Elijah’s room gets a lot of sun. It faces the south and has a bay window that extends out past the wall of the house. This is a nice feature except that his room gets extra hot. It can easily be 5 degrees warmer than our room right across the hall. We have the pull-down, solid shades but a lot of light still gets in around the edges.
To try and help with this and also to help make it darker at bedtime, I came up with a quick project to block more light. I purchased painters drop cloths and a grommet kit from Home Depot. I cut the cloth to be about 3″ wider and taller than each window and then inserted some grommets around each piece. I put nails into the wall around the window where each grommet was and voila, we have an easy way to quickly add additional covers over the windows. You can’t see it from the outside because the normal shade hides it and you can’t see it from the inside when the curtains are pulled.
It was a very cheap solution and it’s easy to store. The only problem is that my material isn’t as solid as I thought it would be. Light still shines through. We’ll see how it helps with the heat but I might try this again with some actual light blocking fabric.