Shutters Makeover

The exterior of our house always seemed to be missing something. Turns out we're one of the only houses on our street without shutters, and it really bothered my husband. I didn't notice until he said something and then of course I couldn't unsee it...*shutters at the lack of shutters.*

A little plain, right?

We started driving around, creeping on similar houses, trying to figure out what color and style to choose. Like most things, there's an overwhelming amount of options, and shutters ain't cheap. It would be hundreds of dollars to buy and mount new ones. So we tabled this endeavor and decided to finish some other small projects first.

One day, my husband randomly decided to go up into the attic above the garage, which was uncharted territory. We fully expected it to be gross and scary like the one above the house, which was covered in mold. Well, he goes up there and it's actually in great condition. Plus, there's treasure!

He found two expensive fishing poles and, you guessed it, THE OLD SHUTTERS. All ten of them! We each did a little happy dance and I almost cried. You'd have thought we found a million bucks. Luckily, they're the durable plastic kind and were all undamaged. They were navy, which doesn't really go with our gray blue siding so we decided to paint them black *cue Rolling Stones tune.*

And then two very coincidental things happened. My hubs had ordered a massive work out machine and it came in several very large boxes that were the prefect size for spray painting shutters. And then our garage door opener died and we couldn't park inside without manually dragging the door open and closed. So we turned our vacant two-car garage into our shutter workshop. It was like we were meant to do this project now - everything happens for a reason!

When the previous sellers redid the siding, they clearly ripped off the shutters and threw them in the attic because there were old spider nests, leaves, etc. still caked on the backs. We hosed them down (thoroughly) and had to cut off the old fasteners. Some of the fasteners had broken off in the brick, which they left behind for us to drill out.

We did the same Dixie Cup trick we used for painting out built-in's doors and drawers, and sprayed away. I did two coats, which took 6 cans of Rust-Oleum, and let them dry for a couple days.

We bought new fasteners from Home Depot and my husband got these bad boys back on the house where they belong. And they. Look. Awesome. 😍

It's crazy how something so simple makes us so happy. But we've been wanting to do this for months and the shutters make our house feel more like a home. And we were able to do it for just $50 and some elbow grease. Another to-do successfully crossed off the list.