inch PVC slat run wide will bow at its center, and a west elevation speeds that along. Sugar Creek Heights is the clearest case in the city: all 19 parcels front South 600 East with no interior street at all, so every front elevation takes direct morning or direct afternoon light across an open 0.46 acre lot. Past about six feet we put two blinds in the opening beneath one continuous valance, or specify a stiffer composite slat carried on a center support bracket. Composite refuses stain. Against stained casing we match a paint color as closely as the range allows, and we call that a compromise rather than a match.

When to Call

Signs You Need Faux Wood Blinds

If you notice any of these in your Franklin home, it is worth booking a measure. None of it is urgent, and none of it fixes itself either.

Basement openings have never had anything on them

A wide headrail settles in the middle when lowered

The valance is missing and the headrail shows from the couch

Laundry room slats have gone wavy along one edge

A new bathroom went in and the windows are bare

Tilting the slats takes two hands and real patience

The bathroom still has a vinyl roller from move-in

Kids rooms still have looped cords from the previous owner

You want one color of blind through the whole house

Wood blinds over the tub have started to cup

Our Process

How Franklin Window Treatments Handles Faux Wood Blinds

Every job follows the same five-step process. Transparent, thorough, and done right the first time.

1

In-home measure booked

2

Room moisture read first

3

Corner-to-corner square check

4

Color held against your trim

5

Old blinds removed and hauled

Real Project Photos

Faux Wood Blinds in Franklin

Photographs from real faux wood blinds jobs completed by our crew in Franklin and surrounding areas.

Custom shades measured and installed in FranklinPlantation shutters fitted to a Franklin windowCellular shades in a Franklin living room
Scope of Work

What Faux Wood Blinds Includes

Every Franklin job is documented item by item. Here is what the crew covers.

Every opening measured three widths and three heights, then checked corner to corner for square

Room moisture read before the material call, so baths, kitchens, laundry rooms and finished basements get faux wood

Mounting depth taken at the top of the opening so a 2 inch headrail clears the trim and any hardware

Solid PVC and wood-polymer composite separated on the order, because they don't weigh the same or behave the same

West and south openings flagged, since surface heat on a dark slat is what starts a bow

Slat size set per opening, 2 inch as the standard and 2 1/2 inch where the window is wide enough to carry it

Center support bracket planned on any span wide enough to let a loaded headrail settle in the middle

Wide openings split two-on-one so no single blind carries more weight than its brackets should

Finished weight checked against the opening before a wide unit gets ordered as one piece

Routeless slats specified where a row of lit route holes would be noticed from inside the room

Cloth tape ladders offered where the route holes should disappear behind a band of fabric

Tilt wand set as the default, with cord tilt only where a wand can't clear a handle or a return

Cordless lift specified in rooms that kids and pets actually use

Products specified to conform to ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 for cord access

Valance style and return depth chosen so an outside mount really closes off the sides

Factory deduction left with the manufacturer so the allowance never gets taken twice

Light gap per side written onto the paperwork before the order goes to the factory

Old blinds pulled, brackets removed, and every new unit tilted and lifted end to end before we leave

Pricing

What Faux Wood Blinds Cost in Franklin

National category figures put stock blinds and shades near $60 to $600 a window, with custom-fabricated units running roughly $250 to $2,600. Those are published national ranges for the category, not a quote for any address in Franklin. Faux wood lands low in that band, which is most of why people choose it. A 2 inch composite blind on an ordinary bathroom opening is inexpensive work. Price climbs when the opening gets wide, because weight is the real constraint here: a wide span wants a center support bracket or a two-on-one headrail, and both add parts and install time. Routeless slats, cloth tapes and a cordless lift each move the number as well. Franklin Window Treatments prices from measured openings around Johnson County, never from a per-window average.

By Product

How Faux Wood Blinds Differ by Product

Every product in this trade behaves differently in a room. Here is what that means for this work.

2 inch faux wood slat: The size most houses around here want, and the one we start from. It gives you a real view between open slats without the stack a wider slat builds at the top, and it stays flat across an ordinary bath or bedroom opening.

2 1/2 inch faux wood slat: Fewer slats over the same height, so the face reads cleaner and the open view improves. It also weighs more per running foot, which is exactly why we settle the span and the bracket plan before writing it onto a wide window.

Solid PVC slats: The least expensive construction we hang and the most waterproof. It's also the heaviest, and it's the one most willing to take a bow on hot glass, so we keep it to smaller openings and off the west wall in July.

Wood-polymer composite slats: Wood flour blended with polymer, stiffer and lighter than solid PVC at the same slat size. It costs a bit more and it holds a straight line better on a wide opening or a sunny one, so it's what we specify by default.

Routeless slats: The lift cord runs through a notch at the back edge instead of a hole punched through the face. With the blind closed there's no row of pinholes glowing at you across a dark bedroom. It costs more and it earns it there.

Cloth tape ladders: A woven tape that hides the route holes and lays a color band down the face of the blind. It changes the look more than anything else on the order, and it narrows the view slightly wherever a tape crosses a slat.

