I hate when people do this, but here I go doing it just the same. I am totally NOT going to answer your question and veer off on a tangent instead. . . We have skylights -- one being a huge 10' x 17' cluster in the center of our great room. I think the POs had rigged some sort of sheer fabric underneath it (based on some tacks and nails), but in year two, we realized that in the summertime, something had to give. After researching all the shade options, we would up getting a skylight cover for the outside. Of course it's not something that you take on and off at a whim, but it's perfect for our needs. DH puts it on some time in May and it comes down usually in late September. No batteries, no wires, no fuss, no muss (aside from the biannual trip to the roof). I'm not sure if it would work for your application (slanted roof on a garden room), and you may want the daily option to open or close, but it's an option. As for the non-hardwire issue: if you're springing for the electrician anyway, to install the outlets, spring for a carpenter to make a wooden rail of some kind that will hide the plugs from view. Would the plugs be at the bottom, or the top? And how are you getting the power behind the wood? (I ask because we have a post-and-beam home with no real working space between the ceiling and roof, so I know what a hassle retrofitting wiring can be). Here is a link that might be useful: skylight shade folks

Lynartist, let me throw another lifestyle issue into the mix. We have two cats that will certainly get hair on the bottom of the curtains, but I can begrudgingly clean those regularly. The bigger fear is that one decides to climb and snags or tears the material. I can only be present with the water spray bottle/cat training tool for so many hours of the day. I do like your idea of treating the area as a whole rather than parsing out separate window ideas. I've been using this site and post to begin learning about options, vocabulary, concepts for these windows. Your advice, and that of others, is greatly appreciated. Now that I am somewhat armed with a starter set of ideas I'll reach out to a professional in the area, but am still interested in getting more ideas. I always content that it is good to be part of a team. Cheers.

I met with an electrician yesterday and we are working on a plan to run low-voltage portion of wire in wall and have transformer plugged into wall under windows. So now I go from 23 windows needing batteries down to 2 windows. 21 windows will be "plugin". It looks like it will cost about $100 in parts, which will be outlets, old work junction boxes, cover plates, romex, etc. and about 6 hours of his time. There will be holes made in drywall for fishing the low-voltage (12v) wire from outlet to window, so I'm expecting painter to fix that and hopefully get all 21 windows worth of drywall work / paint done for $1500. I'll post pictures of before, during, and after as the work happens.

Ceilsan32, I have an update you might be interested in. I started this season with a working EGO mower. In early May it crapped out on me. I called my local (rural) lawn mower repair guys. They looked at it and checked it for power to all the places they thought power should be, but they could not fix it. Since the regular lawn mower repair shops can't work on it, you have to call EGO to get a referral to get it repaired. I took it to a Home Depot that has tool rental and dropped it off. Home Depot no longer carries EGO so I doubt they repair them, but it's likely all that repair stuff transferred to Lowe's as they now sell EGO. Anyway, the problem was it simply didn't start the blade motor. The power drive motor worked fine. HD told me right away they would be sending the mower to Atlanta for repair. EIGHT WEEKS later, I got a call that I could pick up my mower. The problem was the push arm (actually something in the wiring in the arm apparently broke). That part of the mower is NOT COVERED by warranty. The charge was only $52, so there's nobody that would have fixed it for that charge, but still I thought the entire mower was warrantied. The worst part was waiting 8 weeks to mow with my own mower. I used my EGO string trimmer during the mower outage. That's not as bad/hard as it sounds for my 4,000 square feet.