Faux-ny Baloney Week, Day 2: Faux Stained Glass

Been there, done that...I know, I know.  I already showed you my front door sidelight windows, which are stained glass pretenders.  But I just have to show you what I did to the window in the master bedroom last week.  With the same type of product I used before (a decorative window film from Light Effects, which is sold at our local Home Depot for $19.99; it comes as a 24" X 36" sheet, and can be cut to size), I was able to create this lovely stained glass effect.

TA-DA!!

Our master bath isn't one of those enormous spa-type deals, with a giant shower big enough for a whole football team to use at once, a ginormous Jacuzzi tub, and a vanity top long enough to double as a landing strip for an airplane.  We don't even have a double sink, but for the past 22 years have been peacefully sharing the one that sits atop our modest-sized vanity.  Because the bathroom is so small, it's bothered me for years to have curtains hanging over that window--semi-sheer white ones, with lots and lots of gathers to make sure no Peeping Toms could see through them at night...curtains that hung down to the top of the toilet bowl tank and made the room feel too closed-in.  But I couldn't figure out how to get the privacy we needed without using all that fabric.

This window is on the front of our house, facing the street.  We live in a fairly private area at the end, not far from the cul-de-sac, where there are still some empty lots filled with trees.  But there is a house directly across the street from ours; and although the neighbors who live there are not the Peeping Tom sort, privacy has still been our #1 issue when it comes to our bathroom window.

I wanted a change, but what were my options?  What to do, what to do?  And then it hit me: the reason I'd installed the faux stained glass on the small windows on either side of the front door was so that no one could peek in on us at night; and if it worked for those windows, then why not for the master bathroom window?

It's such an easy process, too; you just clean the window, cut the Light Effects plastic sheet to size, spray water on the window with a spray bottle, remove the paper backing from the sheet and then position it in place, using a squeegee to remove all the excess water.  The "stained glass" will stay put indefinitely--but if you decide you want to take it down, you can just peel it off and re-use it somewhere else.  It's got to be the easiest trompe l'oeil decorating product on the market!

The day I put up the faux stained glass in our bathroom, I was absolutely thrilled with it. It looked so pretty with the sunshine streaming through the window.   But then as night fell, that window began to look like a gaping black rectangle, and the thin plastic film on it no longer seemed to be providing the kind of privacy a bathroom demands.  I couldn't help wondering what could be seen out there in the dark, with the house lit up from the inside.

YIKES!  Had I made a huge mistake?

So my husband stood out in the pitch darkness of the front yard while I moved around in front of the window, and then I went outside and he stood in front of it waving at me; and we both decided that, although vague, shadowy shapes could be seen, no one was going to be able to see anything that they shouldn't.  (Phew!)

SO...if you've got a window that you need to cover for privacy's sake, but you don't want to use any of the traditional drapery treatments, I recommend that you think about turning that ho-hum, pedestrian window into a stained glass beauty, with the help of this user-friendly product from Light Effects.