DIY Window Shutters

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Once Stephen finished up his man-shed, it was my turn to put in some feminine touches. You gotta keep a balance, right??

My first idea was to build shutters for the window. Turns out, it was SO easy to do. And cheap! I looked up some tutorials online and combined some together to create mine. Here is what I did…

My plan was to build the shutters to be the entire length of the window, including the top and bottom trim. Our window was about 3.5 feet in length, and I wanted to do three posts for each shutter. I went to Home Depot and bought three 8-foot pieces of fence post. They were $2.50 each, so I spent $7.50 total on the wood.

I measured the window + trim precisely (43.25 inches, in my case), and cut the 8-foot pieces into 6 smaller pieces that length.

Fence posts are probably about 1″ x 3″. They are more rough than typical 1x4s.

Once the pieces were cut, I lined them up in place to make sure they all were the same size, and that I liked how they looked together.

Since our window isn’t very big, I thought that three wood pieces together would be a good size, and wouldn’t overwhelm the window.

I put wood glue on one side of the wood and pressed the next piece onto it. I clamped the pieces together and let them dry.

I repeated the process for the third piece of wood, and then again for the other shutter.

Once the shutters were together, I started working on the cross pieces. Let me say… there are a hundred different ways you could design your shutters with cross pieces. I preferred the simpler look (again, these shutters are not huge, so I didn’t want it to be too much), so I went with a horizontal piece across the top and bottom. I didn’t have enough fence post wood (Doh!) but luckily I found some extra wood that was a perfect size. (These were actually left over pieces from our board and batten project).

I cut the cross pieces to size and used wood glue to keep them in place. I clamped these down to apply pressure.

After a few hours of letting the wood glue dry, I screwed the cross pieces into the fence post. I used three exterior screws and put one screw into each slat of wood. I filled these holes with wood filler (along with a couple of cracks that occurred from the drilling) and let them dry overnight.

The next day, I sanded the wood filler and got to painting! I went with Rust-oleum black paint for interior and exterior. We had this already, so I didn’t have to purchase anything extra. It took 3 coats in total, plus I did a coat of polyurethane on top. This took most of the day… painting, letting it dry, painting again, etc. Painting is always the most time-consuming part!

It was a little freaky at first… this goes on navy, but dries black! I was shaking that can for about 10 minutes, trying to make it black before I realized that’s how it’s supposed to be. 😉

Time for install! It was so easy… we positioned them using a level, and made sure the heights of the shutters matched up. We used 3″ exterior screws and put two in the top and two in the bottom on each shutter.