Privacy Windows (for free)!

My boyfriend and I recently moved into a new apartment in Hollywood. One of my favorite features of the new place is the enormous picture window that takes up one wall of the living room. I love my great view of the sunset over the Sunset strip, but I DON'T love that all of my neighbors can see everything I am up to inside. We had been keeping the curtains closed, but it was getting a bit dark and depressing in the place.

Since we are short on cash as usual, we came up with this idea to cover the bottom half of our windows.

We needed to give ourselves some privacy, but without sacrificing the light, our view, or any money. We wanted to stay away from window film, an obvious solution, since a) no money and b) we are renters, I don't really want to be scraping and scrubbing goo residue from the windows when we move. We were inspired by this post on Manhattan Nest, where a cornstarch mixture was used to affix fabric over windows. Fabric was more opaque than we wanted, and I've heard bugs can be attracted to the cornstarch. And again this needed to be a free project.Finally after some testing we came up with the solution for us.

We cut stripes from a roll of white tissue paper we had around the house and attached them to the window using very very diluted Elmer's Glue.  Elmer's School Glue is non toxic and washable, exactly what we needed for our project. We did a few test strips on the glass and after it dried, I was able to peal it off in one piece.  We dipped the paper into the glue/water mixture (about 1 part glue to 6 parts water) and smoothed it on to the glass using a sponge. It took a bit of care to remove all the air bubbles, but I enjoy doing things like that.

It turned out quite nicely in the end, it only took about 2 hours and it was all from things we already had in the house. It's so nice to keep the windows open :)