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Cleaning Tips for Shutters and Blinds

Hunter Douglas Luminette

If you’ve recently bought a new set of window shutters or blinds, then you know that you want to keep them looking good no matter what conditions life and living might put them through. What might be more interesting is the fact that overall, cleaning and maintaining your shutters and blinds is not as difficult as many might think, and does not take long if you only need to do it only intermittently. When it comes to cleaning your shutters and blinds, the material can mean different things for how you can go about cleaning them. Aluminum and Vinyl blinds are able to get wet, allowing you to ‘bathe’ them if they get grimy, or covered in muck. Composite and natural wood shutters and blinds though, should never get really wet. You can wipe them down with a moist cloth, but it should never go beyond that.

The most important method of cleaning that will keep your shutters and blinds looking fresh and new is a regular dusting. Outside of exceptional circumstances, like dirty pets or children running into them, the most interior window treatments will ever need is a thorough dusting. There are a couple of methods to picking up all the fragments and granules that rest on your window treatments. You can find many different types of feather dusters in grocery and convenience stores near you, but if you want to clean fast and dirty, all you really need is a sock and your hand. Just like making sock puppets in our childhood, use your hand in the sock to wipe down the flat surface of one side of the blind or shutter, then twist the window treatment to show the other side and repeat. There are specialty tools available to clean window treatments on the market, but overall, a clean sock you don’t mind getting dirty or a standard feather duster will work perfectly. Of course, if you have a brush attachment for your vacuum, you can always use that. Vacuuming your shutters and blinds requires them to be fully flat, as closed as possible when you begin, else you won’t get the best coverage when cleaning. When you are done with one side, simply turn the shutter around, or twist the blind until the reverse side is flat and repeat the process. Dusting is the best regular method for cleaning any kind of shutter, from aluminum vertical blinds, to composite wood shutters, to natural wood blinds.

When a set of window treatments gets more than dust and dirt on them does it become a bit more complicated. Wood and composite wood should never get wet, so washing them with soap and water is right out. They will soak in the water and warp, bend, and crack, which would ruin them completely. When shutters and blinds made from wood, faux or real, do get truly dirty, use furniture polish or lemon oil with a cloth in order to clean them, as well as keep their shine and gleam up. If the stain or soiled spot is harder to clean, add detergent to a damp face cloth and scrub the window treatment, then wipe off all excess moisture with a dry face cloth afterwards. Finally, when working with aluminum blinds, vertical or otherwise, you can use soap and water and spot clean the areas which are an issue. Be sure not bend the metal accidentally while you clean.