The Best Blackout Window Treatment

When you’re hoping to kick back and relax inside the comfort of your home and you finally get seated in your favorite chair, the last thing you want is a glaring beam of sunlight getting into your eyes or reflecting off the television screen to disrupt your peaceful endeavor of movie night.

Similarly, many of us find it hard to sleep with the nearby lights shining into our bedrooms from passing vehicles or the moon. In either case, the answer to these problems is the use of blackout window treatments over the offending windows. Blackout curtains are designed specifically to be thick and opaque in order to block any light that tries to pass through them.

Blackout window treatments are not much different than any other curtain in how they are hung or their general appearance. A set of blackout curtains might hang on a traditional curtain rod that you already have installed above your windows, in which case the transition will be an easy one for you since the hardest part of installing the hardware is already done. If you think the style of the curtain looks better when you cannot see a curtain rod, you can search for a style that has clips that will attach it to the hardware on the backside. If this is an important distinction to you, be sure to narrow down your search to those with the aesthetic you desire.

A pair of French doors can sometimes be tricky to cover with curtains, blackout or otherwise, but manufacturers have already figured this one out for you. If you have a set of French doors, look for designs that are specifically made for covering the glass window pains on your doors. The curtains will likely be pulled to the top and tied up for when you do want that natural light to shine through.

As for the aesthetics of the curtain itself, the sky is the limit here. The construction of a blackout curtain can have many details like being waterproof and having a heavy-weight construction, a critical part of being truly opaque and blacking out all the sunlight, but the actual inner or outer layers that you see can be any fabric or pattern.

You might not even need a 100% blackout curtain. If your main goal is to simply lessen the amount of sunlight entering a room that you would prefer to be dark, you can look at blackout-style curtains that are still thick but don’t have a 100% blackout rating. Look at the sample pictures and the review section of the curtains you like to get a good idea of how much light they let through.

If your goal is to actually blackout 100% of the light entering your windows, it’s still difficult to accomplish with some curtain designs. Light will want to shine around the edges of the curtain and it will illuminate the walls. This leak-by of light will still be enough to throw off the darkness of your room. To combat this, you will need to focus on finding a combination of blackout curtains or blinds that still allow you to cover the edges of the wall. A way to accomplish this might be as simple as using a double-sided tape at the outer edges of the curtain to make sure it holds directly on the wall to create a seal.

• If you’re new to hanging curtains, think about having them run all the way from the ceiling to the floor. Having the curtains stop directly above the window is not necessarily going to give the most impressive aesthetic.
• Make sure you measure the width of your windows and doors to ensure that your new blackout curtains will be at least wide enough to completely cover them.
• Pair a set of blackout window treatments with a lightweight curtain made from a material like linen. This will give you the ability to draw your curtains for privacy while still letting light into your home, which is something you may find yourself wanting from time to time.