Shutters

I can't tell you how happy I am that tomorrow is Friday!  This has been a long week at work, and all I want to do is be home to focus on getting organized for the yard sale.  Hopefully I will have some time tomorrow night to do the pricing and (fingers crossed) dig up more items to put out for sale.  I am so excited.  It's a little strange actually.  I always hated waking up really early when I was younger and my mom was having a yard sale.  I would always be on sign duty and I would purposely take longer than necessary so I would avoid dragging out and setting up all of the items.  I was such a brat when I was a teenager.  I hope my kids aren't like that down the road.  But seeing as though I am a lot more like my mother than I thought I EVER would be....it might already be written in the cards.  I also think it has something to do with the fact that I'm not a morning person.  I never was and probably never will be.  I can stay up all hours of the night...and I usually do....but for some reason I am just grumpy when the alarm goes off the next morning.  6 am always comes too quickly!  The funny thing is that I don't really like to sleep in either.  Occasionally, depending on the previous nights' events, I will snooze a bit longer than usual, but since we moved into the house, it has been rise and shine and paint/sand/caulk/build/miter at 7ish every morning.  The motivation to finish our projects usually kicks in around 8-8:30, but that first hour is brutal.  Just ask my husband.  And I know that my attitude is going to have to change when we have kids, but for now, I will enjoy my grumpiness while it lasts!! 

But enough rambling.....onto the more important news of the day......we ordered shutters!!  YAY!  This is step 2 of the exterior transformation (at least for this year).  Step 1 was the installation of the storm doors last weekend.  We still need to paint the other door black, but we are close to finishing up that project too!! 

But back to the shutters.  We have been looking around for a while, discussing options and budgets and styles, but we could never pull the trigger on it.  Finally last week, while browsing the Home Depot website, I noticed that they were having a sale (online only) on their Builder's Edge shutters.  I'm not sure how long the deal lasts, but it saves you about $10 off each pair of shutters if your order is placed online.  PLUS, with free shipping on orders over $249, it makes it a pretty easy decision!  We knew all along that we wanted to add shutters to the house to give it a bit more dimension, but the budget wasn't really allowing us to take the plunge.  Depending on the material (vinyl, wood, aluminum, etc.) the price ranged from between $35-$150/pair.  With this sale though, it is a lot more affordable, so we bit the bullet and decided to go for it.  I really would have loved to go with wood, since our siding is original to the house, but vinyl will last longer and stand up better to our tough New England winters.  And keeping with the rest of our exterior house plan, we chose black shutters to coordinate with the new black storm doors and eventually the garage doors (which will be painted black soon).  The instructions seem to be pretty straight forward, so I'm hoping to have these up next week before we head out on our vacation (which I will talk more about later on).  It's a relatively inexpensive ($28.13/pair) change to make for the house, but I think its going to make a really big difference. 



Photo Credit



The other detail that I forgot to mention is that we went with the louvered look.  I considered board and batten (which is beautiful), as well as raised panel (also really lovely), but after taking a stroll around the neighborhood the other day, I noticed that our collective style leans more towards the traditional look.  AKA louvered doors.  Board and batten would have been my first choice if our house were more country looking, or even an antique or victorian style.  That brought me down to two choices, and ultimately I felt that the raised panel looked a little more contemporary than the louvered (which is usually a good thing), but considering the age of the house (45+) and the style (colonial), I went with the louvered ones. 

Photo Credit

I'll keep you updated on our progress of this project, as well as the yard sale in the next few days.  The shutters just shipped out this morning, so I'm hoping they will get here by next Wednesday!!