Custom Blinds & Shades in Burlington, NC

The old streets follow the railroad, not the compass. The National Register nomination for the South Broad–East Fifth Streets district notes that the grid runs about forty-five degrees off north. That matters more than it sounds. A front room you assume faces south may be catching the late sun at an angle, so we check the wall with a compass before choosing between a solar fabric and a denser one.

South Broad–East Fifth itself filled in from the 1890s into the 1940s. Its 1920s bungalows carry Craftsman sash with three, four, or six panes over a single lower pane, and a few are faced in stone veneer. Those upper panes are worth keeping in view. A top-down/bottom-up cellular shade closes off the lower sash for privacy and leaves the divided glass above it open.

East Davis Street lies a few blocks east of downtown. Its houses date from the 1880s to about 1950, and the street put business owners and doctors next to mill workers, so a large house and a small one often share a block. Several of its Queen Annes, the Stafford-Moore House among them, have polygonal bays. We treat a bay as separate windows that happen to meet. Each face gets its own width, and at the measure we decide whether the headrails butt together in the corners or stop just short.

West Davis Street–Fountain Place was listed in 1984. It is mostly Queen Anne and Colonial Revival houses from the late 1800s and early 1900s, built for middle-class families. North of downtown, the Lakeside Mills district keeps a one-story brick mill from the 1890s and sixteen frame houses from its village. Rooms in cottages that size fill up quickly. One fitted shade per window keeps them open, where a shade layered under drapery would crowd the wall.

Past that older ring the housing gets newer. Openings there are square and tend to repeat in size, so the measure goes quickly and a whole-house order is simple to price.