Hello from my very classy house, where I recently hung two queen-sized sheets over our front window to protect us from the flaming ball of hot ash in the sky. (This is temporary because I’m not in college anymore or on the run from the law.)
In general, my feelings about the summer sun can be summed up pretty succinctly, but truthfully our west-facing front windows are a problem. The birch tree that used to provide some relief had to be taken down a few years ago and while the warmth is delightful in the winter, summer is a different story. By August, the paint on the front of the house is blistered. Standing in front of the living room windows around 5 pm feels like standing in front of an open oven door.
We’ve needed curtains for years (the “temporary” light filtering sheers that we put up when we moved in are…still there) but as you may know, curtains are a tremendous ass-ache. You can either buy crummy ones that aren’t quite the right size or you can spend the GDP of Mauritius on nice ones that fit correctly. Then let’s not even talk about the curtain rods. Let’s also not talk about installing them.
I would happily pay someone to install blinds and curtains in my house if it weren’t for the fact that I am incredibly stubborn and also a cheap bastard at heart. There are plenty of trifling problems I would (and do!) throw money at in order to solve, and I’m no gung-ho DIY-er, but I can wield a cordless drill and a measuring tape well enough. It’s just the measuring and the ordering and worst of all the deciding. How dare you ask me to choose a curtain rod when there are literally millions from which to choose! This is wildly unfair and it is at least 74% of the reason I still have tension rods and Amazon Basics drapery sheers in most of my windows. (The other 26% is that I am lazy trash.)
We would be remarkably less hard on our air conditioning system if we just buckled down and made some window covering decisions. But there are something like 50 god damn windows in this house! Have you ever heard of such a stupid thing! Those capri-pants-and-platform-sandals ladies on House Hunters are always banging on about the OMG NATURAL LIGHT but let me ask you, Sharon, do you have an offshore account somewhere earmarked for draperies? All of those “eclectic” window shapes and sizes aren’t going to be so fun when you are staring into the void of Wayfair!
There are eight, EIGHT, windows in our upstairs sunroom, another area we basically don’t use in the summer because it is mostly uninsulated (due to being primarily windows). Owing to the “charm” of our 95-year-old house, the windows are different sizes, and one pair of windows sits directly above a radiator. I lost my mind yesterday and ordered custom blackout curtain panels for the entire room (this is less fancy than it sounds). I put my husband in charge of measuring and ordering something similar for the living room. As for the queen-sized sheets, I suppose they will become quilting or face mask fabric.
We don’t have rods to hang any of these curtains on yet, but as I explained above I don’t even want to talk about that.