Blind installation in Toronto

The wall decides, not the blind

Every installation in this city comes down to one question asked at each window: what will actually hold a bracket here?

In a house built after about 1970 the answer is boring and consistent, which is why nobody thinks about it. In Toronto’s older housing it is different at nearly every opening, and it is the reason two identical blinds can take five minutes and forty minutes to hang in the same room.

Wooden lath and plaster. The standard interior of a pre-war Toronto house. Horizontal strips of wood with plaster pushed through the gaps to key it in place. It looks and sounds solid and it will not hold a loaded bracket: lath is thin, it splits along the grain, and a screw into it works loose over a season of a blind being pulled. A bracket in lath is a bracket that will be back on the floor.

The window’s own frame. In these houses the timber around the opening is substantial, often four or five centimetres of solid wood, and it is the best fixing available. This is one of several reasons an inside mount is so often right in an old house: the frame is right there and it will hold anything.

Studs. Present above the window, but not always where you want them and not always where a stud finder says, because a hundred years of alterations means noggins, patched openings and old nailing in odd places.

Brick. Behind the plaster on an exterior wall in a solid-masonry house. It holds extremely well with the right anchor and it is unforgiving of the wrong one — a plastic plug in old soft brick crumbles the hole and gives you nothing.

A steel lintel. Over some window openings, particularly where a wall has been altered. You find it when the drill stops. It is not a problem, it is a different bit and a different fixing, and it is one of the things that turns a ten-minute window into a twenty-five-minute one.

Knowing which of those you have takes about ninety seconds of knocking, probing and, where needed, a very small pilot hole in a place that will be covered. That is what the first part of an installation actually is.

What a bad fixing looks like a year later

Worth describing, because these are the faults we are called out to correct, and they are all installation faults rather than product faults.

The sagging end. One bracket into timber, one into plaster. The plaster side gradually pulls out under the weight and the blind hangs a few millimetres low at one end. Nobody notices for months and then cannot stop noticing.

The blind that has torn out entirely. Almost always a heavy blackout or a wide blind hung on plasterboard anchors that were rated for a picture frame.

The crack radiating from the screw. Old plaster is brittle. A screw driven without a pilot hole, or overtightened, starts a hairline crack that opens over a winter of the house moving.

The blind that fouls the sash. The fixing was fine; the position was decided without opening the window. In a house where the sashes still work this is the most annoying of the five, because the blind is perfect and the window is now unusable.

The one that is level with the ceiling instead of level. In a house that has settled, plumb and parallel-to-the-ceiling are different things, and picking the wrong reference means a blind that reads crooked in a room where everything else is crooked in the same direction. This one is a judgement call and it is made at the window: usually you level to the eye’s reference, which is the window itself.

Condos and towers, where the wall is easy and the building is not

Below Bloor, along the waterfront and up the Yonge corridor the fixing question mostly disappears. Concrete ceilings and slab edges take a masonry anchor and hold better than anything in a Victorian. Steel stud partitions need the stud, but they are regular and predictable.

What replaces it is access and rules, and both are settled before installation day rather than on it.

Most corporations want a certificate of insurance naming them before anyone comes up with tools, and most want the service elevator booked. Neither is difficult and both take longer to arrange than the fitting itself.

Many buildings also specify what the window may look like from outside. That is a rule about the backing rather than the room-side fabric, and it is in a declaration somebody has to actually read.

The two things that genuinely slow a tower installation are a bulkhead that turns out not to be structural — a light frame around a duct will not carry a wide blind — and a ceiling that is out of level along a long glazed wall, which over four metres is often five or six millimetres and shows as a wedge of daylight at the head.

The order of work in a renovation

We fit into a good number of Toronto renovations and the sequencing question comes up every time, so here it is plainly.

Measure after the windows and the trim are in. Not before. A measurement taken against a rough opening is a measurement against something that no longer exists once the casing goes on, and the reveal depth — which decides what product is possible — does not exist at all until the trim is fitted.

Measure before the floors go down, if you can, but confirm the finished floor height. A floor-length product’s drop changes by the thickness of the flooring plus the underlay, and that is easily fifteen or twenty millimetres.

Fit after painting. Always. Brackets fitted first get painted around, which looks like what it is, or get taken off and refitted, which puts two sets of holes in fresh plaster.

Fit after flooring. Both because of the drop and because an installation drops small metal things, and a new floor is the worst possible surface to find that out on.

The common mistake is ordering blinds early to hit a move-in date and having them arrive before the trim does. Blinds are quick to make relative to a renovation; there is very rarely a reason to measure early, and there is always a reason not to.

Not putting screws through the good woodwork

On a house where the trim is the reason somebody bought it, this is worth stating as a policy rather than leaving to the day.

The order of preference for a fixing on a window with original casing:

Inside the reveal, into the frame. The screws are invisible once the blind is up, the frame holds better than anything else available, and the casing is untouched.

Onto the wall above the casing. Where an outside mount is needed — a blackout, or an opening that is out of square — the brackets go into the wall above the moulding rather than through it. This needs a fixing that will hold in whatever is up there, which brings us back to the first section.

Through the casing. Only where there is genuinely nothing else, and only after saying so. It is sometimes the right answer on a window where the frame is soft with age and the wall above is hollow, but it should be a decision you made rather than one you discover.

Where a window has original glass in lead came or an old putty rebate, nothing gets fixed to the frame around the panel itself.

What you can do before we arrive

Small things that make a difference in an older house, none of them essential.

Clear about a metre in front of each window. Not the whole room — just enough for a step ladder to stand level, which in a room with a sloping floor is worth checking.

Say which sashes still open. It changes bracket positions and it is the one thing that cannot be seen from a closed window.

Point at anything you already know is odd: a wall that sounds hollow, a window that has been re-framed, a spot where a previous blind pulled out. All three change the approach and all three save time.

If a radiator sits under the window, we will already be planning around it, but a word about whether it still works and how hot it gets is useful.

Semis, and the wall you are drilling near

Half the older housing in the old city is semi-detached, and the party wall changes one thing about installation that nobody mentions until it happens.

Sound carries. A hammer drill into a shared masonry wall is loud on the other side in a way it is not through a stud partition. Where the window sits close to the party wall — which in a narrow semi is most of the front rooms — we knock next door first if anybody is home, and we do the noisy fixings in one go rather than spread across an afternoon. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a neighbour who shrugs and one who does not.

The party wall is often the soundest fixing in the room. Solid masonry, no cavity, and it takes an anchor properly. On a window whose outer edge is close to it, running the bracket into that wall rather than into the outside wall is frequently the better engineering as well as the quieter option — the exterior wall of a Toronto semi is the one that has taken a century of weather.

Settlement is asymmetric across it. The two halves of a semi have often had different work done underneath them — one side underpinned, one not — so a window on the party-wall side of the house can be measurably further out of true than an identical window on the open side. It is worth checking both diagonals on every front window in a semi rather than measuring one and assuming its twin.

And the twin house is a preview. Where the neighbouring half has already had blinds fitted, the same openings have already been solved once. Looking at what is there — how it was mounted, whether the trim survived, where the brackets went — is thirty seconds that occasionally saves an hour.

What we leave behind

The blinds hung, operated once in front of you, and the offcuts and packaging taken away rather than left in the recycling.

A written note of what fabric and mechanism went where, which matters in a house where you may want a matching blind in another room two years from now.

And the honest bit: if a window did not go the way we wanted — an opening too far out of true for the mount we chose, a fixing that had to move — you hear about it before we leave rather than noticing it yourself in a fortnight.

Last updated 9 August 2026.