Custom Shutters, Shades & Blinds in Fruitland, ID

The fastest-growing town at this end of the state

Fruitland went from 4,684 people in 2010 to 6,072 in 2020 — a 29.6 percent gain — and the 2023 estimate puts it at about 6,879. By the standards of western Payette County that is a boom.

Growth like that means one thing for our trade: a steady supply of houses with nothing on the windows. A new build arrives with builder-grade blinds or with bare glass, and a bare window is a privacy problem on day one and a heat problem by July.

New-home builders active in Fruitland include Agile Homes and Homes of Idaho, and we fit custom window coverings to any of their floor plans. If you are closing on a new house, the time to measure is before the furniture arrives.

Three large employers inside one small town

Fruitland is unusual for its size: the payroll is in the town, not a commute away.

• Swire Coca-Cola — roughly 500 workers.
• Woodgrain — roughly 300.
• Dickinson Frozen Foods — roughly 250, processing onions and bell peppers year-round.

That is over a thousand jobs in a town of about six thousand people. Add the Snake River Correctional Institution across the Oregon line — Oregon’s largest prison, about 900 employees, a short drive from here — and you have a town where a great many households are on a shift schedule. The Census Bureau bundles this county with Ontario into a single Ontario, OR–ID Micropolitan Statistical Area, which is the official way of saying one labor market.

Why a blinds company is telling you this: plants and prisons run around the clock, and somebody who sleeps during the day needs a window that actually goes dark. An ordinary shade leaks light at the top, down both sides and through the slats. What works is a blackout fabric fitted to close those gaps — which is a measuring job, not a catalog choice. If anyone in your house sleeps days, say so at the appointment and we will treat that room differently from the rest.

What we install in Fruitland

Two housing stocks, two completely different jobs

The new half. Subdivisions going in around the edges of town, with the window set that comes with modern construction: larger openings, taller great-room glass, sliding patio doors, and west-facing rooms with nothing on the horizon to block a July afternoon. Out here, with few trees and open ground, a west room can be noticeably warmer than the rest of the house by six o’clock. That is a job for a solar roller shade or a cellular shade, not a color decision. And tall glass is the reason people ask about motorization — it is out of reach, not just inconvenient.

The orchard-era half. What we find in older houses in these towns is consistent: aluminum window frames, a lot of original older windows, and some genuinely old wood blinds.

Aluminum conducts heat, which is why an aluminum frame feels like the weather outside in February and is usually the first surface in the house to show condensation. An insulating covering earns more on that window than anywhere else in the building.

And an orchard-era house has settled — a quarter inch out of square at one corner, three-eighths at another. Put a stock-size blind in it and the strip of daylight down the edge will bother you for years. Every window gets measured individually, and we do that part ourselves: not from a plan, not from a photograph, not from numbers somebody else wrote down.

Old wood blinds are generally past saving. Dry, bright Idaho sun bows the slats and makes the cords brittle; the real question becomes what goes in instead.

What tends to go in out here

Beyond the valley the work runs mostly to faux wood blinds, roller shades and Roman shades, plus blackout shades for the day sleepers, cellular shades for winter, and exterior sun shades for a patio that takes the afternoon.

Faux wood handles heat and dry air without the warping real wood can show. Roller shades in a solar fabric cut glare and heat while leaving the view of the orchards and the river bottoms. Roman shades soften a room full of hard light. Cellular shades trap air in their pockets — the same principle a double-pane window uses — which is what you want against cold glass in January.

Shutters look beautiful in a Fruitland home, orchard-era or brand-new, and choosing them is a matter of personal style, not a matter of what kind of house you own.

Yes, we drive out to Fruitland

Fifty miles each way does not worry us.

Troy and Angela answer the phone. The two of us do the measuring ourselves — not a measuring service, not an app, not an estimate from photographs. Our team measures, quotes and installs every job, and you deal with the same two people from the first call to the last bracket.

The driving is not something we put up with. It is how we have built relationships with the people we work for. Going the extra mile is the job.

And there is never a charge for the estimate. Not in Fruitland, not anywhere else we go.