Blinds in Etobicoke

Two Etobicokes, and they want opposite things

There is no single answer to “what should I put on an Etobicoke window”, because the place contains two housing stocks that share nothing but a postcode.

Inland — Alderwood, parts of Rexdale, the streets around Islington — the buildings are post-war. Bungalows and back-splits from the late forties through the sixties, built with modest openings, generous wooden trim and deep reveals. The windows are small by modern standards and the woodwork around them is often the best thing in the room.

On the water — Mimico, Humber Bay Shores, New Toronto — a large share of what we measure was built in the last twenty years and is glass from the floor to the ceiling with a reveal you could not fit a finger into. There is no trim to work around because there is no trim.

The specification that suits one is close to the worst answer for the other, and almost every mistake we are called in to correct comes from applying the habits of one to a room in the other.

The tower window: depth decides before fabric does

In a Humber Bay unit, the first number we take is not the width. It is how deep the opening is front to back, because that number governs what can physically go there and everything else is preference.

The stack varies by product more than people expect. A plain roller needs the least room: a tube, a bracket, and a slim cassette if you want the roll hidden. A zebra needs noticeably more, because its fabric wraps the tube twice — the sheer and the solid pass each other, which is the whole trick, and passing takes space. A honeycomb folds flat and is surprisingly compact. A roman needs somewhere for the folds to pile.

Where the reveal is genuinely nothing — and in a fair number of these buildings it is — the blind does not go in the opening at all. It goes on the ceiling or on the bulkhead above it. That reads as deliberate rather than as a compromise, and it has a side benefit: mounted at the ceiling the blind covers the head of the glass, so the band of sky that would otherwise sit above the blind disappears.

The second constraint is the bulkhead itself. Many of these units have a drop or a duct running along the window wall, and it is rarely a consistent depth from one end to the other. We measure at both ends and in the middle rather than assuming the ceiling is level, because it usually is not by five or six millimetres, and five or six millimetres is a visible wedge of daylight across a wide unit.

What the water does to the light

People who move from an inland street to a unit on the water almost always under-specify the first blind they buy, and it is not their fault. The light is genuinely different and the difference is not obvious until it is your window.

Water reflects. On a clear afternoon, a south or west-facing unit above the fourth or fifth floor is lit twice: once by the sun and once by the surface of the lake throwing it back up. That second dose arrives from below the horizon line, which is exactly where a blind that has been lowered halfway is not covering.

The practical effect is that a screen chosen by openness factor for an inland living room reads as too open once it is in the air over the water. A five per cent screen that would be comfortable on a Kingsway street can be a two or three on the lakeshore. It is one of the few cases where we will tell somebody to go a step tighter than the number they arrived with.

The same reflection is why glare in these units peaks later in the day than people expect, and why a fixed answer — a blind that lives half down — usually fails. The problem moves.

The bungalow: the trim is the point

Inland the conversation reverses completely.

A 1954 bungalow in Alderwood has openings that are small relative to the room and a reveal that is deep because the walls are thick and the frames are wood. That deep reveal is a gift: it takes an inside mount comfortably, hides the headrail entirely, and leaves the woodwork doing what it was put there to do.

So the default here is inside, and it is chosen for the trim rather than for the blind. An outside mount over one of these windows covers the casing, and once the casing is covered the room loses the one detail that says when the house was built.

There are two exceptions and both are worth stating plainly. A bedroom that has to be genuinely dark cannot be done inside the opening — the clearance the blind needs to run is the same clearance the light comes through, and no fabric fixes a gap. In that room the blind comes outside and covers the trim, and the trade is a straight one: a dark room or visible woodwork, not both.

The other is an opening that has moved. Sixty and seventy-year-old houses settle, and on a window where the sill has dropped across its width a rigid bottom bar shows the drop as a widening line of daylight. We take both diagonals on anything that looks suspect, and if the opening is out of true we say so and mount outside, where the overlap hides what an inside mount would frame.

The Kingsway, and houses where the window is architecture

The Kingsway and the older streets near it are their own category. Larger houses, often with leaded or divided-light windows, mouldings that were expensive when they were new, and rooms designed around a particular window rather than the other way about.

The rule here is restraint. A window that is already doing something interesting does not need a blind that also does something interesting; it needs one that disappears when it is up and behaves when it is down. That usually means a plain fabric in a colour taken from the wall rather than from the fabric book, mounted where it interferes least.

