I'm hoping someone who's been through this dillema can give me some advice. My house is *VERY* small, so my home theater has to be in the living room. The living room has a vaulted ceiling, a fireplace, two skylights, a 5' wide sliding patio door, and the circuit panel box in the same corner that the TV sits. Setting this 12.5'x 17' area up for home theater has been a very tough challenge.

I think that I've solved most of the problems -- room darkening shades from www.symphonyshades.com for the skylight and the kitchen window; heavy, dark drapes in the corner behind the TV to cover the ugly electrical panel and give a dark surround around the television. I think I've even figured out the colors -- Laura Ashley "Ironwood" on the walls and Glidden "White on White" for the ceiling.

So right now my biggest problem is the patio door. One wall has the fireplace, and the other wall has the patio door, and the TV sits in the corner of these two walls. All the room darkening vertical blinds that I've found still let alot of light in. I was hoping for something simple, since this is the door into the back yard, and the two [rather large] dogs we have go in and out frequently -- I don't want it to turn into a big hassle. The vertical blinds that we have now are light filtering, so they're of no help.

I've contiplated using something like a large pleated room darkening blind, similar to the one I'm going to use on the kitchen window, in addition to the vertical blinds, but I don't think I can fit it behind the current vertical blind valance. Another option which seems to make more sense, is to use a roller shade. Pretty compact and shouldn't be too hard to put under the current valance, and can be used only when we need it. But it still has light emission problems around the edges. I have seen roller blinds that have a channel that each edge fit into that keeps light from leaking in around the edges, but of course I can't find them anywhere online using a Google search.

Maybe I'm making too big of a deal out of it, and a good quality set of room darkening vertical blinds would suffice. I have no qualms about replacing the verticals that I now have -- they're an "inexpensive" type anyway, and I hate the way the steel weight plates in the bottom of them keep sliding out.

If anyone has an idea or a solution, please let me know!