With waterproof blinds! You may have already worked out or been told that curtains aren’t suitable for kitchens, which is true in the vast majority of cases; but fortunately, you do have alternatives in the form of several different types of blinds, just for starters.
This blog post will tell you about kitchen window decorating without curtains, and what you can do to dress up and cover bare kitchen windows.
How can I dress my kitchen window without curtains?
The most common or obvious answer here is with blinds; waterproof blinds specifically. However, this isn’t your only choice!
How can I dress my kitchen window without curtains? Your options include:
- Waterproof roller blinds.
- Waterproof vertical blinds.
- Faux-wood blinds.
- Installing a frosted, patterned, or stained-glass effect windowpane or panel.
- Using stick-on texture sheets or designs on the windows to emulate frosting or stained glass, but without the cost/commitment.
- Using a privacy screen, or external shutters.
- Hanging plants in the window alcove, plus placing other plants or foliage (perhaps a herb planter) on the windowsill itself.
Why aren’t curtains a good pick for kitchen windows anyway?
So, why are we taking such a deep dive into covering bare kitchen windows without curtains in the first place? Curtains in a kitchen can easily become a fire risk, plus the fact that they’re not waterproof means that they will tend to start to look tatty within a few months, depending on how humid your kitchen gets in use, and how often you cook/produce steam and cooking vapours.
Curtains are made of non-waterproof fabrics, and they will soon lose their drape if regularly subjected to humidity and steam, and they may suffer from water marking and colour running too. They’re also apt to begin to grow mildew sooner or later.
Curtains in the kitchen also absorb cooking smells and subsequently cause the room to smell stale; plus, vapourised cooking fat will stick to the fabric and cause it to look dingy and potentially, attract dirt to stick to it too.
How can I dress my kitchen window without curtains if the window is right over the sink?
A kitchen blind that will keep itself to itself, as it were, and that is waterproof is your best approach here. Curtains over a kitchen sink would tend to get soaked along at least the lower part of their length regularly, and may get splattered with dirty water and food residues too. A blind has a smaller footprint and when open, isn’t close to the sink at all, plus as long as the blind is waterproof, it can simply be wiped off if it does get wet.
Your best choices are a vinyl roller blind or vinyl vertical blind, or a faux-wood blind.
How can I dress my kitchen window without curtains if the window is very large or tall?
If you have very large or tall kitchen windows (or perhaps patio doors) you might feel as if you’ve hit something of a brick wall in terms of what you can use to dress your window without curtains, as some blinds top out at a certain length due to the sheer weight of their materials.
However, vertical blinds can be made in literally any size of your choosing, and roller blinds can be made in very long lengths too; albeit if your window is also wide, you might need to abut two larger roller blinds side by side rather than ordering one very wide one. This looks absolutely fine, as long as the abutment or join between blinds is in the same spot as the mullions where the two sides of the patio doors meet/cross too.
