Hey Everyone! Today I wanted to share with you a fun post. These past two days were super busy but SO worth all of the sweat. It was 90 degrees here in N.C and we were disgusting by the time our work was done, but what a transformation it was. Back when we bought our house, I knew exactly how I wanted the house to look. I had a vision and today my vision came to life. My husband took down the old shutters, hosed the house off, painted the house Alabaster by Sherwin Williams, then hung these beautiful shutters. The best part about these, besides how they look, is that they are super budget friendly and so easy to make. We saw what Holly and Brad @ourfauxfarmhouse on Instagram did and we switched it up a bit for our own version. Check out how we did it here.
Before starting the project you will need to measure your window size. Make sure to measure all of the windows and jot it down. We swore all of our windows were the same size until we measured and the two in our garage were actually 2 inches bigger. You want the shutters to be the same size as your measurements.
*Once that is done, here is what you will need –
Cedar fence pickets is what we used. At only $2.98 a piece, it cost us less than $11. per shutter for the wood.
Sanding block
Stain (optional)
Thompson’s WaterSeal Multi surface Waterproofer
Nail gun and 1 1/2 inch nails
Since we don’t have a table saw, the nice guy at Lowe’s cut the wood for me. I went one day and got enough wood for 2 shutters, so 14 pieces of wood to be cut. I got home and the hubby and I built them that night and loved them. It looked great and I was ready to go back to get the other wood(28 more pieces to be cut) to complete the other 4 windows. Well what are the chances that I end up getting the same guy to cut the wood for me? Yup that is my luck. He even remembered the measurement of the previous trip. But anyway he was super nice, and I promised I wouldn’t be back for a while.
So first you want to get the wood cut to the size needed. We knew we wanted to do 3 pieces of wood for each shutter and 2 across for the cross braces. If you are going with the cedar fence pickets, they are about 5.5 inches wide, so we made the cross braces 17 inches long and left about a 1/4 inch gap between the pieces of wood. Lay it all out on the ground and see where you like the cross braces. We chose to do 10 inches from the top and bottom of the shutter for the 65 inch shutters. For the 67 inch shutters, we chose to do 11 inches from each side. Once you have it all set and ready to go, just use nails to assemble. As you can see, the hubs did about 4 to 5 nails through the top of the cross brace for each piece of wood. It seemed to hold together extremely well. And once all assembled it is time to sand the edges. Because this is an outdoor piece, I personally didn’t feel the need to sand all of the wood down. Plus I chose not to stain them.
****If you are going to stain your shutters, you may want to sand them down and stain them before assembling****
Once they are all ready to go, we chose Thompson’s WaterSeal Multi surface waterproofer. I wore gloves as you can see and used a paint brush to apply. The can said only one coat was needed. It dried pretty quickly and we really loved the way it looked when it was all sealed. This will protect it from the rain and all the elements which is really nice. It looks milky but it goes on and dries clear.
Then let them dry and get those babies hung up!
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