Lake home, cabin, rental or year-round house — we come to McCall, and the in-home estimate is free. We answer the phone and we do the measuring ourselves.
That is not an opinion. McCall has 3,707 housing units and 2,077 of them sit vacant — a 56 percent vacancy rate. In most Idaho towns the figure is under ten.
It is the single most important fact about window coverings here, and it changes almost everything:
A page that treats a McCall cabin like a Meridian subdivision house is a page written by somebody who has not been up there.
McCall sits at 5,030 feet on the south shore of Payette Lake — nearly five thousand acres of glacier-carved water. Which means the light does something here it does not do in the valley. It comes down out of a thin, high-altitude sky, and then it comes back up off the lake in summer and off 132 inches of annual snow in winter. Snow cover holds from about the third week of November into early April.
Fading is faster than people expect. Reflected light reaches the parts of a room that direct light never touches — the underside of a sill, the back of a sofa, the ceiling. It is why a lake-facing room can look sun-tired in five years.
Winter glare is real glare. A bluebird February morning over frozen Payette Lake, low sun, white ground — that is a lot of light coming through a big window at eye level.
And the same wall of glass that frames the view is losing heat all night long when it is well below freezing outside. A covering here is doing two jobs at once, and nobody up here wants it to do them by blocking the view. That tension is the actual design problem in McCall.
Thomas and Louisa McCall arrived in 1889 and traded a team of horses for a cabin and the land rights that came with it. The town incorporated on 19 July 1911.
For the first half of its life this was a timber town. Then tourism arrived — the Shore Lodge opened in 1948 — and when the mill finally closed in 1977 the lake had already become the economy. The year-round population is only 3,686, up from 2,991 in 2010, while the summer and ski-season population is a multiple of that. Brundage Mountain is just up the road, and the Winter Carnival comes round every year.
What holds the town together year-round is St. Luke’s McCall and the U.S. Forest Service smokejumper base — real jobs, real full-time households, real year-round houses that are nothing like the cabins.
So McCall is three housing markets stacked on one lake: year-round homes, second homes, and short-term rentals. They do not want the same thing at the window, and we do not pretend they do.
Made in the USA as standard. Imported shutters are also available if you’d like a second price option.
Including zebra shades, honeycomb shades, and Roman shades — cordless options available for kids and pets.
Wood, faux wood, and aluminum options fitted to your exact windows.
For patios and covered porches.
This is the part worth saying plainly, because it is the reason to call us rather than somebody else.
We have done jobs in McCall, including exterior sun shades. And we work with rental property management companies in McCall to replace window coverings that get damaged.
If you own a rental on or near the lake, you already know the pattern. A guest pulls a shade off its brackets in July. You are in Boise, or Seattle, or somewhere further. The cleaner reports it, the next booking is Friday, and you need one unit’s worth of one product matched to what is already hanging in the other windows — not a redesign.
That is a job we already do. We can work with your property manager for access, match what is there, and handle the one window without turning it into a whole-house project.
If you manage properties in McCall and you do not have somebody for this, call us. It is a large part of why we drive up.
Out in the towns beyond the valley the work runs mostly to faux wood blinds, roller shades and Roman shades, and McCall is no exception — with exterior sun shades added, which we have fitted up there.
The reasons are practical. Faux wood takes humidity swings and bright light without the warping real wood can show. Roller shades in a solar fabric cut glare and heat while you can still see the lake — which matters more here than anywhere else we work, because the view is the reason the house exists. Roman shades soften a room with a lot of hard light and hard surfaces in it. Cellular shades earn their keep through a long winter, trapping air in their pockets the same way a double-pane window does.
Motorization deserves a mention here specifically. Tall lake-facing glass is hard to reach, and a house you are not standing in is hard to manage. Both of those are solved problems.
Shutters look beautiful in a McCall home, old cabin or new build, and choosing them is a matter of personal style, not a matter of what kind of house you own.
As for what is hanging there now: in the older houses we find aluminum window frames, a lot of original older windows, and some genuinely old wood blinds. Aluminum conducts, so it is cold to the touch in February and the first place condensation shows. Older windows have settled and are rarely square, which is exactly why we measure every window ourselves instead of working off a plan or a photograph. And decades of high-altitude sun leaves old wood blinds warped and their cords brittle — at that point you are not choosing between repair and replacement.
It is a fair question from this far out, so here is the straight answer: we come up, and we are glad to.
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 McCall, not anywhere else we go. We will plan the visit around when you are actually in town — or around your property manager, if you are not.
See what our customers are saying, or leave your own review.
Between us, thirty years in the Treasure Valley — and the two of us measure every window in McCall ourselves, every time. We’re not a franchise, and Angela can build a plantation shutter start to finish.
Call, text, or get a free quote below. Either one of us will get right back to you.
Tell us which rooms you’re covering and we’ll bring samples, measure, and put a real number in front of you. Free, and no pressure. Prefer to talk? Call or text 208.755.8583.
Rather not fill in a form? Call or text us — whatever is easiest for you.
That number takes texts as well as calls. On a computer, point your phone camera at the code — a text to us opens already written, so all you do is hit send.
Or send your details below and we will come back to you.
Lake home, cabin or year-round house, we’ll plan the visit around your schedule.
