diy - heat blocking curtain

so. i moved to a new apartment in long beach and it's awesome. well, the space is awesome, i'm quite happy with it... however.. it's had some downfalls. namely, the cockroaches, damn those bugs, but they are few and far between now that i did all that patch work. I think i need to do more, but that will come gradually.

anyway, the other big issue is the HUGE window my my front room. It is 9x6 and faces the morning sun. It's poorly insulated, it's an aluminum frame, thin windows, not so great on those sweltering 95 degree days. So I needed a something to help me keep it cool. I did not want to spend well over $100 to put up a curtain rod and the type of material it would take to keep it cool, nor did I want to deal with installing the hardware in a place that I'm not sure how long i'll be here.

it was so hot one day, i thought, i'll just put aluminum foil on the windows, i don't care how ghetto it looks... that's when i came up with my brilliant plan.... emergency blankets.



I thought, well they are reflective, they can keep heat out or in, and they are cheap. They were also much bigger, way easier than trying to figure out how to put up a whole bunch of aluminum foil. However, I really didn't want to have a huge sheet of aluminum looking stuff hanging from my window, so i did a bit of research and found one other person who did this. She suggested putting a white sheet in front of the blankets, i thought, perfect.




i was originally going to sew the thing together, but then some common sense kicked in, and i decided to use packing tape and staples, as you can see above. it worked like a charm and took about 20 minutes.




i hung it up by using clear adhesive hooks from 3m, they are about $3 per package and I used 6 of the heavy duty kind. I then put medium size binder clips on the "curtain" and hung the clips on the hooks. This is what it looks like inside when my blinds are all the way open, on the inside. When they're closed, well, they look like blinds.




And this is what the whole thing looks like from the outside. We haven't had a super hot day to test my theory yet, but it is noticeably cooler in here every day and for that, i'm thankful.

so let's see, if i were to have bought a curtain rod ($25 at Ikea), curtains ($100 for them to be thick enough and fit the whole window), then spent the time to hang it, it would have been really time consuming and expensive.

Instead, I paid $3 for a twin size sheet at Ikea, $9 for three emergency blankets at Target, and it took me about 20 minutes to assemble the whole deal.

I'm a happy camper. No only if the blanket would search for cockroaches and kill them in my house, i'd be elated.