Blackout curtains

Summer is a bit of a pain. Between the heat and the long daylight hours it can be hard for children to sleep. At our last house in Ninomiya, we had storm shutters on the doors and windows upstairs, so Pi's room has always been pitch black. The biggest problem with that is it made it really hard for him to sleep in a room that wasn't pitch black (sleep aids are great...and terrible).

When we moved last year to a house with no storm shutters upstairs, we came up with a simple and most importantly cheap solution to get Pi's room nice and dark. Cardboard...

We bought lots of black construction cardboard from the hundred yen store (this time Seria), and stuck it up all over his doors and windows with packing tape. It was great! It looked fine from the outside too, as all you could see were black doors and windows. The only problem was if you wanted to open the door, then you are also letting in unobstructed light. To solve that problem we saftey pinned a black blanket in front of the door, but it only worked so so.

It was a fairly good, but not great solution. My husband also grew concerned after a year if the photo-degrading cardboard would cause any health problems.

So this year we decided to splurge and buy some blackout curtains. I looked at a few different shops- Ikea have both blackout blinds and curtains. Nitori have blackout curtains too. I ended up buying mine from Amazon because they were a little cheaper and had good reviews.

These do an amazing job of keeping out the light (that is the flash that makes the curtains look light in the photo). I actually took the lace curtain off and hung this curtain behind the original curtain. It works even better that way as it create more of a seal around the door frame.

This is what I bought:

1級遮光カーテン プラネット ネイビーブルー 幅100cm×丈200cm 2枚入 全2色8サイズ

Shakō kāten is the word for blackout curtains. 

The 100x200cm size was 4246yen including shipping. 

They are good quality curtains and said they would block out 99.9% of the light. I think they do. 

They also claim to help keep they heat out (which is good) and are washable (also good).

Do be careful if you are buying things online though. Some of the cheaper blackout curtains had some really bad reviews and let's face it, if they are not going to block out the light then there isn't really a point.