Pleated Shades

Pleated Shades in Franklin, IN

The honest budget shade, with no air pocket

Call (317) 999-5154Get Free Quote
Quick Answer

A quick summary before the details: this is a made-to-order product, measured in the home and built to your numbers. The answers here explain what that means for pricing, timing and what happens if something fails.

  • Service: Pleated Shades for Franklin homeowners
  • Service area: Franklin, IN and surrounding areas
    • Nothing in window treatments needs a middle-of-the-night call-out. What matters is the fabrication window, typically two to five weeks. Service and repair work sits outside that and gets handled on a much shorter timeline.
  • Insured and bonded
  • Serving Franklin, IN since 2008
Pleated Shades Services

Expert Pleated Shades for Franklin Homes

A pleated shade is a single layer of creased fabric on a headrail, and it's the right product in rooms where a honeycomb is more than the job needs. Franklin has more of those rooms than the towns around it, because 3,288 of the city's 9,590 households are renter occupied, which puts owner occupancy at 65.7 percent, well under Bargersville's 73.3 percent. McCarty's Lakehurst shows the other case: 25 parcels on just two streets, South Lakehurst Drive and South Lakeview Drive, carrying 12 to 18 openings a house. Covering that many windows well means spending where it counts instead of everywhere.

The disclosure on a pleated shade fits in one sentence: there's no trapped air pocket, so it doesn't insulate the way a cellular does. Testing at DOE and Oak Ridge credited cellular shades with up to 20 percent of heating energy saved, and up to 15 percent of the total heating and cooling load, measured against a bare window. That belongs to the honeycomb geometry rather than to pleated fabric. In IECC Climate Zone 5A, where January averages a low of 20.9 degrees and July a high of 85.2, the difference is real on an exposed elevation. Pleats also relax over years, so the crease loses definition, and the cord holes let pinpricks of light through.

When to Call

Signs You Need Pleated Shades

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.

Temporary paper shades have been up for two years

Two white shades in one room don't match at all

An arched window has never been covered

A house is going on the market and looks unfinished

A bonus room over the garage bakes in the afternoon

Trim is too shallow for a deeper headrail

The cord lock has to be reset every single morning

Route holes glow in a line after dark

The shade creeps down an inch overnight, every night

Cheap stock shades were cut to the nearest inch

Our Process

How Franklin Window Treatments Handles Pleated Shades

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

1

Three widths, three heights, diagonal

2

Full travel run twice per unit

3

Room sorted by what it actually needs

4

Specialty shapes templated on site

5

Cleaning limits explained at handover

Real Project Photos

Pleated Shades in Franklin

Photographs from real pleated shades 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 Pleated Shades Includes

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

The energy question answered honestly up front: a pleated shade is one layer of fabric with no cell behind it

Rooms steered to cellular instead wherever trapped air is the actual reason for the purchase

Rooms where pleated is the right call identified plainly, from secondary bedrooms to offices to a rental turnover

Pleat size set against the opening, a fine pleat on short glass and a larger pleat where the drop can carry it

Fabric opacity settled in writing before the order, light filtering against room darkening

Reflective backing considered on hard west and south exposures, described as what it is rather than as an energy rating

Three widths and three heights per opening with a diagonal check for square

Mounting depth read so the headrail sits inside the opening where an inside mount is what you want

Stack at the top measured against the glass, since a stacked pleated shade still covers the top few inches

Cordless lift specified in rooms children use, with products conforming to ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 for cord access

Route holes disclosed on any corded unit, because a closed pleated shade shows those holes as a line of small bright dots

Light gap per side written onto the paperwork, along with the 1/16 inch per side factory deduction Lutron publishes

Top-down bottom-up priced where a room wants daylight high and cover low

Arched, angled and fan-shaped openings templated on site, since pleated fabric is what those get built from

Wide spans reviewed for headrail deflection and split into two units where that is the right answer

Every opening in a room ordered on one purchase so the fabric comes off the same run

The paperwork done properly, with IC 24-5-11 requiring scope, dates and total price on residential jobs over $150

Bottom rail leveled and full travel run twice at every unit before we pack up

Pricing

What Pleated Shades Cost in Franklin

National category figures put stock shades near $60 to $600 a window and custom-fabricated shades roughly $250 to $2,600. Those are published national ranges, not a price for any opening in Franklin. Pleated sits low in the custom band and that is the honest appeal of it. One layer of fabric, a light headrail and a simple lift add up to less than a double cell shade with a blackout fabric and two lift systems. Where the number climbs is the same place it climbs on everything: width, drop, a room darkening fabric, a cordless lift on a heavy unit, or a templated arch that somebody has to build to a pattern. Franklin Window Treatments prices from measured openings across Johnson County rather than from a per-window average.

