Wooden Blinds Buying Guide

How To Pick The Perfect Wooden Blind

Wooden blinds are a stylish shading choice for any home, our wooden blinds offer a superb level of light control, rugged durability, great functionality and of course the timeless look that comes when you use wood in your home’s décor.

All of our wooden and faux wood blinds here at DotcomBlinds are made from the highest quality materials and made with expert craftsmanship, meaning you can rest assured that your new wooden blinds will be absolutely top notch.

We offer both real wood blinds and faux wood blinds, which means we can cater to a wide range of customer needs, both in terms of budget and functionality. While real wood blinds will always have a look of class to them, our faux wood blinds are an excellent imitation and for most people, the difference between real wood and faux wood blinds is almost imperceptible!

Real Wood Blinds vs Faux Wood Blinds

Here at DotcomBlinds, we offer two main varieties of wooden venetian blinds: our real wood venetian blinds and our faux wood venetian blinds.

The main difference between the two types of wood blinds we offer is the material the slats are made from, with our real wood blinds having slats made from 100% real wood (obviously) and our faux wood blinds having their slats made from moulded plastic with a wood-style finish.

There are of course more differences between our real wood blinds and our faux wood blinds, but most are subtle and not incredibly important to most people, however if you’d like to take a deeper dive into the differences between real wood and faux wood blinds, we have a blog covering that very topic here!

To show you just how similar our real wood and faux wood blinds truly are, we’ve included two pictures below, the one of on the left is an up-close look at one of our white faux wood blinds and on the right, one of our white real wood blinds.

As you can see, the white real wood blind and white faux wood blind look practically identical and you’d need a trained eye to spot any differences between the two.

Smooth Slats vs Textured Slats

If you’re looking at our range of faux wood venetian blinds, you will have noticed that we offer two types of slats for our faux woods: textured slats and smooth slats.

Our textured faux wood slats have been moulded with a wood grain texture into the plastic, which imitates the look, feel and style of a real wood slat. Textured slats are ideal if you’re looking to create a timeless rustic vibe in your windows.

Whereas our smooth faux wood slats are completely smooth on the surface, with no texture or grooves on them at all. Our smooth slats are ideal for creating a sleek modern or minimalist look in your home’s windows.

To see the difference in look between our textured and smooth faux wood slats, see the pictures below of our Alabaster Textured Faux Wood Blind (left) and our Alabaster Smooth Faux Wood (right).

As you can see the textured blind on the left-hand side has a wood grain effect and appears to be made from real wood, whereas the smooth blind on the right-hand side has a smooth finish with no texture at all.

Choose A Colour That Fits Your Décor

Picking the finish colour for your blind is one of the most important parts of selecting a wooden blind. Choosing the right colour can be the difference between a blind that looks ‘good’ and one that looks ‘great’.

It helps to look at the rest of the décor in the room you’ll be adding the blind to – If you have a lot of white in your room’s décor scheme, then you may want to choose a white blind to complement the existing décor, or a darker colour to create contrast.

To be sure in your choice of colour, we recommend that you order some free samples before making a buying decision, so that you can see the colour of the slats in person and see how it looks with the existing décor in your home.

While we have a lot of colour options for our wooden venetian blinds, they can be broke down into three main types: light wood (white and off-white colours), medium wood (browns, natural wood and grey colours) and dark wood (dark brown, dark grey and black colours).

Light Wood Blinds

Medium Wood Blinds

Dark Wood Blinds

What Sized Slats Do You Want?

We offer multiple slat sizes on our real wood and faux wood blinds, with a choice between having a 35mm slat or a 50mm slat. While the size difference may not seem extreme, the size of your slat will change how the blind looks and it’s impact on your home’s décor.

The larger 50mm slat is quite chunky, which works well in sleek modern décor schemes when paired with a light finish, while also being able to create a rustic feel when paired with natural wood colours – These thicker slats will also block out more light than thinner versions.

