How to Train your Dog to Stop Barking in One Hour with a Window Treatment

How to Train your Dog to Stop Barking in One Hour with a Window Treatment

By Guest Contributor Christina Przybilla / Owner of Christina Marlene Design LLC

Working as a designer can be challenging, especially when sustainable solutions for pets are involved. Often, our suggestions don’t work, or they merely touch the surface of the problem.

What I want to tell you about today is a client with a prominent picture window and a frisky dog called Snowy who liked to spend his entire day barking at whomever happened to be passing by, thereby destroying the owner’s newly installed two-and-a-half-inch faux wood blinds.

Photo credit: Christina Marlene Design LLC / Decorating Den Interiors

The client had chosen faux wood versus real wood because of the danger of warping in the sun, and because she still wanted to be able to see things that were going on outside via the tilting mechanism of the slats. She had done her homework.

Back to the problem: Snowy would jump and pull down the slats each time someone walked by. The slats resisted rather well. They were merely bent, not broken. I had seen worse. The windowsill, on the other hand, which my client had only painted the previous year, was already scratched due to Snowy’s constant jumping.

My client had spent quite a bit of money already on the redesign of her picture window and wasn’t happy. Her phone call to me was more out of desperation than intention to do any design work. When I told her that my initial design consultation was free, she was happy to let me take a look at the situation.

Photo credit: Christina Marlene Design LLC / Decorating Den Interiors

I got to meet Snowy, a very sweet Schnauzer-Poodle mix, who does get overly excited when he sees stuff going on outside. Apparently, walking Snowy had gotten worse ever since they had moved into that house.

I knew exactly what she meant because I also have two reactive dogs. I shared with her a little bit of knowledge that I had acquired from a dog trainer. According to him, there is the notion of “adrenaline,” and how a constant level of it in your puppy’s blood can wreak havoc in its behavior. This trainer also said that the trick to having a well-behaved dog was to keep the adrenaline levels low.

But what on earth does your dog’s adrenaline level have to do with good window design?

It’s to not let your dog notice that anything is going on outside in the first place. And there is —according to my knowledge as a designer — only one window treatment that can truly fulfill this mission: it’s the indoor shutter.

With an indoor shutter that’s designed right, you can control what you want your dog to see, and what you want to see. You can do this because you can design your shutters to be as high or low in the window as you want, or you can even plan for a mid-section split and keep the bottom part closed entirely and only open the top section for light and vision, all this whilst creating a stylish, clean, and contemporary look.

Photo credit: Christina Marlene Design LLC / Decorating Den Interiors

Once I had explained these perks to my client and added that they were more expensive than regular blinds, but that shutters would add to the value of her home overall, she was onboard with the project.

Let me share with you what happened after we installed the shutters: Snowy sniffed at them briefly, jumped on the sofa, and took a nap. Mission accomplished: The dog quit barking instantly because he could no longer perceive anything going on outside. We had upgraded not only the look but the value of my client’s home and spared her the need to hire a dog trainer because what the trainer would explain over many a lengthy session, my client handled all by herself with one simple turn of a slat.

For more information about window treatments, contact Christina Przybilla @ Christina Marlene Design LLC christinamarlenedesign@decoratingden.com 626 841 45 41