By Product

How Pleated Shades Differ by Product

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

1 inch pleat: The standard and the one most rooms get. It holds a crisp horizontal line at ordinary window heights, it stacks small at the top, and it keeps the scale right on the bedroom and office windows this product usually goes into.

Fine pleat: A smaller fold for short windows, transoms and specialty shapes. More folds across the same drop means a finer face, and it's what a small arch or a narrow sidelight needs so the shape doesn't look coarse.

2 inch pleat: A larger fold that suits tall glass and big rooms, where a fine pleat across a long drop starts to read as texture rather than as a line. Fewer folds also means a slightly smaller stack for the same height.

Light filtering fabric: The everyday specification. Diffused daylight comes through, the view does not, and the room stays bright. It's the fabric that suits an office, a stairwell or any bedroom where waking up with the sun isn't a problem.

Room darkening fabric: A denser fabric that cuts most light through the face. It gets a bedroom dim rather than dark, since a pleated shade doesn't seal at the edges and an inside mount still passes light down both sides.

Reflective backing: A metallized back face that bounces some of the sun striking the shade back at the glass. It's a real property of the fabric and it's not an energy rating, and we describe it that way rather than putting a number on it.

Cordless spring lift: A spring lift with no operating cord on the product, and the version we specify in any room a child uses. It also removes the route holes from the conversation, since there's no lift cord passing through the fabric.

Corded lift with a cord lock: The traditional and least expensive control. The lift cord runs through holes punched in the pleats, which is exactly where a closed shade shows a vertical line of small bright dots at night. Worth knowing before you save the money.

Top-down bottom-up: Two rails on one shade, so the top can drop for daylight while the bottom stays up against a sidewalk. It adds a second lift system and its own hardware, which is where much of the extra cost comes from.

Fixed arch and angle-top units: A half-round, a quarter-round or an angled top built to a site template and left fixed. Pleated fabric is what these get made from, because a pleated fan holds its shape where a rolling product simply can't follow the geometry.

Light Control

See What Each Fabric Does To The Light

Pick a fabric below and the window updates. It's a drawing rather than a photograph, so read it as a rough guide to what each family does in a Franklin room, and to what it doesn't do.

Fabric type

Sheer, 10 percent openness

Ten percent of the weave is open, so you keep the view and most of the daylight. Glare drops a little. After dark, once your lamps are on, someone outside can read shapes through it, which is why this belongs on a view window rather than a bedroom.

Openness factor is printed on the fabric card, so you can compare one line against another before you order anything.

Keeps the viewNot private after dark

Solar, 5 percent openness

The usual pick for a west window or a covered porch. You can still read the yard through it, glare comes down noticeably, and the fabric intercepts a good share of the sun before it reaches you at four in the afternoon.

It also cuts the UV landing on floors and furniture. NFRC puts UV at roughly 40 to 60 percent of fading damage, so this slows fading rather than stopping it.

View and glare controlSlows fading

Solar, 3 percent openness

A tighter weave. The room goes dimmer and the view drops back to an outline. Choose it where the sun is the problem and the view is second, which around here usually means a west wall in July. That's a common call on this side of Indianapolis.

Openness affects how much you see out, not how private you are. A 3 percent fabric still shows silhouettes at night.

View becomes an outlineStrong glare control

Solar, 1 percent openness

Close to a solid fabric with a little view left in it. This is the strongest glare control in the solar family.

The trade is that it darkens the room on a gray January day too. Indianapolis averages a January high near 36F and the light is flat, so think about how the room reads in both seasons before you commit.

Darkest solar optionDim on gray days

Light filtering

No view through it. Daylight comes through the face diffused, so the room stays bright without a hot spot across the television or the kitchen island. This is the default for living spaces.

It isn't private in reverse at night. With the lamps on and the sun down, silhouettes still show.

No view through itBright without the glare

Room darkening

A denser fabric, usually with a liner behind it. Most of the light coming through the face is gone.

Light still arrives around the edges on an inside mount, so a room darkening shade gives you a dim room rather than a dark one. If someone in the house sleeps during the day, say so at the measure and we'll scope it differently.

Dim, not darkEdges stay bright

Blackout

The fabric itself passes essentially no light. What you'll still see is the perimeter. Lutron publishes an inside-mount light gap of about 3/4 inch per side on its Roller 20 and 64 shades, along with a standard factory deduction of 1/16 inch per side, and shades over 120 inches tall or past a 4:1 height-to-width ratio get larger gaps than that.