The smaller 35mm slat on the other hand is quite slender, working well to create an understated look where your venetian blinds are part of your home’s décor and not the main focus – These thinner slats will allow more light into your home than their thicker counterparts.

Do You Want Privacy Tapes On Your Blind?

On most of our wooden blinds, we offer the option to add on privacy tapes to the blind. Privacy tapes are a coloured strip of fabric that runs up the blind’s ladders, covering the holes in the slats where the strings are threaded.

Privacy tapes provide two main benefits:

-By covering up any holes in the blind’s slats, the use of a privacy tape when your blind is closed, ensures that passers-by cannot see into your home.

-Using privacy tapes also reduces the amount of light entering your home, preventing any light from leaking in through any holes on the blind.

Privacy tapes beyond their practical benefits, can be very stylish so you may want to add them to your blinds entirely for the look they create.

On all our blinds with privacy tapes, we have selected specific privacy tapes for each blind, ensuring that the colours are expertly paired and will create a stylish look in your windows.

Inspire White Textured Fauxwood with or without privacy tapes

Ebony Real Wood Venetian with or without privacy tapes

What Other Features Should You Look For?

We also offer some other key features across our range of wood and faux wood blinds, which you may find desirable for your new set of blinds. When shopping in our wood blinds category, you can filter the selection with the ‘Shop by Feature’ button to see blinds with certain features – Or look at the features section of the individual product page to see what features that specific blind has.

The other features we offer for our wooden blinds are…

Wipe Clean Slats: This feature means that the blind’s slats will be made with a wipe-clean material, meaning they can be easily cleaned with a dry cloth for removing dust and debris, or a damp cloth for removing stains.

Fire Retardancy: This feature means that the slats and hardware of the blind have been made with fire retardant materials or coating, which will remove the risk of your blinds catching alight in the case of a fire.

Moisture Resistance: This feature means that the slats and hardware of the blind are made with water resistant materials, preventing the blind from being damaged by exposure to water or developing rot in moist environments such as bathrooms.

How To Measure Your Windows For Wooden Blinds?

Here at DotcomBlinds we have made our measuring instructions as simple as they can possibly be to ensure that all of our customers can easily get accurate measurements for their blinds.

All you will need is a measuring tape and somewhere to note down the measurements for the window – All in all, it shouldn’t take more than a minute or so per window to get your measurements.

You can view our simple measuring instructions for Venetian Blinds online here!

How To Install Wooden Blinds?

Our customers come from all walks of life, all with their own level of DIY experience, of course this means we have some expert customers who could put up their new wooden blind in their sleep, but also we have some other customers for whom this is their first DIY project – So to keep things on a level playing field, we have made the installation of our blinds to be a simple and quick process.

All you will need to install your new wood or faux wood blinds is a power drill, a screwdriver, a spirit level, a pencil, as well as some screws and wall plugs.

We have separate instructions for installing both our faux wood blinds and real wood blinds, while we will send you instructions with your new blinds, you can find our installation instructions online – You can find the installation instructions for our real wood blinds here and you can find the installation instructions for our faux wood blinds here.

How To Operate Your New Wood Venetian Blind?

Venetian blinds seem quite simple to operate, but many people struggle with using them correctly, often causing frustration for the user. There are two main ways you can operate your new wood blind, firstly you can open and close the blinds, secondly you can also rotate the slats.

To open and close the blind, you will need to pull the cords of the blinds on the right-hand side of the blind. If your blind is closed, the slats will bunch together to open the blinds when you pull the cords, whereas if your blind is open, pulling the cords will cause the slats to relax and spread apart closing the blind.

To rotate the slats on your wood blind, you will need to pull the cord on the left-hand side of the blind. Moving this cord will rotate the slats of the blind, allowing you to adjust how much light you let in through your window.

For more information on operating your new wood venetian blind, you can check out this blog post which looks at how to operate a venetian blind.

How To Maintain Your New Wooden Blinds?

