Custom Shutters, Shades & Blinds in Wilder, ID

A town of 1,597 with a silo in the middle of a golf hole

River Bend Golf Course sits on Fish Road outside Wilder, on the Snake River — eighteen holes, par 72, 6,884 yards from the back tees, built in 1994 and designed by Joe Bideganeta. It is public.

And on the fourth hole there is a grain silo standing in the fairway. It is the signature hole, photographed from the fairway looking back at it, and golfers who have played the course remember that hole and not much else. "Quirky but fun," one review calls it.

That is Wilder in one image. A farm town of 1,597 people — up from 1,533 in 2010 — that did not pave over its agriculture to build a golf course. It built the course around the silo and left it there.

TimberStone is a short drive away as well, just across the line in the farmland with a Caldwell address, and there is new construction around it. Between the two, a small farm town has more golf within reach than towns ten times its size.

What we install in Wilder

Open ground changes what a window has to do

Here is the practical difference between a window in Wilder and a window in a Meridian subdivision: there is nothing in the way.

No neighbor’s house eight feet off the property line. No mature street trees. Fields in every direction, and a picture window pointed at them.

That means full sun, with no break. A west-facing room takes the entire afternoon in July, low and direct, and the floors, rugs and furniture in that room fade faster than anywhere else in the house. Rooms like that run hot well into the evening.

It also means wind. Open country wind finds every gap around an older window, and in winter you feel it as a draft long before the thermometer agrees with you.

And it means the view is the point. Nobody who bought a house facing open farmland wants a covering that erases it. That is the actual design problem out here, and it is why solar roller shades and top-down/bottom-up cellular shades get asked for so often: both let you keep the horizon while cutting the glare or keeping the privacy.

Then January arrives and the glass becomes the coldest surface in the room. Glass has effectively no insulating value compared with the wall around it. A cellular shade traps air in its pockets — the same principle a double-pane window uses — and that trapped air is the insulation.

Farmhouses, and what we expect to find in them

Wilder’s housing is largely farmhouses and country properties, with some newer building — Bear Homes has been active here at Rose Meadow and Rose Pointe, and we fit custom window coverings to any of their floor plans.

In the older houses we expect what we find throughout these towns: aluminum window frames, a lot of original older windows, and some genuinely old wood blinds.

The frames are usually aluminum, and aluminum is a conductor. It is why you can put a hand on one in February and feel the weather through it, and why the first condensation in the house tends to appear right there. A covering with some insulating value does more for you on a frame like that than on anything modern.

Nothing in an old house is square anymore. Decades of settling — and out here, ground that shifts with the irrigation season — leave an opening a quarter inch out at one corner and true at the other. Hang a stock-size blind in it and you get a wedge of daylight down the edge that you will notice every evening for years. That is the best argument there is for measuring each window on its own, and it is why we do the measuring ourselves instead of taking numbers off a plan or a photo.

And whatever wood blinds are hanging there now have probably done their time. Open-country sun bows the slats and takes the life out of the cords. The question stops being whether to repair them.

What tends to go in out here

Most of what we hang out here is faux wood blinds, roller shades and Roman shades, with cellular shades for the winter side of the problem and exterior sun shades on a porch or patio that takes the afternoon.

Faux wood is the choice because it shrugs off heat and dry air where real wood would bow. A solar-fabric roller shade is the choice because it takes the sting out of the afternoon with the fields still visible through it. Roman shades are the choice when a room needs something soft in it.

Shutters look beautiful in a Wilder farmhouse and in a brand-new build alike, and choosing them is a matter of personal style — not of what kind of house you own. On a big picture window they also give you something a shade cannot: louvers you can angle to throw light at the ceiling instead of into your eyes, without giving up the view.

Yes, we drive out to Wilder

The phone is answered by Troy or Angela, and the measuring is done by the two of us — no measuring service, no app, no estimate worked up off a photograph. Our team measures, quotes and installs every job, so the people at your windows on install day are the people who were there on day one.

We are not grudging about the drive. It is how we have built relationships with the people we work for, and going the extra mile is simply the job.

And the estimate never costs anything. Not in Wilder, and not anywhere else we go.