So if you need a genuinely dark bedroom, that gap has to be dealt with on purpose, either with side channels or by going outside mount. We tell you which one your opening can carry while we're still standing in the room.

Dark facePerimeter needs a plan

Openness factor is a measured fabric spec, so you can compare it line to line. The category names are not measured. One maker's room darkening can behave like another maker's light filtering, which is why the sample books come to the measure and get opened in the room they're going in, at the hour that room has the problem.

Common Questions

Pleated Shades FAQ

Questions we hear most often from Franklin homeowners considering pleated shades.

The ones where nobody sits for long. A laundry, a hallway landing, a spare bedroom used twice a year or a basement window all want privacy and light control without the cost of a honeycomb. The rooms worth spending on are the occupied ones on an exposed elevation. Sugar Creek Heights is the clean example, where all 19 parcels front South 600 East and every front room takes direct morning or afternoon sun. That's a cellular room. Franklin's housing stock is bimodal and so are most window covering budgets, and putting the money where the exposure is beats spreading it evenly across the schedule.
Enough to matter across a whole house, and less than people expect on one window. The published national spread puts stock shades at roughly $60 to $600 per window and custom fabrication at $250 to $2,600, and no equivalent Johnson County figure exists. Pleated sits at the lower end of custom for a given size, because it's one layer of fabric rather than a insured cell. On a McCarty's Lakehurst house with 12 to 18 openings, the difference across the whole schedule is real money. On the three front windows you look at daily, it's small enough that the honeycomb usually wins.
Because the lift cord has to pass through the fabric. A standard pleated shade is lifted by cords running through holes punched at each pleat, and those holes read as a vertical line of pinpricks when the shade is down and the sun is on the glass. It's a design characteristic rather than a defect, and it shows most on a dark fabric with hard direct light behind it, which describes an east or west front elevation in Southbrook off South Mauxferry Road. Cordless lift removes the interior cord path and most of the effect with it. If a room genuinely needs to be dark, this isn't the product for it.
Better than you'd think on price and worse than a blind on abuse. The fabric can't be scrubbed, so a stain is usually permanent, and a hard yank on the hem creases a pleat that never fully recovers. What makes them work in rental use is replacement cost, since a single pleated shade is cheap enough to swap between tenants rather than repair. With 3,288 renter occupied households in this city and Franklin College feeding much of that, owners here tend to spec for replacement rather than for longevity. Specify cordless on every unit, because products conforming to ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 are the baseline where children may be present.
Slowly, and sun accelerates it. The crease is heat set into the fabric at the factory, and years of raising and lowering plus years of UV soften that memory, so an old pleated shade hangs with less definition than a new one and the bottom pleats sag first. NFRC attributes 40 to 60 percent of fading damage to UV, and the same energy works on the crease. On a west facing opening in one of the 954 homes Franklin added in the 2010s, expect the shade on that elevation to age visibly faster than the same shade on the north side of the house. Nothing prevents it and a liner slows it.
It can, as a fixed fan shaped piece rather than something that operates. Half round and quarter round transoms and palladian gable assemblies are documented across Franklin's post-1990 stock, and a pleated fan fits the shape for far less than shaped shutter millwork. What you're accepting is that the fan doesn't move, so it covers the transom permanently and gives you no light control up there. Our usual advice is to leave the transom open and treat the rectangle below it, since the shape is generally why the elevation looks the way it does. If glare off that transom lands on a screen, the fan earns its place.
Structure. A pleated shade is a single layer of fabric folded into pleats, so when you look at the edge you see one accordion. A cellular shade is two layers joined so the folds form closed cells, and when you look at the edge you see honeycombs with air inside them. That trapped air is the entire point of a cellular shade. A pleated shade doesn't have it, which is why it costs less and why we don't make an energy argument for it.
Not the way a cellular does, and we won't pretend otherwise. Any fabric between you and cold glass in a Franklin January does something, since it slows the air movement at the window and takes the edge off a draft you can feel from the couch. What it doesn't have is the trapped air pocket. The DOE and ORNL testing that gets quoted in this trade, up to 20 percent heating energy savings and up to 15 percent of total heating and cooling energy, was done on cellular shades. If that number is why you're buying, buy cellular.
When the room needs a good-looking shade rather than an energy product. Secondary bedrooms, home offices, hallways, a bonus room over a garage, a rental between tenants, a house being prepared for sale. All of those want something that fits the opening properly and costs sensibly. Pleated does that. It's also the right answer on arched and angled openings where no other product follows the shape, and that has nothing to do with budget.
