do you close your curtains at night?

[Willmafrockfit]

in films, american at least, they never do

do people actually live like this?
curtains open all night?
how do you sleep?

I'm a scaredy cat so yes because
A) when I was a child there was a 'prowler' in our village who used to look through windows. When I came downstairs early one morning, still quite dark outside, he was looking through the kitchen window and it terrified me
B) I watched Salem's Lot at an impressionable age and have never quite got over the vampire boys floating outside the bedroom window 😂

I close the curtains in my room and my youngest daughter's. My older daughter rarely even closes her blinds. I close the blinds in the living room but never the curtains and I only close the kitchen blinds sometimes (usually if I'm at the sink and then I start to get paranoid someone is going to appear at the window 😂).

Yes, at least at the front of the house. Back isn't overlooked at all, so rarely close them unless sleeping in the spare room. Grew up with curtains often open, as we lived on a farm with no one overlooking and no street lights, but it was necessary in winter to retain heat.

Not usually. We are elevated over the road and there are no houses opposite. Just fields and trees. Only close them occasionally when I want a lie in during summer.

Yes, all curtains are drawn as soon as it gets dark, don't like being visible. Couldn't sleep with them open, either moonlight or street light would keep me awake.

When I was a teen we had a 'peeping tom' that we discovered was a neighbour's son (who was about 20 at the time and lived at home). My mother used to feel someone was watching her at bedtime (we lived rurally) and one night I was getting ready for bed and after I turned the lights out I heard a huge rustling from outside my bedroom window (we had a large hydrangea bush there. I immediately got up and crept into my mother's room and heard the side gate being opened. Long story short, mum eventually discovered who it was and had to approach the neighbour about it, who was mortified. So to this day I'm not keen on having curtains open!

Always. The house is overlooked and the curtains keep the house warm.

Yes but only upstairs. I pull the kitchen blind before we eat in an evening as our neighbour's window is inches from ours at 90 degrees so he can see straight in.

My DP never used to close his curtains before he moved in with me as he liked to be woken by sunlight. But it was a bungalow and not overlooked.

The same, but recently have curtains for the bedroom as was getting fed up of full sun in my face at 4am in high summer!

exactly, even if there were no lights outside, in the summer the sum comes up early!

Yes. We have an LED streetlamp right outside our house that is brighter than the sun so have blackout blinds/curtains on all the windows which are closed as soon as the streetlamp comes on.

Yes, always, even in the kitchen which faces the garden and isn't overlooked in anyway. I hate looking out and seeing the dark.
I don't feel settled in the evening until the curtains are drawn in all rooms and I often close them before it gets dark just so I can feel relaxed.

In winter to keep the heat in and cheer up the room. In summer to stand a chance of sleeping beyond sunrise and to keep the heat out.

We close the curtains in the lounge when it gets dark but never close the curtains in the bedroom. Like others we're rural so nobody can see in and there are no street lights to block out. I hate feeling closed in at night. Curtains open, window open (except on the very coldest of nights) and bedroom door open.

I wear an eye mask anyway so this still doesnt bother me.

In the bedroom i do but i hardly ever close the blinds and curtains in the rest of the house because we live rurally and no one ever walks past our house.

A lot of these answers seem backwards to me
Not overlooked so I leave the curtains open?
So... you're isolated and therefore the only people likely to be looking in your house are there deliberately for nefarious purposes (peepers or scoping for a burglary) and unlikely to be noticed by your ( most likely perfectly innocent) neighbours and reported
This makes no sense to me.

I get not wanting to be looked at by nosy neighbours, but not being "overlooked" does not equal not being seen by anyone

Unless your gardens are floodlit all evening you can't KNOW that no one is out there

We don't even have curtains in our room.

We then wake up to our amazing view.

Always.

Where I lived growing up we backed onto farmland so my parents never used to bother closing the curtains downstairs, only upstairs when getting undressed/dressed for bed in winter with the light on.

That was until a local man was arrested for being a peeping tom. Apparently he used to creep along the back of the houses on our road looking in a people at night. One of our neighbours had his suspicions, followed him one night and caught him. Creeped me out. I've never forgotten it.

Oh, and he also pinched some knickers off the washing line that Mum had forotten to get in.

When I'm watching a film or something where a villain is in the garden looking in at people I always say - shut the bloody curtains!!!!

Upstairs - yes. Definitely. We’re in Scotland and would be up at 4am if we left upstairs curtains open.
downstairs we close the front ones in winter to stop people seeing in but almost never the back ones as our back decking is very closed in. It’s not overlooked. Nobody could get in there without setting off the security light.

We don't have curtains and I hate it! I'd really like some, or some blinds in the bedroom and living room. DH wont have them though. We do have shutters and used to have them down for sleeping but DH thinks they rattle too much now so they have to stay up . I don't sleep well for half the year! I still usually put them down in the DC's rooms when its not dark else they don't sleep.

Bedrooms yes as I would wake up at silly o'clock each morning.

Downstairs - only when it's really cold or when we want to watch TV and the sun hasn't set yet as we get afternoon sun in the living room.
Dining room - we get morning sun so I close it when I eat breakfast.

Always.

Apart from the privacy aspect, none of us can sleep well when there are short nights in the summer, so we have blackout blinds as well as curtains.

I open my curtains for a few hours in the morning then they're shut.

I prefer the dark.

Always. We lived rurally growing up and didn't even have curtains/blinds in the living room and many other rooms. Our house backed onto farmland so no neighbours to overlook us. Then the house was burgled along with some other neighbours and police thought that the burglars had been scoping out the houses beforehand. I don't know whether they did or not but they'd have been able to stand in the dark field at night and look into our living room and see everything in it, including me and my brother and sisters.

Mum and dad got curtains after the burglary.

I do.

I understand in certain protestant traditions curtains were not closed, at least in rooms other than bedrooms, to indicate you had nothing to hide. Not sure if that continues.