When not to DIY your blinds: the honest list

1. Bay windows and corner windows

A bay is three or more blinds pretending to be one window. Each face needs its own measure, the angles decide how the blinds meet at the corners, and every millimetre of error arrives at the junctions, where it shows twice. Get the sequencing wrong and the blinds foul each other; get the gaps wrong and the bay leaks light at every joint. A professional measures a bay as a set and orders it as a set, and that is genuinely the skill you're paying for.

The tell you're here: more than one wall of glass meeting at an angle, anywhere in the room.

2. Reveals that are properly out of square

A few millimetres of lean is character, and face fit hides it. A reveal where the diagonals disagree by a finger width is a different animal: a rolled blind in that opening will gap at one corner no matter how well you measure, because the blind is square and the hole isn't. Terraces around Cooks Hill and the older weatherboards through Hamilton, Islington and Mayfield produce these openings reliably, and they often bring friends: sashes that stick, sills that fall away, reveals that taper front to back. The right answer is someone who measures leaning windows every week and knows which product and fit absorbs the lean, and that diagnosis is exactly what a free in-home measure is for.

3. Motorised blinds

The brochure says convenience; the install says power supply, charging access, motor pairing, weight limits per tube, and a remake if the blind was a whisker out because a motorised tube can't be trimmed on the bench. If it's hard-wired, an electrician is legally required for the wiring, full stop. Motorisation is a genuinely good product for high windows and big spans, which is precisely why it belongs with the people who install it weekly. This is the strongest "done for you" recommendation on the site.

4. Very wide spans and high glass

Past about 2400 mm, a roller stops being a one-person object: the tube deflects under its own weight, bracket alignment becomes surgical, and the fabric telegraphs every compromise as a wander or a ripple. High glass, stairwell voids and two-storey windows add ladder work at heights where a wobble costs more than any blind. The step ladder in our install guide is the honest ceiling; past it, the risk isn't pride, it's plaster and collarbones.

5. The whole-house batch

Twenty windows into a new place at Fletcher or Chisholm, post-handover, every one of them bare. The measuring is not twenty times harder than one window; it's twenty chances at the same mistakes, and one wrong number in a batch order is a remake you fund yourself. Run the risk maths like the manual would: your error rate has to be near zero across sixty width measurements, sixty drops and twenty forms, on a week when you're also moving house. A professional measure turns that whole risk column into someone else's responsibility, on a job where the quote is free anyway. Do the two easy singles yourself for the satisfaction; hand over the batch. Our new-estate guide covers this fork in detail.

6. Anything structural, wet or electrical

Rotten reveals, crumbling brick, windows with active leaks, and any blind that needs wiring: each adds a trade to what looked like a blind job. Fix the substrate first, or let the measure visit spot it, because a bracket in rotten timber is a blind on the floor by spring.

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The maths, stated once

Every job above shares the same shape: the cost of a professional measure is a visit and a conversation, and the quote that follows is free and without obligation. The cost of getting it wrong yourself is a made-to-measure product that fits nothing else in the world, plus the Saturday, plus doing it all again. On easy windows that trade favours you, which is why most of this site teaches you to take it. On these six it doesn't, which is why this page exists.