Mostly, and they do soften. A pleated shade holds its folds because the fabric was heat-set at the factory, and that set relaxes slowly, faster on a hot window than on a shaded one. After several years on a west-facing Franklin window you may see the folds sit slightly less sharp than they did, particularly at the bottom of the shade where it spends most of its life stacked. A cellular shade holds its shape longer because the cells brace each other. That's a real difference worth knowing.
Because the lift cord runs through holes punched in the fabric. On a corded pleated shade, each pleat has a small hole for the cord to pass through, and with the shade down those holes stack into a vertical line of bright dots that you notice at night and barely see during the day. It's construction, not damage. Cordless lift removes them entirely, since there's no cord passing through the fabric, and that's one of the better reasons to spend the difference.
In any room a child or a pet uses, yes, and we specify it that way. There's no operating cord on the product at all, which is the direction the ANSI/WCMA A100.1-2022 work on cord access points, and inner-cord non-compliance is treated as a substantial product hazard under 16 CFR 1120.3. On a pleated shade there's a second benefit, which is the route holes disappearing. The tradeoff is cost and the fact that a wide unit wants a hand at each end of the bottom rail rather than one in the middle.
Dim, not dark, and the reason is the edges rather than the fabric. A room darkening pleated fabric blocks most of the light through its face. What it can't do is close the gap down each side of an inside mount, and Lutron publishes 3/4 inch per side as a real inside-mount figure on their roller product to give you a sense of the scale. For a genuinely dark bedroom the answer is an outside mount with real overlap, or a blackout fabric running in side channels, which is a different product.
Yes, and pleated is usually what those get built from. A half-round over a front door, a quarter-round in a stairwell, an angled top following a vaulted ceiling: all of them get a site template, and the shade is fabricated as a fixed fan to that pattern. Fixed means it doesn't operate, which surprises people, so we say it early. If the shape has to move, the honest answer is often a movable shade below the straight line and a fixed unit above it.
Less than most products, and not nothing. A raised pleated shade gathers into a compact stack at the headrail, smaller than a double cell shade of the same height and much smaller than a woven natural. On a tall window that stack is a couple of inches of glass. On a short window it's a bigger share of the view, which is why we measure the drop and tell you where the bottom rail will actually sit when the shade is fully up.
Dust them and leave them alone otherwise. A vacuum on low with a brush head across the face, or a soft duster run along the folds, handles routine dirt. Spot marks come off with a barely damp cloth blotted, never rubbed hard, because the fabric is thin and the heat-set folds don't like being worked. Don't submerge them, and don't use a steamer on them. Fabric that has been soaked tends to come back with soft folds that never recover their line.
Reasonably, with the usual honesty about the exposure. A west or south window in Johnson County takes real sun from late May into September, and a light colored pleated fabric there will soften in color over the years more than the same fabric on a north window. A reflective backing helps the fabric itself and improves how the shade looks from the street, since all the shades read the same color from outside. On the room behind it, NFRC puts UV at roughly 40 to 60 percent of fading damage, so the shade slows what happens to your floors. It doesn't end it.
Wide enough for most rooms, with weight and headrail deflection as the limits. Pleated fabric is light, so the fabric itself isn't the constraint. What matters is the headrail across a long span and the way a wide bottom rail behaves when you lift it from one end. Past the point where a single unit gets awkward, two shades sharing an opening reads better than one that drags. We work that out at the measure rather than after the box arrives.
Close, and possibly not exact. Pleated fabrics run in dye lots, so a shade woven this year can sit slightly off one woven three years ago. Across a hallway nobody sees it. On two windows in the same wall everybody does. The practical advice is to do a room in one order, even the small window you were going to skip. We write the fabric name and color onto your paperwork so a later order at least starts from the right reference.
Two to five weeks is the normal custom fabrication window, and pleated usually sits at the shorter end because it's a simple build. Templated arches and angle tops run longer, since somebody is making a one-off to your pattern. The window goes into your paperwork along with the scope, the dates and the total price, which the Indiana Home Improvement Contract Act requires on residential work over $150.
Areas We Serve

Pleated Shades 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

Franklin Window Treatments handles the full scope of window treatment work. Explore our other services below.

Faux Wood Blinds in Franklin

PVC where Johnson County humidity would ruin hardwood

Learn more →

Wood Blinds in Franklin

Stain that answers 1850s casing, not a paint chip

Learn more →

Vertical Blinds in Franklin

One pull clears a rear patio door

Learn more →
Free In-Home Measure

Schedule Your Free In-Home Measure in Franklin

Contact Information

Reach Us Directly

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

Ready to Book Your Measure?

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
Service area

Serving Franklin and the surrounding area

Call NowGet Quote