Fixing super-fancy blinds with not-super-fancy hacks

When we did the final walk-through of our condo before settlement, we forgot to notice that one set of blinds hadn't been fixed.  The previous owner had claimed she would repair them prior to the sale -- or rather, her proxy/friend had agreed, since the previous owner herself is in a nursing home and not super able to manage her own affairs.

These are super fancy blinds: they're honeycomb with double-layering, and can be raised up from the bottom or lowered from the top.  They have pull cords at the side, but they don't have those long strings that are choking hazards; the pull cords have a ratchet mechanism, so if you pull a cord toward the left, say, it comes out about a foot while ratcheting up the blinds a foot, and then it itself springs back into original place.  Then you pull it again to ratchet up the blinds another foot, and it springs back, etc.  It's sort of like a pump handle, but it's a pull handle, instead.  I'd never seen these!

We have lots and lots of windows in the new condo (yay!) and they're all very large and quite tall, and consequently all these blinds are likewise very large and tall, and I'm sure they are very pricey.  And because the blinds throughout the place all match each other, we don't really want to buy one new blind that clashes with the rest, so fixing this would mean tracking down the original manufacturer and make and model.  Ugh.  I suppose we could have tried to insist post-settlement that the owner make good on this, but she is in a nursing home and we did sign off on the walk-through that things looked okay.

So I decided to try a DIY repair.  After all, if it works, it's a YAY repair; if it doesn't, we're no worse off.

Here's what was wrong with the blinds.

1. They'd split in half: somewhere in the middle, they'd come unglued, so a lower portion of honeycomb was sitting on the bottom bar, and an upper portion of honeycomb was hanging from the top bar, and in between, there was just space and the two nylon cords that raise or lower the bottom bar.
2. Except that the bottom bar couldn't be raised or lowered, because the ratchet string had gotten detached from its mechanism, and was now lying on the window sill like a snake soaking up the sunshine.

We had a work crew in the condo replacing some flooring, patching up holes, repainting, and performing other happy cosmetic tasks.  They declared themselves at a loss to fix the blind (which I hadn't even asked them to do, so I'm fine with that), but they had ladders set up, so they could get the blind down and hand it over to me for my own personalized and creative patching.

It's hard to see the stitches,
but here's where I sewed the top and bottom together.

To fix the first (that the blind was split in half), I got a needle and thread.  Perhaps I could have tried glue, but the original glue failed, and I didn't want to have to repeat these efforts if my own glue did the same.  I know that stitching will make that one row of the blinds look a little different, so we're not going for Better Homes and Gardens here.  

From the other side, you can't see the stitches at all. 

To fix the second (that the pull-cord had become detached from the ratchet mechanism), I could see the internal cord was (phew!!!) luckily still intact, and held from sliding down further inside by a fortuitously placed knot.  I used needle-nosed pliers to grip that string and pull it further out, agains the tension of the internal spring.  

On one side the cord is attached with this bead-like thing.
On the other side, the bead was missing and the cord was detached.

The bead-like clamp that had held the ratchet string to that internal string was broken, so I just tied them together, and dabbed a bit of superglue onto the knot for good measure. 

On the other side, I just tied it with a knot.  
No bead.  It's not elegant, but it works.

And here's what the blinds look like, now that they're up.

Like, you can see that there's one line that's different, but it's not horrendous, really.  For a 10-minute, $0 fix, I count that as a YAY!