Hellobee Boards

I've tried both. In my parents' house I bought and installed all the window treatments except the living room, which has a huge room-width window. They had custom curtains made for that one, and the store sent someone to install them. It's worked well until recently, and then one of the attachments broke and it turned out the installer used some kind of bizarre, unstable-looking attachment system... I'm surprised it didn't break sooner, and it took me and DH half an hour to wrestle it back into place. I'd rather have done it myself to start with!

My place is a different story. I don't know what's wrong with the window walls, but the concrete is really hard and we don't have the tools to get anything through it. We asked the electrician who was doing our lighting to install the curtain rods too, and very glad we did - there is no way we would have done it on our own. (And I don't think he used the weird screws my parents have!)

We got cordless blackout cellular shades for our whole house from americanblinds.com. We've had them up for about 18 months and no complaints! Measuring was a bit tedious b/c they wanted 6 measurements taken per window if I recall correctly, but each unit fits its window exactly as it should. We had no issues installing ourselves. There were 2-3 brackets per window, and then the shade just snapped right in.

@Foodnerd81: My other thought would be use. Are you going to raise lower these daily or do you think they’ll stay one way most of the time? We don’t raise/lower our blinds very much so I guess I can’t speak to their durability really. But I think $600 would be enough of a savings to take the gamble.

we've purchased roller and roman shades for every window in our house from blinds.com in the last two years and i've been super happy with their customer service and their products. some options are better than others as we're learning, but they have a 100% satisfaction guarantee and they're always running sales. super easy to install too.