Help with window problems.

[Watcher]

I messed up and also posted this in house lighting so oops.


I’ve sorta been dropped into this lighting stuff and am nearly completely ignorant so please bear with me. As you might guess I have tons of questions but I won’t ask them all the time. I’m going over the post already here to see what I can learn that way first. My dad said its always better to learn from other people’s mistakes.

Here’s my first problem/question. We are a newer church and our church is in metal building which is a former business building. The sanctuary is in the office area which has 70” tall windows going around the front of it where our “stage” is and down one side. This makes it just a little difficult to control the lighting in the church. To stop some of the outside light currently we have black paper taped to/over the window but its not completely opaque, it has sun bleached and looks bad from the outside and has tears in it. We want the area behind the ‘stage’ to be black for when we do get a real stage built and our donated stage lights mounted. We have been racking our brains on something to block the light and look nice inside and out but not cost an arm and leg.

Anyone else ever had to deal with a problem like this? How did you solve it?

[waynehoskins]

We have a small space (used by the children's ministry as well as for small events) that had a similar problem. It has floor-to-ceiling windows along the entire length of its long exterior wall (which is about 30 feet long). We put blackout window tint on all of the windows (except for the exit door). With the tint, you can't see any light through the window -- except for at sundown (it's the west wall), when you can see a very dim very dark red sun, but that's it. I imagine a similar solution might work for you as well.

[tpichler]

Paint. Sweet talk one of your artistic members into making a nice mural visible from the outside but painted from the inside. Totally opaque. Clean the window with alcohol first and you will be amazed at how long it will last (ours was good for about 2 years). We got bored with it and scraped it off with a razor blade and did it again with a new design. For some of the windows in the hallway some of the ladies did a fau stained glass effect. It looks really nice.

[Paris MkVI]

If you are not concerned with anyone seeing anything in particular from outside, the blackout window tint is a good option.