Started off by reading the instructions, which were as bad as such things usually are. Not in a very sensible order. Schizophrenic about which way around the thing should be hung, there being a total of four permutations: roller in, roller out, shiny side in and shiny side out. Very particular about measurements, quoted in millimetres - which was all very well, but the width of the opening varied by more than a centimetre front to back. The opening was, however, rectangular and level, which was something. No diagram about how the blind was intended to fit in the hole.
Cut a few inches off a garden cane to make a measuring stick, more or less the width of the opening.
Mark up the blind and cut it down to size, 35mm less than the width, rather than the 33mm suggested. The top pole hacksaw cut was a bit crooked & ragged and needed the attention of a file to true it up. Cut the fabric 5mm narrower than the top pole, rather than the 2mm suggested. Not confident that the blind would roll true enough for 2mm to suffice.
After deep thought, jam the right hand bracket, the one that is just an axle and does not contain the chain assembly, into the top right hand corner of the window opening. Fix it.
Jam the left hand bracket into the top left hand corner of the window opening. Fix it.
To my relief, the blind fitted and worked. The left hand fixture being a lot easier to manage than the corresponding fixture on the Argos cousin.
Rolling not quite true. But nothing like as bad as the Argos cousin in this regard and, seemingly, within the tolerance I had allowed.
A slight sag in the middle, maybe 2-3mm, and it would have been more had we used the full width of the blind supplied. Major design changes indicated should one want to blind up an opening of 12 feet rather than one of 4 feet.
Wondered about the pale horizontal stripes in the bottom foot or so of the blind. Maybe it had got creased up somewhere along the way - not by me - and it was going to take a few days for them to hang out again.
Set aside the child protection machinery. That is to say a special bracket to corral the chain and stop a child choking on the thing. A special bracket which would make raising and lowering the blind a little more awkward than it is already - the chain needing to be pulled from the right angle.
We shall see how long this one lasts. IKEA years. Argos months. John Lewis?
Careful search of the documentation and packaging reveals admission that the blind was made in China. We wondered about the instructions. Were they just rubbish because John Lewis is no keener than anyone else on spending money on writing decent instructions? Or because they were translated from the Chinese by some professional translator who knows all about ancient Chinese literature but nothing about kitchen blinds? I remember from my time at the European Commission, that translators who are not specialists have a hard time with specialist material. And BH is acquainted with a home working translator who reports much the same thing.
About two hours start to finish. A fiddly sort of business, but one which would get a lot quicker and easier with practise - practise which one does not get. And I was glad that I had a wooden window frame to hang the thing off. Don't know about hollow plastic window frames, but I do know that I would have found fixing into masonry a lot more fiddly - and error prone - than fixing into wood.
PS: there was a time when people had much sport with the quality of the instructions which came with complicated government forms, like census forms and tax forms. Certainly these instructions have got much better, but perhaps people have also realised that private sector instructions are usually worse and that it is really quite hard to write good instructions, instructions that work for everyone. There is also the point that at the time our road was built, the sort of people who lived in it would not have dreamed of hanging their own blinds. That was what people who lived in other roads did for you. Professionals. At the very least, craftsmen.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/diy-episode-one.html.
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