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An honest comparison

DIY or professional blinds in Albury?

We fit blinds for a living and we are still going to tell you when DIY is the right call. It genuinely is, on some windows. On others it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with your skill with a drill.

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When DIY is genuinely the right answer.

If you have a modern home in one of the newer estates around Thurgoona, Hamilton Valley or Baranduda, your openings were made in a factory in the last twenty years and they are square. A standard-size blind will fit a standard-size opening, the reveals are clean, the architraves are solid, and a careful person with a level and a drill will get a result that looks fine. Add a single spare bedroom or a laundry window and DIY is comfortably the sensible choice. We are not going to pretend otherwise to win a $150 job. Where it falls down is not effort or competence. It is the openings themselves.

The Albury problem: half our housing is not square.

Albury has a lot of genuinely old housing, and the central and eastern streets are full of it. Walk into a 1920s or 1930s home around East Albury and measure a window opening at the top, the middle and the bottom. It is common to find 8mm or 10mm of difference across those three numbers, because the house has moved on reactive Riverina clay soils for a century and the timber has done what timber does. This is the single biggest reason DIY blinds disappoint here. Order to the widest measurement and the blind jams. Order to the narrowest and you get a permanent light gap down one side that you will notice every single morning. A made-to-measure blind is built to the narrowest dimension with the fabric sized to the opening, which is a decision made at the measure, not at the drill.

The cut-down trap.

Most cheap online blinds ship in standard widths with instructions to trim them at home. That process shortens the tube and the bottom rail but leaves the original brackets and clutch geometry, and the result is a blind that telescopes to one side as it rolls, so it climbs out of true a little more each time. It is not something you can adjust out afterwards. If you can find an online blind that fits your opening without trimming, the $60 to $150 per window is a real saving against $120 to $320 made-to-measure. If you cannot, you are buying a blind that will irritate you for a decade to save a hundred dollars once.

The four mistakes we get called out to fix.

  • Brackets into bare plasterboard. A roller blind levers hard on its brackets. Anchors let go eventually, usually with a chunk of wall. Fix into architrave, reveal or a stud.
  • Ordered to the wrong one of three widths. The jam-or-light-gap problem. Unfixable after the fact.
  • Inside mount with no roll clearance. The fabric roll needs depth. Fitted too tight in the reveal and it rubs the glass or the reveal edge.
  • Brackets not level with each other. Out by 2mm and the blind tracks sideways. It looks like a fabric fault and it is not.

The line you legally cannot cross.

Hardwiring a blind motor into your mains supply is electrical work, and in NSW that has to be done by a licensed electrician working to AS/NZS 3000. Doing it yourself is unlawful, and if something later goes wrong in that part of the house your insurer will take a keen interest in who did the work. Battery and plug-in motorised blinds are a different matter and you can fit those yourself all day. The other legal point applies to everyone: any corded internal window covering has to comply with the Competition and Consumer (Corded Internal Window Coverings) Safety Standard 2014, which means the chain cannot form a reachable loop and a tensioner has to be mechanically fixed to the wall or architrave. That is an installer obligation, and if you are the installer, it is yours. There is more on blind cord safety.

Worked example: the honest maths on a Lavington house.

Nine windows in a 1990s Lavington brick veneer, openings mostly square. At 2026 rates the DIY route is nine online blinds at $60 to $150 each, so $540 to $1,350, plus a weekend, plus whatever you get wrong. Made-to-measure route: $2,400 to $4,500 supplied and installed, per our Albury cost guide. That gap is real and we are not going to talk you out of it if budget is the constraint. But run the same maths on a heritage home with out-of-square openings and it inverts: the DIY blinds hang badly from day one, they cannot be fixed, and you replace them in three years having spent the money twice.

A sensible middle path.

You do not have to pick one lane for the whole house. Plenty of Albury homeowners DIY the easy square openings, the laundry, the spare room, the small bathroom window, and get the hard ones done properly: the big living-room span, the out-of-square heritage frontage, the tall stairwell window, and anything with a motor in it. That is a genuinely good strategy and it is what several of us have done in our own homes. If you want a hand deciding which windows are which, a free measure costs you nothing and we will tell you honestly which ones you could do yourself.

Old housing and new estates

Where we measure.

The older the suburb, the more likely the openings have moved. That is the main thing we are checking for at a measure, and it is why the older AlburyCity suburbs behave so differently to the newer estates north and east of them, or across the Murray in the City of Wodonga.

East Albury West Albury Lavington Thurgoona Wodonga Albury CBD North Albury South Albury Glenroy Springdale Heights Hamilton Valley Wirlinga Splitters Creek Baranduda West Wodonga Jindera

Frequently asked questions.

Can I just measure and fit blinds myself?
On a modern square opening in a newer Thurgoona or Hamilton Valley estate home, yes, and we will say so plainly. A drill, a level and a careful tape measure will get you a decent result. Where DIY reliably goes wrong is older Albury housing, because those openings are rarely square. Measure the width at the top, middle and bottom of a 1920s East Albury opening and you can easily find 10mm of difference, and a blind ordered to the wrong one of those three numbers either jams or leaks light down one side forever.
Are online blinds actually cheaper?
Per window, yes: roughly $60 to $150 against $120 to $320 for made-to-measure. The catch is that most cheap online blinds ship in standard widths and get cut down at home. A trimmed blind runs a shortened tube in the original brackets, which is why they telescope to one side and roll up crooked. If the blind fits your opening without trimming and the opening is square, the saving is real. If either of those is untrue, you have bought a blind that will annoy you daily for years.
What is the most common DIY blind mistake?
Fixing brackets into bare plasterboard. A roller blind puts real leverage on its brackets every time it is pulled, and a plasterboard anchor will eventually let go, usually taking a chunk of wall with it. Brackets need to land in the timber architrave, the window reveal or a stud. The second most common is ordering to the widest of three measurements on an out-of-square opening, and the third is mounting inside a reveal without allowing clearance for the fabric roll.
Is there DIY work that is actually illegal?
Yes. Hardwiring a blind motor into your mains is electrical work, and in NSW that must be done by a licensed electrician to AS/NZS 3000. Doing it yourself is unlawful and will void your insurance. Battery and plug-in motors are fine to install yourself. Separately, any corded blind you install must meet the Competition and Consumer (Corded Internal Window Coverings) Safety Standard 2014, including a tensioner fixed to the wall. That obligation applies to the installer, and it applies to you if that installer is you.
Will you install blinds I bought somewhere else?
We would rather quote the job properly, and here is the honest reason. When we fit a blind we made to your opening, we own the whole result. When we hang a blind someone else sized to a standard width for an opening it does not match, we own a problem we did not create, and the blind will still hang badly because the fault was in the measurement, not the installation. If you have already bought them, tell us in the form and we will give you a straight answer either way.

Not sure which windows are worth doing yourself?

A free measure costs nothing and we will tell you honestly which ones you could handle.

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