A little shade and privacy

A few times a year the request comes my way to install outdoor solar roller shades. As the name implies, they offer a bit of shade from the intense afternoon sunshine and allow the enjoyment of a westerly facing porches and decks.

For this installation yesterday, an idea from the homeowner was tried. Normally with the off-of-the-shelf solar roller shades, from companies like Coolaroo, there is at least a four inch gap between the shades if they are butted end-to-end. In the case of this porch, the off-of-the-shelf solar roller shades would have had larger gaps due to there being no combination that would perfectly fill the openings. Custom roller shades were considered, but they would have been very expensive. The homeowners idea was to overlap longer roller shades to fit the opening, so that’s what was done.

I try to always mount solar roller shades on the inside side of the beam at the top of the opening. I feel that the shades are better protected from the elements when not in use. This really would not work with this idea, so the roller shades were mounted to the underside. For the sake of consistency, the shades were re-worked so that they all had the shade material hems to the outside and the handle attachment points were also move to the outside edges of the openings.

Once installed, the idea eliminated those strips of sunlight that can come through the gap between two solar shades. Each shade was rolled the same way so that they could be rolled tightly up to the underside of the beam and not hit the railing when fully lowered. Along with the added shade to the deck, there is now also a bit of privacy… at least visually, so commenting about the neighbors still needs to be kept to a low roar.