I am renting a house that has beautiful wooden venetian blinds - that I can not remove or replace - but they are not very effective at blocking the ambient night light that is abundant on my street. This affects my sleep hygiene - it is strongly recommended to sleep in as dark environment as possible. I can not remove the existing blinds I want to keep the room light during day so no sticker or dark foil my budget is limited and I would like to avoid buying and installing heavy curtains How do I darken the room on a budget? Any DIY tips are welcome. Buy paper window shades. Specifically the ones that are folded like an accordion and have an adhesive edge at the top. Trim them to the width of your windows. Lay them out flat and paint one or both sides black with spray paint. Stick them up behind the Venetian blinds. If you only painted one side then you can face the white side out if you are concerned about the external appearance. During the day you can lift them up and clip them in place with those plastic clips that are used to keep chip bags closed.

Or if the windows are double-hung you can accordion them up and sit them on the top of the bottom sash. sheet of cardboard (or similar) cut to fit inside I am a graveyard shift worker. I found the best solution is a cheap sleep mask you can get at Walgreens. Total blackout for you leaves light when you want it. Not being sarcastic, just this is what I found over years trying to sleep during the day. Get a set of second hand curtains from the local second hand shop. We just did this to our master bedroom. Now we own the house but didn't want to pay a lot of money for curtains and my wife found some really nice second hand roman blinds for $7.50 each. We put them underneath our regular curtains and the room stays warmer at night and significantly darker. You could the same type of thing. I'm pretty sure you've already considered this, but just in case you haven't... It may be an obvious option, but the direction your blinds face is pretty important... To block street- and auto lights, you'll want to make sure inside edges turn down, if you're any higher than the first floor.

I have migrane headaches and have to have a completely dark room to sleep. I bought solid pink insulation and cut it to fit my windows. painted the side one side white and then still hung blackout curtains. you can not see your hand in front of your face in the middle of the day, but you can sleep.That will let light in during the day and give you better coverage at night. YOu could go lo-tech and use black sheets. Just pin them up on the wall at night. curtains schoolboy q ruthlessThat is probably your cheapest, albeit, most horrible looking solution. blackout curtains shopkoThen again it's just for sleeping.jcpenney curtain rod connector If you want a cheap easy solution, you can buy fabric and safety pin it to the blinds. laura ashley curtains blanchardstown

If you pin just the top and bottom, when the blinds are pulled up 100% then ~1/2 of the fabric would be seen underneath the blinds. So I'd suggest ~ 4 sets of pin to have the minimum extra fabric seen. I'd also suggest using khaki, it is relatively cheap and thick. *I'd also suggest pin it to back(window side) of the blinds so it is not seen as much and you can retain the beauty of the wooden blinds. Make your own ShiftShade. Watch this on how it works: go to youtube DOT com and search for ShiftShade.rectella jazz black curtains Then buy the fabric yourself. discontinued dorma curtainsIt's called: Roc-Lon Blackout Fabric and you can probably find it at your local fabric store (mine has a 40%off sale, AND a 25% off coupon you can find on their website: JoAnn DOT com ) Then decide how you want to put it in your window.

If you want to do it like ShiftShade, buy the fiberglass rods on Amazon (remember to buy the end caps, too). Alternatively, you can use neodymium magnets and metal thumb tacks, screws, or mount an additional magnet to your window frame. This whole project will probably cost around $10 per window. My husband is a shift worker and often has to sleep during the day. I bought black rubber shelf liner , cut it to size, and used spray adhesive to attach it to the windows. You cannot tell if it is day or night when you are in there. Very inexpensive and easy to do. A proven way to do blackout without a curtain rod is to use black fabric cut to the window size. Put up Velcro dots on the window frame, placed strategically to match Velcro on the fabric. You can actually make fabric to look like Roman shades. Looks great, no screws or hardware and easy to wash. Remember to use matching Velcro dots to achieve the look of Roman shades. I had this for years on wood windows where I didn't want hardware.

Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count). Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?Prev Max Beerbohm’s Sherlock Holmes Parody (223B Casebook) Next The Genius of Herlock Sholmes (223B Casebook) Curtains can go very, very wrong. If you go overboard, you end up with something heavy and expensive and claustrophobic, like one of those getups Sally Field wore in Lincoln. On the other hand, don’t ignore them until too late, after all the remodel money has been spent. With my husband threatening to thumbtack a bed sheet over the beautiful new windows “to stop the spying,” I faced a desperate situation. “Let’s review,” said my husband, who likes his privacy. “How exactly did we end up adding only two new rooms but 21 new windows?” Um, the architect likes “light?”

