They're also easy for the kitties to destroy. I used to live in a place
with vertical blinds, and the cats thought they were kitty toys. They would
chew on them!

Yeah, that happens here too. They get all bent and won't lie flat anymore!
You can't win.

The cords are also the "safe" single strand (non-looped) kind, but as
someone else wrote, they get all tangled and are effectively looped. I
need to put nails or something to wrap them around high up.

Joyce

I got vertical blinds thinking they'd be better from the critter point of
view. I'm not sure if that was the right choice. They can't climb the
verticals, but both Fluffy & Shmogg have destroyed the cord at the bottom of
the blinds that keeps them together and keeps the weights in, and my blinds
no longer sit straight. Ever. They also brush past & through them so that
they've pulled the individual slats down and broken the slat holder thingy.
And on the back door, where the blinds were opened and closed the most (ie,
moved tot he side so you could go through, not turned so that they let teh
sunlight in), Fluffy decided to have a fight with one, and instead of
breaking off like the others, it ruined the opening and closing mechanism.

Efectively instead of having functional vertical blinds, we just have
extra-wide "fly curtains" on our windows.

The only blind that is still in full working condition (although the trim
got pulledd off my Shmogg years ago) is the normal every day roll-up blind
in the kitchen. I'd be very happy to replace the vertical blinds in two of
the bedrooms, the bathroom and toilet with the roll-up blind, but inthe
master bedroom, laundry, lounge and dining room, the windows start at floor
level, meaning that the roll-up blind is impractical.

In the end I think we'll just have to shell out the extra money and get real
curtains, both lace and heavy, over those windows.  I still have no idea
what to do about the sliding glass back door though. Most of the time its a
window, but every so often, it needs to be a door. How do you get curtains
to do that? The vertical blinds were ideal, rolling blinds and venetians
certainly wouldn't work, and curtains there would look weird.

Whoever designed my house needs to be shot, IMHO. Even I could do better
than that, and my only experience with designing houses is living inthem and
realising which designs work and which are mind bogglingly silly. (Like
making the north facin (ie sun facing) wall virtually all glass, it
sometimes gets up to 50C in the kitchen in summer, and thats before I"ve
started to cook anything)

Yowie