Once you have your new wood blinds installed on your window, you’ll want to ensure that it is well maintained so that it stays looking and working excellently for the longest possible time.

For day-to-day use, it is important that you aren’t overly rough with your new venetian blinds, as by harshly tugging the cords you can cause the blind’s strings to fray or for them to get tangled, making it harder to operate the blind.

For cleaning, we recommend that you can your blind every few months to remove dust and debris from the blind’s slats, an uncleaned buildup of dust and debris can add extra weight to the slats of the blinds, potentially making it harder to operate the blinds – We have a blinds cleaning guide here, that you can reference to see how to clean your wooden and faux wood blinds.

If you have your wood venetian blind installed in a damp environment such as a bathroom, it is important that you ensure that no parts of the blind are ever in sitting water, even blinds with the water-resistant feature. While our water-resistant blinds can survive a bit of wetness, they may still be damaged by being overexposed to water for too long.

Where To Order Your New Wooden Blinds?

If you’ve finished reading this buying guide, and are thinking to yourself “Great, now it’s time to buy a wooden blind” you’re in the right place!

We have over 100 options for our real wood and faux wood venetian blinds for you to choose from and you can browse our entire range of real wood and faux wood blinds here.

Once you’re on our wooden blinds page, all you need to do is select whatever blind in the range takes your fancy, enter your measurements, select a slat size (if available) and choose whether you want the blind exact fit or recess fit – From there just head to the checkout page to finish placing your order.

How Quickly Can My Wooden Blinds Be Made?

We list the lead time for our real wood and faux wood venetian blinds on each individual blind’s product page, with lead times changing depending on stock and popularity of each blind – many of the blinds can be made on quick turnarounds of 3-5 working days*, others may be on a longer turnaround of up to 15 working days*

We can also offer our Same Day Priority Dispatch service on a select range of our faux wood blinds for a cost of £19.95* - On this service, when placing your order before 11am on a workday we make the blind in our factory and dispatch it to our courier the same day you place your order – More often than not these orders are delivered to your door the next working day, but we cannot guarantee a next day delivery.

You can view all of our blinds available on a Same Day Priority Dispatch service here.

*at time of writing 13/06/2023

Frequently Asked Questions

In this final section of our buyers guide for wooden venetian blinds, we’ll quickly look at some frequently asked questions to do with our real wood and faux wood blinds.

Do wooden blinds keep heat in? Yes, both our real wood venetian blinds and our faux wood venetian blinds will provide some level of insulation when closed (more so when privacy tapes are used) which will help trap heat inside and keep your home warm during the Winter.

Will wooden blinds keep my home cool?  Yes, as we mentioned previously our real wood and faux wood venetian blinds will create a layer of insulation over your window (more so when privacy tapes are used) which will help prevent the sunlight from warming your home up during the Summer and keep your home cool.

Do wooden blinds reduce noise? Yes, as the blinds provide a layer of insulation, they will help to dampen noise from the outside world from entering your home. However, incredibly loud outside noises may still be heard even when using a wooden blind.

Do real wood blinds warp? So long as you use your real wood blind in an appropriate space, you should have no issues with your wooden blinds warping. However, if the blinds are installed in an inappropriate space such as non-water-resistant blind being used in a bathroom or mishandled, they may experience some warping.

Do faux wood blinds warp? Our faux wood blinds should not warp from typical day to day use and in the majority of cases they will never warp. However, in some unusual scenarios like a prolonged extreme heatwave over 40°C we cannot guarantee they won’t warp.

Do faux wood blinds fade? Unfortunately, over time prolonged exposure to sunlight may cause the colour of your faux wood blinds to fade, especially in South facing windows, however this will happen slowly over a number of years, by the time you notice any fading, it would be time to replace your blind anyway.

Anything Else?

Hopefully, we should have answered every question you could possibly have in regards to our real and faux wood venetian blinds, but if you still have a burning question that we haven’t answered in this buyers guide get in contact with a member of our customer service team today by emailing [email protected] or calling on 0800 1422417.