hudebnik | home improvement

In summer 2019, we had all the second-floor windows replaced (except one in the bathroom that they convinced me was better left alone). In preparation for that, I took down the plastic slat-blinds in the two office windows and partially dismantled the window frames. We started looking for wooden shutters to put in the windows, but everything we found at Home Depot seemed too plasticky.

In summer 2020, we had the spare-bedroom/office renovated: the paneling and plaster came down, replaced with drywall, the acoustic-tile ceiling came down, replaced with drywall, and among other things the window frames were finally rebuilt.

shalmestere found some used wooden shutters on E-Bay that were almost the right size, and mail-ordered them.

As of yesterday, Jan. 10, 2021, the shutters are finally installed. There were some stumbling blocks.

Each set of shutters had one broken slat, which we repaired with glue, a bamboo skewer from the kitchen, and some plastic wood, then paint over.

Each set of shutters had a wooden strip to screw into (and in turn to be screwed into the window frame) on one side, but not the other, so I had to make two more wooden strips.

The shutters without wooden strips had partial hinges to attach them to said strips. I went to Home Depot and bought four matching hinges to replace all the existing ones.

The new hinges were somewhat thicker than the existing ones, so I could no longer get away with attaching them to the surface: I had to chisel out rabbets for them so the hinge surfaces would be flush with the wood and the hinges could close completely.

I chiseled rabbets on the shutter edge first, then lined up the wooden strip next to it to mark where the rabbet on the wooden strip needed to be. Some of the rabbets as I had originally placed them conflicted with the existing holes in the wooden strips for attaching said strips to the window frame, so I had to re-chisel the rabbets, fill the old rabbets with plastic wood, and paint over them.

Using four wooden strips the same size as the two they came with made the shutters about half an inch too wide to fit in the windows, and the "right" width wasn't any standard lumber width, so I had to plane some of them down. Through a sequence of trial and error, all four strips are now slightly different widths.

The two windows aren't exactly the same width, so I had to keep track of which two shutters, and which two strips, went in the right window and which in the left.

The first time I put things together, which I think was Jan. 7, I installed the shutters in the left-hand window, and they were a little too wide: they fit very tightly in the window, and didn't quite lie flat. The next morning when I tried to place the shutters in the right-hand window, they fit with half an inch to spare, so I decided to swap one shutter from the right window with one from the left, in hopes that both would then fit nicely.

So I did that, and the widths came out right, but then the hooks and handles didn't match up because the shutters from the right window had them at different heights than the shutters from the left window.

One fix could have been to move the hooks and handles, but I thought that would be a highly-visible hack. So instead I swapped the shutter back to the window it had come from, and swapped only the strips (which were distinctly different widths).

But swapping which strip went with which shutter meant the hinges didn't exactly line up, so I had to move two of the rabbets again (and fill the gaps with plastic wood, and paint over them).

Anyway, it's done now, and one can walk into the office or through the hallway naked without flashing the world outside.