At least that’s what he said when he showed me the plans. It looked like a good idea on paper, too. Of course, now that we’ve moved in we practically have to walk around in sunglasses. So what’s the solution (and how much did I end up spending)? Strategy No. 1: Don’t panic. Instead, walk from room to room and evaluate each window calmly. As Brooklyn-based architect Frederick Tang (whose firm Davies Tang + Toews is a member of the Remodelista Architect/Designer Directory) puts it, “What do you need from each of your windows? Is this a room where you want to sleep in utter pitch darkness? Or do you live somewhere where the site has privacy and your amazing views are the thing you are concerned about?” Strategy No. 2: Hang simple solid-color curtain panels. Why choose curtains (instead of blinds, say, or shades) for some windows? Says Tang, “It is a classic trick to use curtains to enlarge the visual effect of window. Often people will place them bunched up a foot or two off to the side of window, so will look as if a window is bigger.”

To get the most visual impact, “curtains look nicest when they go from the floor all the way to the ceiling, even if the window is not full height,” says Tang. Strategy No. 3: Sew your own. In my both my living room and guest bedroom (above), twin panels frame the casement windows. These were pretty much the easiest sewing project evers. My friend Stephanie, who is an excellent seamstress as well as being an interior designer, drew me a pattern on the back of an envelope. All I had to do was cut long lengths of fabric, sew lining onto them, press, and hem. The point of these curtains was to absorb sounds and to add a layer of texture to the rooms. In the living room privacy wasn’t a concern even for my husband–it’s a living room, after all–so instead of using a zillion yards of fabric, I made two 56-inch-wide panels. I never “close” them, and if I did, they wouldn’t entirely cover the windows. In all, I used six yards of Cream Linen Fabric ($14.99 a yard from Ballard Designs).

To add weight and body to the curtains, I lined each panel with cotton Roc-Lon White drapery lining ($4.19 a yard from Jo-ann Fabrics). Cost of the living room curtains: $125. Above: No need to sew a rod pocket. I attached clips to the top of each panel. Cost of the living room curtain hardware: one Cambria Oil Rubbed Bronze Curtain Rod ($49.99) and four packages of Cambria Oil Rubbed Bronze Curtains Rings (currently on sale for $4.99 per package) at Bed Bath and Beyond, $90. Strategy No. 4: Use the money you saved in other rooms to splurge on custom shades or blinds for the bedroom. In the bedroom you don’t want to skimp. You spend at least one-third of your life in this room, so you want good coverage: for privacy and to block the sunlight on Saturday morning when your husband takes the dogs out and lets you sleep in. In my bedroom (above) are custom Roman Shades from The Shade Store. You can save money here by measuring your windows yourself and installing your own shades after they arrive (they’re shipped in long cardboard boxes to your house).

The big question is always whether to hang shades (and blinds) on the outside of the window jamb or to recess them. Says Tang: “If the window jamb is deep enough, it’s nice to hang them inside because it gives more of a custom look. It’s more tailored and looks a little more finished.” For the recessed option, you need to cut the blind or shade precisely– within a quarter of an inch of the width of the window. Total cost of seven lined bedroom shades: $2,826. Strategy No. 5: Some windows may not need anything. At my house, I identified ten windows–in the kitchen and adjoining family room–that could remain bare. The view was nice, there was no need for privacy, and it was a cleaner look. The trick to leaving windows bare, says Tang, is to be uniform. In a room, if you leave one window uncovered, you also should leave all the other windows uncovered because “you don’t want one to look like an orphan.” Another way to achieve an uncovered look is to think ahead–far, far ahead–and to include in the remodel design recessed curtain tracks or pockets for shades.

“You can build a pocket on a window, where essentially the trim above the window falls a little lower to hide the shade that’s behind it,” says Tang. Here’s an example of the finished look, from one of his projects.(I know that’s self-evident, but the figure made me so happy I couldn’t resist typing it.) Strategy No. 6: Inexpensive cut-to-order wooden or bamboo shades. In my home office (above), late afternoon sun is a problem. it causes a glare on the computer screen. Photograph by Michelle Slatalla. “Windows that are south-facing need more attention than windows that are north-facing, because of sun,” says Tang. “For situations like that, I like very simple shades. It’s amazing how many customized options there are that give you a lot of bang for your buck.” Tang, who lives in a pre-war building in Brooklyn, covered his own windows with custom cut shades from Home Depot. “They have a valence; I live in a very traditional house where that sort of detail is appropriate to the architecture.”