Window film

Frosted lower panels, clear upper panels.

Our old house is a little peculiar in that the boundaries of our property on two sides are the external walls of our house, but we aren't butted up against any other houses. On one side is the driveway we share with the matching house next door. On the other side, unfortunately, is the car park to the unit block that was built in the 1980s following the bulldozing of two more old houses like ours.

So our kitchen unit looks out onto a giant expanse of bitumen. To the right was quite a pretty herb garden tended by one of the unit block tenants, but that brought with it its own problems. Namely people tending to or hanging out in the garden, less than a foot away from where I was scrubbing dishes or preparing breakfast. It was weird. Plus sometimes if one of the neighbours wanted to have a chat with BCB they'd knock on the kitchen window if they saw either of us in the kitchen. Friendly, but... a touch intrusive. As a result we kept an ugly vinyl rollerblind down nearly all the time.

Window film is not very common in Australia, where most people have houses with fences, rather than apartment windows onto a solid brick wall, so it took me ages to think of it. But it's the perfect fix. I looked around online, and found most of the options were custom designs that were quite expensive. We ended up at Bunnings, where $30 bought us the only roll of privacy film left on the shelf.

Little rectangley-flowery shapes show up at night when the carpark lights are one. Pretty!

I wanted plain frosted, but had no choice but this kind of geometric floral. Luckily, I think I like it even better than plain. It was relatively easy to apply. I definitely recommend going heavy on the water/ dishwashing liquid spray. It made it a lot easier to move the film around to start with. Also I'd recommend checking on it a couple of hours after application. We found a couple of new air bubbles had developed, but the glue was still just tacky enough that we could squeeze them out still.

We caught a couple of bits of grit under the film, and have one crease in panel, but given that the windows are four square feet each, I think that's not bad. Took only an hour or so from measuring the windows to finish. Hopefully it will hold up okay, but so far I'm a massive fan. The sun can peek in our kitchen again, but not the neighbours.