Exterior Face Lift: Phase II

I am super pumped to let you know that our homemade shutters are complete and have been boosting our curb appeal for almost a week.

Aren't they bea-u-ti-ful?  My amazing husband spent many man hours constructing these babies and I am so grateful to him.  He pretty much took on this entire project by himself.  I also owe a big thank you to my father-in-law for supplying us with all of the lumber, to our super nice next door neighbor for loaning us his planer and table saw, and to my father for helping Seth hang them.

The lumber from my father-in-law was all rough-sawn so Seth used our neighbor's planer to smooth them down and ensure that they were all uniform thickness.  It created a mountain of saw dust.

Then he used a table saw to trim the sides of each board.

Don't let my lack of words fool you.  This was a lot of labor.  Hours and hours.  There were over 70 boards.  But at the end of it, we had some super smooth (free!) poplar.

Seth then followed this tutorial (thanks Ashley and Jamin!) to assemble the shutters.

Since we were planning to paint them, we spent some time sealing all of the cracks with paintable caulk.  I was having flashbacks to our old rotting shutters and wanted to make these as waterproof as possible.

Seth then primed and painted them.  We bought the same paint that we used for our front door (Valspar's Duramax Exterior paint in semi-gloss).  The color is Knight's Armor by Olympic.

My dad and Seth used 4" Tapcon concrete screws and our hammer drill to attach them to the house.  There are three screws holding each shutter.  Sadly, Seth could not find a countersink bit large enough to countersink the screw heads so he caulked over them (for more waterproof peace of mind) and then painted the caulk.  If you're up close you can see where the screw heads are, but it's the best we could do.

Seth is focusing in on the imperfections, but I think these shutters are such a vast improvement over what we previously had.  (Is any DIY ever absolutely perfect?)  They are so much more our style.  Just ignore the continued presence of the ugly green wrought iron columns (they are up coming down next).

A little more eye candy for you…

…and a closer peek at our front door Christmas wreath that I didn't get around to blogging about and our new shiny doorbell.

The wreath is a little asymmetrical and strange, but I love it anyway.

Happy New Year!!!