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A few weeks uh months ago now, I showed you some photos of the lovely new shutters that Stefan and his dad built for the front of our house. They nearly lost a few fingers in the process because they were building these when it was -10°C (14°F) outside, but I assure you that all appendages are fully functioning again.

Once the weather was finally warm enough for the paint to not freeze before we could get it on the shutters, we began the task of water sealing (that was actually all Stefan) and painting the shutters. The initial thought was that Stefan would use his air compressor and spray gun to paint them — which generally would have worked fine except for it was just insanely loud. To the point that Mackenzie would have a meltdown every time the machine was turned out. And it was certainly not something we could use on Sunday’s since that is “quiet day” in Germany.

So we settled for using paint rollers and would have finished them all up about 2 weeks ago…except we needed another bucket of paint. So after picking that up the day after my arm surgery, we finally got all the shutters painted with two good coats of blue-green water based acrylic paint. We found a stencil that we love a couple years ago when we started repainting the shutters on the courtyard side of the house but I think we discovered why the previous owner used a really simple sponge-painted flower last time around — stenciling over cracks between pieces of wood is not at all easy. But we managed. And I have to say that they really look fantastic!

I’m pretty amazed at how the paint dried, because the shutters almost look and feel plastic, despite being solid wood. I can only hope that this means they are extra water tight … and that we won’t have to think about rebuilding any of these for another 10 years!

This weekend, Stefan put up two of the last shutters which were a bit of a mission thanks to a tweak the previous owner made to the latches which fold up to hold the shutters against the house. Apparently, he nearly ripped one out of the wall at some point so he attached a brace to the latch to hold the shutter in place…but unfortunately the shutters we’d built were too thick to fit in that brace. So Stefan had to get out the metal cutting wheel on the Dremel and his hammer to brute force the brace off.

We only have the two uppermost shutter to go…and they are the hardest because there is no where to support them once you get them out of the small windows…plus my left arm is definitely not quite back to full capacity yet.

It sure is nice to have them back up…the house has so much more character with the shutters — especially brand new pretty ones instead of the old peeling, decomposing onces And we sure do sleep better knowing our shutters are no longer at risk of fall down on someone’s head at any moment.

Now I just need to worry with getting some flowers to put back in the window boxes so they look as pretty as the shutters. We usually put begonias in there which look nice…but the containers dry out super quickly when it’s hot (hence the blue bottles in there to give water during the summer) and I’d really like something I could over-winter. I know that can be done with begonias…I just haven’t worked out how to do that exactly myself…or where.

How about a round of applause for Stefan and his dad who did a really excellent job building these shutters!