September 2011

You want to learn how to make wood shutters for your house?  Today I’m your gal.

We live in a super windy city, and over the summer a particularly vicious storm ripped off what was left of the plastic window shutters on the front of our house.  The plastic cheap-os have been driving Viktor crazy forever, so he decided to take action and make some wood shutters on his own.

You cannot BELIEVE how easy this project was.  Peasy.

The new wood shutters on the front of the house make the curb appeal so much greater, and they took literally one afternoon to make.  In fact, we loved the new version so much we plastered the entire house with wood shutters over the course of a slow weekend.

And as always, when I say “we” I mean Viktor and the children.  I usually sit inside the air conditioned house working and come out to approve the final project.  We’re a good team Viktor and I.

Here’s how it went down:

Step 1:

Buy fence slats from Home Depot.  {this is not sponsored; we spend half our earnings at that bloody store, including the supplies for these wood shutters}

Step 2:

Assuming you have a wood saw {or someone you love has one}, measure and trim the rugged ends off the fence slats.  We used three across to make our shutters.

Step 3:

Measure the width of the shutters, including your preferred spacing between them, and cut two short slats to go across the front.

Step 4:

Once you’re happy with the way it’s all lined up, it’s time for the nail gun.  The nail gun is the best part of any project, it really burns that aggression.

Alleged aggression.

Put a bunch of nails into the two thin slats across the front of the shutters, until you get this:

Ta da!  Wood shutters.

Step 5:

Flip the shutters over, and using a hammer flatten all the nails sticking out.  Those will scratch stuff up, and nobody needs that.

Step 6:

Show off the fabulous legs God gave you. {Sexy husband sold separately}

That’s it.

You can see that we made a good handful of these to shutter every window in the house.

What you choose to do with the shutters is up to you.  You can stain them, leave them, paint them, oil them.  It’s your rodeo, not mine.  We chose to slather ours in waterproof black oil paint.  We need all the weatherproofing help we can get for our house.  The wind is insane, really.

They make a huge difference to the aesthetic of the house, so much so that they almost make up for the lack of a white picket fence.

Almost.

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