NtB Hates: Fake Shutters
By Christa TerryLiving, as I do, in a town where enough of the houses have remained relatively unchanged (outside, at least) from their construction in the early 1800s and late 1700s, I see a lot of real wood shutters. Real wood shutters on hinges that actually work, I mean. Unfortunately, I also see a lot of houses sporting vinyl shutters nailed directly into siding (wood and otherwise)… this includes *shudder* my own little Cape. Please trust me when I say we’re going to take care of this, but we’re focusing on the inside of the house where we, ya know, actually live first before doing much to the exterior. And yet, knowing as I do that we’ll eventually rip off the faded vinyl siding to expose the original wood shingles underneath and replace the ugly faux shutters with cute real ones that actually work, I am still mortified when I look at my house and see something like this:
What I much rather see is something a bit more like this:
Real shutters rock for so many reasons, not the least of which being that you can move them to clean behind them so wasps don’t have a chance to set up shop. Real shutters can be used for privacy and shade, and they just look nicer, being to scale (unlike oddly small vinyl shutters that wouldn’t even cover the window if they worked) and having all manner of nice hardware.
So why am I not rushing out right now to order custom wood shutters along with the appropriate hardware? Because custom wood shutters can be rather expensive – whether you’re talking board & batten, louvers, or panels, you’re talking $100 per half a shutter (ouch). The good news is that The Beard and I are finally getting off our butts and starting to do renovations that go beyond painting – think hanging drywall and so on – so we’re feeling pretty good about our ability to make our own working wooden board & batten shutters once we start tackling the outside of the house.
March 29th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Fake shutters are legion up here, and I hate them too. They tend to be epidemic on houses where the people chose a really blah colour of siding, and so pick colourful shutters to make the place look more interesting. Why they don’t just pick interesting-looking siding in the first place is beyond me.
March 30th, 2010 at 9:39 am
Around here, I think they’re a way of trying not to stray too far from the New England aesthetic even when you’re building a condo block or a triple decker or some other non-traditional sort of housing. But the thing is there’s so much original housing from the 1700s and early 1800s that it just ends of looking silly, like people are trying too hard.