Cordless lift: A constant-force spring inside the headrail in place of a lift cord. It's what goes into rooms children use. On a heavy faux wood unit it wants a hand near each end of the bottom rail rather than one hand in the middle.

Tilt wand: A clear or color-matched wand that turns the tilt mechanism. Nothing hangs loose off the headrail, it clears a door handle better than a cord loop does, and it's the default we begin from on almost every faux wood job.

Center support bracket: An extra bracket carried under the middle of a long headrail. On a wide faux wood blind that bracket isn't decoration, it's what keeps the rail from taking a set and the slats from dragging harder on one side than the other.

Two-on-one headrail: Two blinds sharing a single continuous headrail across a wide opening, each with its own lift and tilt. It keeps each unit at a weight the brackets and your arm can manage, and the split position gets written on the order so nobody guesses.

Common Questions

Faux Wood Blinds FAQ

Questions we hear most often from Franklin homeowners considering faux wood blinds.

The wet ones, without much debate. Arbor Homes builds that community from 1,354 to 3,198 square feet with three to five bedrooms and two or three baths, so a mid size plan there has several rooms where steam sits for an hour after somebody showers. Franklin's muggy stretch runs from roughly May 25 to September 22, and that moisture is what cups a hardwood slat. PVC and composite ignore it. We generally put faux wood in the baths and the laundry, plus any kitchen run with a sink under the window, then keep real wood for the front rooms where the casing is stained and dry.
About six feet is where we stop trusting a single 2 inch PVC blind. The Kingsbridge 3-Car Venture series runs to 3,420 square feet with five and six bedroom plans, and openings in that plan set get wide enough to cross the line. Two options work. Split the opening into a pair of blinds sharing one continuous valance, which hides the joint and halves the load on each headrail. Or specify a composite slat, which is stiffer than hollow PVC, and add a center support bracket. We'll measure the opening and tell you which one the width actually calls for rather than guessing from a photo.
Sometimes, and the only way to know is to measure at the stop. Franklin built 837 homes in the 1960s, and a good number of them have since taken vinyl inserts into the original openings. That insert eats mounting depth in a way nobody can predict from the outside, and the loss is rarely even from one room to the next. So we check every window rather than measuring the living room and assuming the back bedroom matches. Where the depth falls short, we mount outside on the casing, which reads as a decision rather than a workaround and tightens the side gaps as well. Factory deduction on an inside mount is 1/16 inch per side.
Nearly, though not exactly, and the plan should account for it. Slats come off an extrusion line in batches and the whites wander from batch to batch, so a fresh blind set beside an older one carrying the same color name can look warmer or cooler. Sun makes it worse. On a Sugar Creek Heights front elevation, where every one of the 19 houses faces east or west onto South 600 East, two summers of direct light will have moved the older slats on their own. Put the new ones in another room and nobody will ever catch it. On the same wall, redo the wall as a set.
They're one of the few window coverings that survive turnover. Franklin has 3,288 renter occupied households against 6,302 owner occupied, an owner share of 65.7 percent that runs below Bargersville's 73.3 percent, and Franklin College is a large part of why. A PVC slat takes a wipe with a damp cloth and comes back. What wears is mechanical rather than material, the ladder strings and the tilt gear first, a cord lock later, and each is serviceable without scrapping the blind. Specify a cordless lift on every unit. Products conforming to ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 are the right baseline in any house where a tenant may bring small children.
Fit, mostly, and Franklin punishes a poor fit more than most towns because two different housing populations sit interleaved on the same streets. Nationally, standard stock shades run roughly $60 to $600 per window and custom work $250 to $2,600, and both are national ranges with nothing comparable published for Johnson County. A stock blind comes in fixed widths, so an installer cuts it down and you live with whatever gap the cut leaves. Custom is fabricated to your finished width. Lead time is typically two to five weeks, which is the real trade you're making.
Material, weight and where it belongs. Faux wood is either solid PVC or a wood-polymer composite, and neither one takes on moisture the way a wood slat does. That's the entire reason it exists. The tradeoff is weight. A faux wood slat is heavier per foot than basswood, so the same width that a wood blind handles on its own may need a center support bracket or a two-on-one headrail in faux wood. Across a room you'd struggle to tell a painted faux wood blind from a painted wood one.
No, and that's the specific job we buy them for. A composite or PVC slat has no wood fiber left to swell, so a bathroom running two showers a day doesn't move it, and steam off a stove doesn't either. That's why we put faux wood over sinks, in laundry rooms, in mudrooms and in finished basements in Franklin without hesitating. What can still happen is heat-driven bowing on a hot sunny window, which is a different failure with a different fix.
Solid PVC can, and you should hear that before you order. A slat sitting behind glass on a west or south elevation gets hot, and a heavy PVC slat that's warm along its whole length will slowly take a slight curve. Composite construction resists it much better because the polymer is stiffened with wood flour. So on a hot exposure we specify composite rather than solid PVC, we keep dark colors off the worst windows, and we suggest tilting the slats open on the hottest afternoons instead of closing them tight.
