Turning shades into blackout shades

Hey folks, So TL;DR, I signed a lease in a new apartment in NYC where I get a nice view of an office building which has bright white lights on 24/7. In their infinite wisdom, the "luxury" building folks installed shades that are semi-translucent. At nighttime, enough light comes through that I have to wear an eyemask to get enough darkness to sleep. Now one obvious solution here is to install blackout curtains. And I can go to that solution if the other ones are too much additional work. But I thought I'd ask if anyone has any ideas for some way to affix some kind of material to the blinds that (1) would block light out (2) are thin enough that I can still roll the shades up and (3) it's a reversible process. I asked some LLMs for ideas and they had some very DIY solutions which makes me think no one has created a product to solve this problem directly (I've seen it in many of my friends' apartments as well). For those wondering, my preference to avoid blackout curtains is purely an aesthetic / practical one (they take up space and make the windowsill inaccessible). submitted by /u/National-Funny-780 [link] [comments]

May 8, 2025 - 05:11

Hey folks,

So TL;DR, I signed a lease in a new apartment in NYC where I get a nice view of an office building which has bright white lights on 24/7. In their infinite wisdom, the "luxury" building folks installed shades that are semi-translucent. At nighttime, enough light comes through that I have to wear an eyemask to get enough darkness to sleep.

Now one obvious solution here is to install blackout curtains. And I can go to that solution if the other ones are too much additional work. But I thought I'd ask if anyone has any ideas for some way to affix some kind of material to the blinds that (1) would block light out (2) are thin enough that I can still roll the shades up and (3) it's a reversible process.

I asked some LLMs for ideas and they had some very DIY solutions which makes me think no one has created a product to solve this problem directly (I've seen it in many of my friends' apartments as well). For those wondering, my preference to avoid blackout curtains is purely an aesthetic / practical one (they take up space and make the windowsill inaccessible).

submitted by /u/National-Funny-780
[link] [comments]