How To Shorten Window Blinds | Stoneside

By: Natalie Elmhurst

Updated: 4/16/2025

If you’ve ever bought a set of ready-made wood or faux wood blinds for your home, you know how frustrating it can be to install them and find out they are too long for your window. Because these types of blinds are usually manufactured to fit standard window sizes only, this happens more often than you may think. Rather than take them back to the store, you may want to figure out how to shorten blinds to make them fit your space.

Shortening window blinds can be done, but it is a painstaking process that requires attention to detail. If you miss a step or don’t get exact measurements for your window, then your blinds will be ruined, and all your efforts will be for nothing. In essence, shortening blinds requires you to remove some of the slats, so when the blind is fully extended, it doesn’t hang past the window sill. However, if you remove too many slats, the blind won’t function properly. So if the blinds are excessively long and you have to remove anything more than 6 to 20 slats (depending on the slat measurement), it’s not worth trying to fix them.

Details may vary depending on the manufacturer of your window treatment, but generally, you will be taking apart some of the blinds’ components to remove the slats. Once you have measured your window (starting from where the blinds will be mounted and ending at the sill), lay the blind on a flat surface and determine how many slats need to be removed to accommodate your window measurements. (It can be helpful to mark what will be your bottom slat so that you don’t lose track of how many need to be removed later on.)

Next, look at the very bottom of your blinds. This is called the rail, and there are some buttons or plugs to hold the string ladders and lift cord in place. You need to remove those buttons and untie the cords so that you can slide off the excess slats. Once you have the desired length, put the bottom rail back in place and run the cord and string ladders back through. You’ll also have to retie the string ladders after trimming them to match the blinds’ new length. Finally, you can gently hammer the buttons back in place on the rail to finish the job. This work requires a deft touch and a steady hand to avoid running into mishaps, such as an unevenly hung bottom rail, marks where you reinserted the plugs, or an accidentally cut inner cord (which basically destroys the blind).

It’s important to note that this process refers to blinds with horizontal slats. If you want to know how to shorten vertical blinds, that job may seem even more laborious. With these window treatments, each vertical slat must be carefully measured and cut so that they are all even with each other. If the material on your vertical blinds looks a little ragged where you made the cuts, you will have to sand it down to get a smoothly finished edge.

There is, however, one foolproof way to get the right fit without shortening window blinds at all: Invest in custom blinds that are tailored to the precise measurements of your windows. At Stoneside, we handcraft all of our blinds according to each customer’s specifications. To ensure top quality, we closely monitor all projects to ensure accuracy, and our in-house technicians provide white-glove installation service. All you have to do is select your ideal blinds, and we take care of the rest.