Review of NEW! Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade from JCPenney Home

The NEW! Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade sold by JCPenney Home is a great investment for any room of your house where you want control over the daylight. When shopping for new blinds or shades for our future baby's room, our number one desire was to have room-darkening or black-out shades that would prevent the sun from coming in to the room too much during nap time. The Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade provides that feature, along with many more that really pleased us. Unfortunately this product is only sold online at JCPenney.com, so you cannot go to the store to preview it. Hopefully this review will give you a good idea of what you are getting and why these shades are so worth the extra money!

Cost: Let's start right off with the cost, then I'll explain why they are worth the price. The Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade at a standard size of 31x48 run $110 a piece. When compared to other similar Cellular shades, this may seem high. However JCPenney is currently offering a deal where you save if you buy 2 or more. This brought my order of 3 shades down to $64 a piece. Does that still seem high to you? Well then take a look at what you are actually getting!

The Concept: The reason we choose the Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade is because it offered two different layers. The first layer is only light-filtering, meaning that when this layer is closed a good deal of sunlight will still come in. The second layer is room-darkening, meaning that when this layer is closed, little sunlight will come in. If the sun is shining directly on the window, you'll still get light in the room, but it won't be as bright as it would be with other shades. We wanted the room-darkening portion for naptimes, but we didn't want to have our baby's drapes wide open during other times. That is where the light-filtering layer really sold me on this product. Now we get the best of both worlds - privacy and light when the baby is awake, darkness when the baby is asleep.

How it Works: It's hard to tell exactly how this will work by looking at the website so I was anxious to receive the shades and put them up. Once installed, we found the shades are actually made up of two distinct sets of shades. It is almost like they attached too cellular shades together top to bottom. The top half is the light-filtering half, and the bottom is the room darkening piece. Basically you open the half you want and the other half collapses.

Cordless: I also loved the concept that these were cordless as cords hanging can become a safety hazard for young kids. In between the two layers there is a metal strip where a plastic handle is hooked, there is also another metal strip and handle on the bottom. Each of these metal strips can be pulled up or down independently to get exactly the lighting we want (or don't want) in the room. The shades move very easily with little effort needed and whereever we stop is where the shades will stay.

Insulation: We did not buy these specifically for the insulation, but figured it would be a nice bonus. The honeycomb design promises to offer "excellent insulation and sound absorption". In the summer this means it can keep the room cooler by keeping out the heat and sun from outside, but I'm really looking forward to using these in the winter when the cold air tries to seep through the windows.

Colors: Perhaps the only limitation of this product are the color options. However it is a new product so maybe they will come out with more choices in the future. Currently JCPenney offers the Cordless Cellular Day/Nite Shade in 7 neutral colors - 4 which are similar shades of brown/gold, 1 Ivory, 1 White and 1 Espresso. We choose Espresso because it was the closest thing we could find to match the dark furniture in the room. I would have liked to try the white but thought the room needed some contrast colors. When installing at night, I had a hard time believing these Espresso shades would let any light in, but by the next morning I could certainly see the difference (see photos).

Installation: Our windows were not 1.5" deep and we still managed to mount them inside. You will need a drill if you are installing this into a plastic window frame. We found that out after we got to work on putting them up. Luckily my dad had a drill and came right over. Other than that, all we needed was a screwdriver (it's easier with an automatic), measuring tape and a pencil. The instructions are pretty straight-forward explaining where to screw the mounting brackets into the window frame. Once those are screwed in, it's simply a matter of snapping the shades on to the brackets and snapping on the plastic handles. These proved a little difficult to snap on, but once they were on the handles and shades are very sturdy and I can tell they aren't going anywhere.

Overall: We are highly pleased with this product and already considering buying another set for our bedroom and possibly even the kitchen to replace some of the old mini-blinds we have. I love being able to have light in the room without actually having our shades wide open, but also getting the darkness when it is needed. We are glad we took the chance without seeing it in person and would gladly take the chance again. Enjoy!!