DIY Project: Kitchen Window Shade

Well our June has been a little crazy.  The kids left the second week of June and moved to another placement, and we have been slowly but surely getting settled into our new (old?) normal.  When we knew the kids would be leaving, I started making a list of things to do with my time--things that I have been wanting to do but haven't had time or energy to do over the last few months.  Several of those things were house projects.

I spent the first week after the kids left cleaning and organizing like crazy.  I cleaned out their room, rearranged our living room and dining room, cleaned out our office and our pantry, etc.  One of the things I've had on my list for a while is figuring out a cover for our kitchen window.  

One of the first things most people notice about our house is all of the natural light in the living room and kitchen area.  The windows in the living room are huge and let in a lot of good light.  They also face East and let in a lot of sun and heat.  So we bought curtains for the living room at the beginning of last year and left it at that.  

Since I've been home during the day more, I have noticed how hot our kitchen is in the mornings.  When I was working full time, I left before sunrise most days so by the time I was in the kitchen in the evenings, the sun was on the other side of the house.  But since I've been home with (and now without) kids, I've noticed how hard it is to do dishes/make breakfast each morning because of how warm and blinding it is in our kitchen.  

This is our kitchen window last week.  I wanted something other than plain blinds for this window and I had found several tutorials for a DIY window shade using blinds and fabric so I decided to try that out for our window.  

I went Friday and bought blinds and some fabric.  All of the windows in our house are weird sizes, so this one is 46.5" wide.  Which meant that I had to be pretty picky with the fabric I bought since most are 44-45" wide so they wouldn't fit at that width.  I settled on this one from Hobby Lobby:

I also found that you can buy pretty cheap blinds (like less than $4) at Walmart for windows 39" wide and less.  But I had to pay more since our window is bigger.  Overall though, I still completed this project for less than $20 and I was pretty happy with how it turned out.  I followed this tutorial pretty closely.  It was pretty simple--I cut the ladder strings on the blinds and then removed most of the slats and adjusted the blinds frame to be the right height.  Then I used fabric glue to glue the remaining blind slats to the fabric and to hem up the edges of the fabric.  The hardest part was hanging the hardware in our windowsill to hang the blinds! :)

Here is the finished project. When the shade is closed it definitely makes a big difference in how comfortable our kitchen is in the mornings!  And it's easy to open up to let light in the rest of the day.