Privacy Please

I've always been a country girl and now live in town...if you have ever done this you understand my struggle. This means I have to keep curtains closed at night, actually put decent clothes on if I have to run to my car in the driveway, and be close to neighbors. To top it off we live directly across from the city park. I love how it's always active and we will randomly have children stop in if they need something or have a problem (it's a really small town so this is legit!)

I am adjusting but our front door (the old school entry that goes into the living room that we never use) faces the park and the windows being empty were starting to weird me out that you can see directly into the main area of our home. They are annoying side light windows that add sunshine but are hard to cover.

(Sorry about the dark pictures, it's a little hard to take decent ones that face the sun)
I wanted to still see out but cut down on the full vision in. I've seen so many of you with the machines that cut vinyl and do all the work for you. That handy tool isn't in my budget right now so I went old school and made something different using Contact paper. (I'm really hoping these peel off decently when I get sick of them. I might be going through an entire bottle of Goo Gone!)

I first measured how tall my windows are and cut a piece of contact paper that long so I knew my working space. I knew I wanted to do a design that mimics the design of my curtains in the rest of the space.

I gave myself lines to work from as the base of my linear design that I did. Then I made a cardboard template for the oval that I would repeat on the lines. This kept my circles/ovals consistent and made it A LOT easier!

After they were all traced, and I held it up the window to double check that it was going to fit, I cut them out with my handy little Ex-Acto knife.

Using a level and some painters tape, I made a straight line for reference of laying out the first middle strip of the 3. After the first one was straight  and even, I winged the 2 on the sides (I wing a lot of my creativity :) )

I purposely made the strips a little too long so that I could later use my blade to make them fit perfectly inside the window.

The doors are still a horrid mint green and I haven't painted them yet, even though they stand out, now it's even more obvious that they are green and maybe it will encourage me to also get this little project done before everyone is here for Thanksgiving.

(--UPDATE 11/8/10 I did it tonight already because this picture bugged me so badly....It's now a nice slate gray.)

I'm excited about the final turnout (even though there's no good way to take a great picture of a window to prove how good it looks in person). During the day it even makes fun shadows on the floor. I didn't consider it before, but you can also see it perfectly from the outside as well and adds interesting lines to the front of our home. It's just enough that you can't see in 100% but still allows me to see outside and let the sun in. Best part....it only cost me $4.00!