It depends on the maker, but the honest answer is that width isn't the limit, weight is. Every manufacturer publishes a maximum width and a maximum square footage, and faux wood hits the weight ceiling before wood does. Past a certain span a single headrail starts to settle in the middle, the slats stop lining up, and lifting the blind stops feeling good. Our usual move on a wide opening is either a center support bracket or two blinds on one continuous headrail, decided at the measure rather than after.
Solid PVC is exactly what it sounds like: extruded vinyl, cheapest, fully waterproof, heaviest and the most likely to bow under heat. Composite mixes wood flour into a polymer, which stiffens the slat and drops the weight, and it usually carries a better finish. Composite costs somewhat more. On small bath windows out of direct sun, PVC is honest value. On anything wide, tall or sunny, composite is the one that still looks right in five years, so that's where we spend the difference.
They do, and people notice it at night more than during the day. A standard slat has a hole punched through it for the lift cord, and with the blind closed those holes stack into a vertical line of small bright dots. In a living room nobody cares. In a bedroom facing a streetlight it becomes the thing you look at. Routeless construction moves the cord into a notch at the back edge, and cloth tapes hide the holes behind fabric. Either one solves it.
It isn't, and it's the disclosure worth having in writing. An inside mounted blind has to be narrower than the opening or it would bind against the trim, so the factory takes a small deduction and light comes in down each side. Lutron publishes 3/4 inch per side on their roller product as a real figure, and horizontal blinds behave similarly. If a bedroom in Franklin needs to be dark, an outside mount that overlaps the trim beats an inside mount every time.
They're heavy, which makes the lift choice matter more than it does on a light shade. We specify cordless in any room a child uses, meaning there's no lift cord anywhere on the product, which is the direction the ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 work on cord access points. Inner-cord non-compliance is treated as a substantial product hazard under 16 CFR 1120.3. If a window is wide enough that a cordless faux wood unit gets awkward to lift, that's an argument for splitting it, not for putting a cord back.
That's one of the better places for it. A basement in Johnson County sits cooler and damper than the rest of the house through the muggy stretch from late May into September, and that's the combination that moves a wood slat. Faux wood ignores it. The one thing we check is mounting depth, since basement openings are often shallow and a 2 inch headrail needs somewhere to sit. Where depth runs out we go to an outside mount or drop to a narrower slat.
More forgivingly than almost anything else we sell. Close the slats one way, run a duster or a vacuum brush across the face, then close them the other way and repeat. Marks come off with a damp cloth and mild soap, and unlike wood there's nothing to worry about with water. Don't soak the headrail, because the lift mechanism and the tilt gears inside it don't want to be wet. Cloth tapes need a gentler touch than the slats do.
Probably close, and possibly not exact. Faux wood slats are made in production runs, and white isn't one white. A blind ordered next spring can land a shade off from one hanging now, which nobody notices across a hallway and everybody notices on two windows in the same wall. The fix is simple if you plan for it: order every opening in a room at once, even the ones you're tempted to skip. We write the exact color name onto your paperwork so a future order starts from the right place.
Look at how wide the opening is and how much view you want when the blind is open. The 2 inch slat is our standard and it suits most openings in a Franklin house. The 2 1/2 inch slat puts fewer slats across the same height, so the face looks calmer and you see more out. It also adds weight, which pushes a wide window toward a support bracket. On a short window a wide slat can look heavy, so we scale it to the opening.
Custom fabrication generally runs two to five weeks, and faux wood usually sits at the shorter end of that because it's a high-volume product. Nothing about that window is a delay, it's a factory cutting slats to your measured sizes. You'll have the fabrication window in writing along with scope, dates and total price, which the Indiana Home Improvement Contract Act requires on residential work over $150. If a date shifts at the factory, you hear it from us the week we learn it.
They do something about both, and we won't overstate either. Closed slats put a solid layer between the room and the glass, and tilting them upward bounces afternoon sun toward the ceiling rather than onto the floor. That's real comfort, though it isn't insulation, and the documented energy testing in this trade sits with cellular shades rather than with blinds. On fading, NFRC puts UV at roughly 40 to 60 percent of the damage, so closing the slats slows fading on floors and furniture. It doesn't stop it.
Areas We Serve

Faux Wood Blinds Across Franklin

We measure and install in every one of these Franklin neighborhoods. Each has its own page with the build eras, window conditions and mounting notes for that section.

Related Services

Other Window Treatment Services in Franklin

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Contact Information

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Our team prioritizes scheduled measures and service calls, and books in-home measures during business hours.

Office
1417 Commerce Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46201
Hours
Mon-Fri 8a-6p
Service Area
Franklin, IN and Surrounding Areas

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Call us to set up an in-home measure, or to ask about a treatment that has stopped working. We will talk it through on the phone first.

Call (317) 999-5154
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