Reclaimed Wood Shutters

In this blog post, I’ll show you how we took our lake home from drab to fab with these awesome reclaimed wood shutters! When we purchased our lake home, we knew it had good bones, but knew the exterior needed some updating! The home colors were originally brown with mustard stripes and mustard trim (see below). We freshened the house up by painting it with PPG 1027-4 Olive Gray for the body and then a creamy off-white for our trim. We loved it after painting it but we knew it still needed something. 

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Remember the fence boards we did for the wall in the basement? If you need a refresher on how we cleaned and prepared those boards, here’s the link to the blog post . We decided to use some of those boards to make reclaimed wood shutters! I wanted a simple shutter-nothing real fancy because it wouldn’t fit with the simple style of the home. We measured the windows themselves and made the boards the same length as the height of the windows (not the frame) and then spaced the boards out about a 1/2 inch apart. Then, we cut a cross-board to attach the three boards together. We used our air nailer to attach the boards together, with minimal hardware exposed. 

Here are the reclaimed wood shutters after we put them together. Then, we decided on a stain that we had leftover from a recent deck project. I brushed it on with a throw-away chip brush. The wood was so old, that the stain was absorbed rather quickly! I chose to do all of this project on our concrete driveway because the weather was great and I didn’t have to worry about getting it anywhere. Below is a picture of the stained reclaimed wood shutter. Big difference, huh??

Then, we took the reclaimed wood shutters to our lake home. We finished touching up the paint (top picture) and then put the reclaimed wood shutters on the home. Due to the simplicity of our home’s exterior and the varying heights due to the batons (little boards running horizontally), we decided to just use some long screws to screw the reclaimed wood shutters directly to the home. See the bottom picture? That’s the finished project! 

Well, what do you think?? Think it made a huge difference? For a simple lake home, we love the difference it made! Have you made shutters for your home? I’d love to see them! Email the before and after pictures to me!