shutters up.

Do you ever obsess over what should be the simplest things? I had such a hard time trying to choose the shutter dogs for our shutters. I didn't even realize there was a choice in such things (or that they were even called shutter dogs) until I started to look for them. I did so much online research and drive by photo snapping that I ended up with a folder full of photos - of shutter dogs!

Taken in Princeton, NJ over the summer; propeller:

Rat tails:

"S" variety:

"S" variety mounted on the side:

Taken in Historic Richmondtown, Staten Island, NY:

Scroll variety:

Crude yet minimal replacement on the same building:

For our own shutters, we've chosen the "S" variety. This is really more a choice of economy rather than an actual decision. We happened across two new old stock sets of "S" shutter dogs at a yard sale a few weeks back. They were $1 a box! It looks like we even saved 60 cents on the original price.

As of last week, the shutters are finally up on the house.

Before:

We now also have 7 different colors of paint on the house. This is the first time I've seen the grey we chose against the house. I love it. I'm not a "paint a patch and see what it looks like" kind of person - I chose this from a tiny swatch and bought it all at once. Relief.

We still need to find shutters for the upper floors. The other shutters we inherited had too much rot to salvage. Now, I can start obsessing over shutters.

shutters for the day!

We luckily inherited most of our original storm windows for the house when we bought it. They were stacked in the basement:

And some of the original shutters too!

There are signs that they were once mounted outside:

If you look closely, you can see the dirty outline where they once were:

We had our local handyman take the best shutters to prime for us - we had 4 still in good condition. He brought them over today and gave them a preliminary hanging before Fernando paints them.

We purchased some of the hardware we were missing many months ago - it's a perfect fit. We'll be painting the hardware black and we will need to order more. We bought everything that was available in stock at the time from Reiman's Hardware.

I'll have to hunt around for the outer hardware too.

Temporarily in place! Now I'm thinking I might need wider window boxes...

I really can't wait to start working on the exterior trim paint. It will be nice to not have to look at that peeling yellow paint when I come home from work... too bad, we're still quite a ways off from that reality.

shut up!

Back when we were trying to close (another story for another day) all we had were photos to obsess over. What colors we were going to pick for inside and how we could spice up the outside. Now we are so far away from choosing paint colors... you need smooth walls with no holes in them for paint right? F. decided to clean up a photo of the house taken in the winter. I immediately decided that we needed shutters. Don't you agree?


When we had pulled off enough vines to see the front windows, my mother noticed hardware on the sides of the windows. I knew that visually it needed shutters but we didn't actually know that it had had shutters at one time! Then, Sunday night poking around the basement near the original storm windows stacked up in a pile, we had an amazing find - 8 of the original shutters! I know we are no where near putting the shutters back up but it's a nice feeling knowing I don't have to have them made and that we can just take them to our refinisher to get painted. I know there's enough to do all of the large windows on the front so eventually we'll have to have the two smaller 3rd floor window shutters made. But I don't care. I'm happy we have the original shutters.