What do you have in your living room and/or dining room?

I like to keep those areas a little more formal...at our old house we had narrow white blinds (privacy) and then long curtains with a formal cornice (padded wooden thingie in the same fabric as the drapes) at the top. I could raise the blinds and they'd completely disappear up top under the cornice if I wanted to do that.

Anyhow, here at our new house we have lace. And it's UGLY! I can't wait to get rid of it but Dh and I are not really agreeing on what we want. He wants to leave the windows bare and although there are shrubs near the front of our house, I am downstairs often in my underwear! LOL!

I really am into those bamboo shades lately and I want to use those in a roman shade style. Dh thinks it will be too dark but I can raise them! *sigh* I have some light blue silk drapery panels that I'd like to use too...I just think the contrast of the silk and the bamboo will be so pretty...

In our living room we are getting ready to change out the plastic blinds for the 2" faux wood ones. I am thinking of taking those down though for a more clean look in there.
I have the bamboo blinds in my bedroom and I like them b/c they dont need to be dusted!

We have mini blinds with valances through out our whole house. They were here when we moved in. They are okay.

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If you can do it, shutters are great. Living in AZ, they help a lot. We got the wood ones. They are pricey - we did ours room by room, but we really like them and would do it again.

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In our dinning room that is part of the kitchen we have a slidingdoor and that has solor mesh panels. I sun is on that side of the house all day in the summer ( the floor gets hot) and in the living room we have blinds and then curtains (sheers) over them. we only have blinds becuase it faces the road that is a little busy and the window is 5 ft wide.

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We have white mini blinds in all of our rooms. Most of our rooms have valances; two rooms just have the mini blinds only.

I have really long windows so I don't think shutters would look very good on those. I can't do long curtains because my dd would be playing "Here Comes The Bride" with them all the time.

The windows facing the street and our bedroom window have vertical blinds. You can now get panels that attach to the vertical blinds that make them look like shear curtains.

The problem with using bamboo for privacy is you can totally see through them from the street. We have bamboo shades plus white sheers in our dining room.

I like the idea of the panel-track shades. They are about 18" wide and can be retracted to the side to let in light. They will lend a much more modern feel to your room than the lace panels and there are lots of colors and textures to go with the silk.

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We had white plantation shutters on all our windows when we bought the house, but are slowly replacing them as they are wearing out. Yesterday I bought blackout cellular shades for my kids rooms. We have them in our bedroom and love them. I am going to then slowly, due to expense, replace the rest of the house (kitchen, dining, living, great room, playroom) windows with cellular shades, too. I love them!! We have curtains on a few windows, but some do not have any.

I like the simple look of cellular and the energy efficiency, too.

I had no idea what blackout shades were - but these are EXACTLY what I've been desperately looking for to put in DS's room! At $60, we'll have to save up a little while, but thank you for mentioning these.

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We have shutters in the bedrooms, dining room and kitchen. In the dr and kt, they have valances over them. I'd like something a little softer looking in the bedrooms, but the shutters do block out light wonderfully. The living room has roman shades.