Fabric first, hardware second
Three fabrics, and the Waverley rooms that ask for each one
There is not much to a roller blind. A panel wound onto an aluminium tube, a bracket at each end, and a chain, a spring or a motor to move it. Nothing to dust between, nothing to untangle. So what you are really comparing, quote against quote, is fabric.
Blockout — bedrooms and street-facing rooms
Blockout carries a coated backing that stops light rather than dimming it, and that backing turns away a fair share of the heat a Highveld afternoon pushes through west-facing glass. One honest caveat before you order it for a nursery: the fabric blocks light, the gap beside it does not. A blind hanging inside a window reveal has to sit a few millimetres clear of each edge to run freely, and that thin line shows at six in the morning. If the room genuinely has to go dark, raise side channels with the consultant while the tape is still on the window.
Sunscreen — the lounge window you would rather not lose
Sunscreen is a woven fabric rated by openness: 3%, 5% or 10%. Smaller number, tighter weave, more glare and UV held back — and less garden visible through it. Waverley's mature street trees have already taken some of the sting out of that light, so a 5% weave is often the sensible middle here, with 3% saved for lounges that take the low western sun square on. It buys you daytime privacy and none at all after dark; once the lamps go on inside, the view runs the other way. That is the whole reason sunscreen rarely goes into a bedroom on its own.
Double roller — one window with two jobs
Two blinds sharing one bracket, one behind the other. The classic Waverley version is a bedroom in one of the older single-storey houses looking straight over the low garden wall onto the pavement: sunscreen down through the day so the room is not a cave, blockout down at night so the street stops being an audience.
Hardware is a shorter conversation. Chain control ships with a tensioner screwed to the wall as standard; spring assist and motors exist for the rooms where a hanging chain is unwelcome, and the motorised blinds & automation page covers where that spend earns its keep. Cassettes and pelmets hide the tube and can be colour-matched to the frame. Waverley's older stock adds its own quirk worth naming: decades of settling, repainting and the occasional re-glaze leave plenty of steel-framed windows a shade out of square and shallower in the reveal than they look, which is why face-fix or reveal-fix gets settled standing at your window instead of over the phone. A single tube runs to roughly three metres of fabric before it starts to bow in the middle — beyond that we hang a matched pair on one bracket line so the opening still reads as one window.
What a roller blind costs here
Read these as guides, calculated by the square metre installed. A hand-operated roller — chain or spring, in blockout, sunscreen or a light-filtering weave — prices at R1,000 to R1,600, with plain blockout near the cheap end and a tight 3% sunscreen or a double roller near the dear end. Put a motor in the tube and the same window guides at R2,500 to R3,800, covering motor, remote or wall switch, and setting the limits on the day.
Two things bend that. A scullery window uses the same brackets, the same tube and much the same fitting time as a lounge window, so anything very small is charged to a minimum rather than by area. And side channels, cassettes and pelmets are listed as their own lines rather than buried in the rate. Everything firms up after the free measure, in writing.