Shutters are the mascara of a house. The finishing touch. The "ooh, what pretty eyes windows you have". It's what makes your house "pop" and one way you can accessorize your house. And although brown mascara would probably look more natural on me, I go with black. The same goes with our shutters. It's time for the black plague to spread to our shutters. From far away, they seemed to be in great shape, so why buy new ones when you can spray paint them for fairly cheap?
Obviously the first step is removing the shutters. With a drill in hand, Ehren climbed out the window and pried them off.
I gave him many words of encouragement, told him he was doing a great job, reminded him not to fall and then I got distracted by our pretty hostas and had to take a picture. #nofilter <-- that's a thing, right?
After all four shutters came down, our house looked naked and ashamed. But don't those new windows look good all by themselves?
I washed off the shutters pretty well to get rid of cob webs, mud dauber's nests, bugs, etc. so that I would have a clean slate to spray paint.
You can see how gross the back of them looked.
And you can also see that their original color was probably that very blue blue.
Then after washing them off, I realized "these shutters aren't brown, they're green!" I guess the brown dirt that has been covering them for years made me think less green and more brown. Either way, they are going to be black by the time I'm done with them.
I laid them out in the sun to dry thoroughly.
Then I used satin black spray paint to paint these bad boys. I'm pretty sure there is now a hole in the o-zone layer above our house because of this project. I used spray paint instead of a can of paint because of all the slats. I've painted closet doors with slats like these and I ruined my brush and almost lost my mind due to impatience.
Since spray paint dries very quickly, we were able to put the shutters back up in no time. They were screwed in at different places on the shutters and we needed to make sure they lined up with the pre-drilled holes. After 15 minutes of trying to figure out which shutter went where, I said aloud, "we should have numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4 when we took them down!" Then we looked at the back of the shutters and they were already numbered. Doh!
After we almost not successfully hung the shutters, we had to do a "selfie Sunday" picture on the roof. That's a thing, too, right? Except I most definitely used a filter as I had no make-up on and probably had black spray paint splattered all over my face.
The best part was climbing back in the house, coming down the stairs, walking out the new storm door, then turning around to see the final product. It looked better than I imagined and made more of a difference than I anticipated. I love how crisp and clean it looks now.
Let's look waaay back, shall we? Before the new windows, before we ripped out the pathetic looking yews and before we painted the shutters.
Then before the black paint:
And after:
I didn't realize what a difference shutters make on a house. It reminds me of my blonde eyelashes and mascara. When the shutters were off, the house looked blank and boring. But with the shutters on, it draws your eye to the windows and the contrast and the framing it does to the house. Much like how different I look with and without mascara on. It's like the finishing touch to a house and what makes it feel like a home rather than a cookie-cutter house. Now that we've painted our shutters, I notice everyone's shutters and think, "ooh, those would look cool if they were ____". With all the new spray paint colors available now, it's definitely worth considering painting and personalizing your shutters when you have a free afternoon. #nofilterneeded