It also means measuring the glass pattern before choosing a stack. On a window divided into panes, a roman that stacks over the top third hides one row of the division and looks like a mistake even though it is fitted perfectly. A roller that disappears into a slim cassette does not.

Balcony doors, and wind

A sliding door to a balcony is not a wide window and it should not be specified as one.

Three things separate them. The covering has to clear the opening completely — not mostly, completely — because a door that catches on a blind is a door people stop using properly. It has to survive being pushed past several times a day by people carrying things. And it has to tolerate the door being open, which in a tower on the water means wind.

That last one is the reason a beautiful fabric can be the wrong answer twelve storeys up. Anything loose enough to move will move constantly, and it will make noise doing it. Weighted vanes, a bottom bar with some mass in it, or a product that clears the opening entirely and gets out of the wind’s way are the honest options.

Where there is stack space on one side of the door, a vertical or a wide roller drawn to that side is the neatest result. Where there is not, the blind has to stack above, and that has to be planned rather than discovered.

Storm windows, and the extra sixty millimetres nobody mentions

The pre-war streets in Mimico, New Toronto and Long Branch have a feature that almost never comes up until somebody is standing at the window with a tape: a second layer of glazing on the outside of the original sash.

Some of it is genuine wooden storm sash that comes off in spring. More of it is triple-track aluminium fitted in the sixties and seventies, with a sliding storm pane and an insect screen sharing the same frame. Either way, it sits outboard of the window and it does two things to the specification.

It changes the depth you actually have. The reveal measured from the room looks generous, but the operable part of the window — the sash you need to reach past — may be set further out than you think, and a blind fitted to the full depth can end up in front of a latch you use twice a year and cannot get to.

And it changes what the window does with heat and condensation. A double-glazed unit behaves predictably. An original single pane with a storm outside it has a cold cavity between the two, and in February that cavity condenses. A heavy blind pulled tight against that window overnight traps the moisture rather than letting the room’s air move across the glass, and the sill pays for it over a few winters.

The answer is not a different fabric. It is leaving the blind standing slightly proud of the glass rather than sealed against it, and being honest that on those windows a full blackout with side channels is a trade against the sill rather than a free upgrade. On a bedroom that genuinely has to be dark it is still worth doing; we would just rather you knew which trade you were making.

Getting into a building without losing a fortnight

Most of the tower work here needs the same two pieces of paper before anyone arrives with tools: a certificate of insurance naming the corporation, and a booked service elevator. Neither is hard. Both take longer to arrange than the installation, which is why we begin them when the quote is written rather than the week of the fit.

Buildings on this stretch also tend to have opinions about what the window looks like from outside. White or off-white backing is the usual one, and it is almost never a real constraint because the ranges are built for it — the rule concerns the reverse face, not the side you live with.

Load-in windows are the third thing. On a building with no visitor parking and a single service lift, an arrival time is worth more than a four-hour range, and that is how we book it.

What the visit involves

A call back first, asking which rooms and what is wrong with them. Then a time.

At the window: three widths, three drops, cut to the tightest of the six. Reveal depth before any conversation about fabric. Both diagonals wherever the opening looks like it has moved, which inland is often and on the water is almost never. Obstructions written down — a crank handle, a deep sill, a duct running along the head.

Samples held against your own glass at roughly the hour the room misbehaves. On the lakeshore that means late afternoon, and it is worth arranging, because a fabric that looks right at eleven in the morning can be a stop too open at five.

Then a written quote with a line per opening, no deposit and no card.

The question we get asked most here

It is some version of: the unit came with blinds, are they any good?

In the towers, the answer is usually that they are fine mechanically and wrong specifically. Builder-supplied blinds in a condo are chosen once for every unit in the building, which means the same fabric faces north, south, east and west. The north-facing units got something too tight and the west-facing units got something far too open, and only one of those two groups notices — which is why the people who ring us are almost always on the west side.

In the bungalows, the answer is usually that they are old, corded, and mounted to the opening in a room that needed them mounted to the wall. The cords alone are worth dealing with if a child uses the room, and that is not a sales line: since 1 May 2021 a blind sold in Canada has had to meet limits on reachable cords, but the one already on your wall is exempt by age rather than by being safe.

Last updated 9 August 2026.