Making a Complete Set of Shutters

First of, how was Puerto Rico?

It was really great. I don’t know what to say about it so I’ll leave you with some pictures.

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Back to cold Pennsylvania and the shutters. We’ve been leaning the lower tiers against the windows for privacy while I procrastinated on the uppers. So I laid them out in a row and my stomach dropped. I was short a matched pair. There was an extra set of left-side shutters, and they’re not interchangeable.

Anyways, I thought a little bit about how losing what I paid for the shutters wasn’t the end of the world and then I remembered the right side shutter I did have. The seller sent me one extra with some damaged louvers. They look chewed off actually. I wasn’t sure why I had it, but I had started using it to practice trimming and stripping. I held it up with the spare left-side paneled shutter and realized that if I lined up the panels, the hinges lined up! All I had to do was take another quarter inch off.

So, that leaves me with a complete set of shutters as long as we ignore the animal chew damage. And I wasn’t about to ignore that. So I decided to cannibalize the spare left-side shutter for louvers, which meant dismantling the mortise and tenon joinery of the chewed one to replace them. This scared me, but I got it apart with minimal damage. Except I destroyed all the wood wedges that used to hold the tenons in. The spare left-side shutter wasn’t so lucky; I cut it up to get the louvers out, and what’s left of it is going to turn into new tenon wedges.

So the good news is the louvers fit! The bad news is I have to finish putting it back together.

The next holdup was using the Irishman’s table saw. He constantly promised me I could use it, but the boys (pronounced buys) always had it. Finally, he took the shutters and trimmed them down for me and that meant I had no more excuses to put off refinishing them.

See, they’re uglier than you thought, right? But luckily, this messed up finish is shellac. Shellac dissolves in alcohol, so you can strip it without any scary chemicals. Better yet, when you dissolve it you basically turn it back into fresh shellac that you can paint back on. So, this means that if I brush out a LOT of denatured alcohol onto it, I can brush it around and it darkens up scratches for me. Also, if I screw up I and leave drips and smears, I can fix them easily enough just by using more alcohol next time. So I’m pretty happy with the way these look! (Ignore the blotches; it’s not done yet.)

Well, except that the colors don’t match. By the way, the panels do match. Every shutter has square sticking on one side and the stopped chamfers on the other. And the dark reddish one in this photo is lighter on the other side. Once I get old shellac onto the newly cut edges, they’re pretty close to the lighter color. So what do we think this is? Did sun exposure darken the wood? I’ve learned from Ross that stained woodwork from the Victorian era was often lighter than people think it was.

But with my shutters it doesn’t matter if the light color was historically accurate. I need them to all be the same color, and that means darkening them. Fortunately, the darker color is almost a perfect match to the TransTint dye that I used on my second floor doors. I added dye to an acrylic finish, and it did a really good job of evening out the color that remained in the wood after I stripped and trimmed them. (The color looks a little redder in this picture than in real life but you get the idea.)

So I’m looking forward to evening out these shutters the same way. My only complaint before was that the acrylic finish sometimes dried faster than I could get it evened out and my closet doors have a few smears. The good news though is that this dye also dissolves in shellac, so I’m going to do it that way and make the job (hopefully) screwup-proof.