When you live in an apartment building, you must get used to the fact that you might hear and see your neighbors more than you expect.

But there is also an expectation of privacy, and if someone is making a point of staring into your house, well then, you may have to take matters into your own hands.

In this story, a person was so uncomfortable with repeatedly catching their neighbor staring into their home that they decided to cover an enormous wall of windows in reflective film.

AITA for putting “ugly” one way mirrors on the windows facing one of my neighbors because I saw the husband looking in my windows?

I live in an apartment on the ground floor of a house that was converted to apartments.

My neighbors (one street over but the back of their house faces the back of the house I live in) can see my whole backyard and vice versa.

Sounds like what they really need is a fence.

My apartment has a whole wall of windows that are on the back of the house.

It’s gorgeous and is a big reason I picked the place, I love keeping plants and it let in a lot of light.

Looking out, there is the neighbors backyard which is large and comes up close to my place, the property line is maybe 10 or 15 feet from my windows.

The windows were a major draw to the property for this resident, but they also came with a major draw back.

Once it has gotten to be warm out I’ve noticed the husband of the family who owns that house looking into my apartment a lot.

Even sometimes I’ll look up and see him, look away then look back minutes later and he’s still looking.

What a creep! Now, we’ve all had the experience of accidentally getting a peek inside someone else’s home, but making a point of staring is wildly inappropriate.

So I started shutting the shades during the day but that was kind of annoying, my place is a dark cramped shoebox without the windows open.

And I can’t do that for too long because the plants were struggling without light.

As a fellow plant-lover, I understand the problem. Maybe what she really needs is a wall of vines.

So I bought these window coverings that make windows into one way mirrors.

During the day when it is light out, my windows look just like mirrors now.

It works for her, but I can imagine the wall of mirrors are going ot be highly annoying to everyone else in the neighborhood.

From the inside it looks pretty much the same, the windows look tinted slightly darker but that’s it.

From the outside you can’t see in at all, it looks exactly like mirrors.

The section of windows it’s applied to is about 8 feet high and 20 feet wide.

That was quite the installation!

After a week of the window coverings being up, both of the parents from the neighbors house came to my door and wanted to talk to me.

The wife was complaining about the windows for a lot of reasons…

You have to agree her reasons are actually pretty valid.

1. They were ugly
2. It was uncomfortable, especially for the teens and their friends, to have a huge mirror adjacent to the swimming pool. It’s at a time that they feel insecure about looks and they have lost interest in hanging out by the pool.
3. In the afternoon and evening, it was reflecting a lot of extra sunlight into their backyard, they couldn’t enjoy eating dinner on the back porch with the sun in their eyes.

The glare alone may be causing na actual neighborhood nuisance.

But the woman stood firm. She had her reasons.

I said sorry about the inconvenience but I wanted it for privacy.

They both pushed back on that some and I said that I needed privacy because of the husband’s starting.

Uh-oh. Now the chickens have come home to roost.

He started denying it in front of his wife and so I took out my phone where I’d taken pictures and sent it to my group of friends, and showed her a couple pictures of him gaping at my apartment and the texts from that time.

The audacity of this man to claim that he wasn’t creeping on her when she had textual proof!

He got mad and said he incidentally looked over, and the 8 foot by 20 foot mirror was a crazy overreaction.

It might be an overreaction, but also she felt unsafe.

I said that I’d like to keep it, and that I was sorry but frankly this was avoidable.

I think they’re both mad because they called my landlord, who brushed them off.

The couple even tried to go around her and complain to her landlord.

AITA for putting the mirrored film on my windows?

It’s a complicated issue, and in the comments, people were torn.

Obviously, this person has the right to privacy in her own home, but were there other solutions?

This person said that any action she took to protect herself from this creep was A-OK.

Similarly, even her landlord doesn’t think it’s a problem and is on her side. As this person says, they are the ones who need to make a change.

But there are issues with mirroring the entire back wall of your house and she is actually causing a public nuisance to her neighbors, as well as local wildlife.

This person points out how she could actually be causing real harm to the plants and animals that may share the space. There are apparently other privacy-friendly options that may work better for birds.

And the glare is a true defect. While these neighbors may have an issue with the aesthetics, only the fact hat she is shining a light into their homes as a result may be actionable as a public nuisance.

He caused this problem himself.

What a weirdo.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.