With our departure for Hong Kong just a few days away, we are racing to get all our (not so) little projects around the house accomplished. We’ve already landscaped with mulch and stone, closed off basement windows, backfilled dirt up against the foundation, cut down trees, ripped out junk, dug up hundreds of rocks and landscape stones from a previous owner, and more, and more, and on and on!

This weekend, like most weekends, we thought we’d tackle a three or four hour project, that if we started by noon, we’d be finished by 5:30, in time to make our family going-away party at Laura’s parent’s house. The project? Remove, paint, and reattach our window shutters. No biggie, right? Well, like I said, our estimation of time needed for a project would be a lot closer to being correct if we doubled the time we felt would be needed. It seems like every time I start something, the process goes much slower in reality than it takes in my mind. Oh well.

We spent this weekend taking down all our white, plastic shutters and painting them with spray paint. These shutters are thin and cheap. Because of this, they have some cracks in them where they have been impacted by a ladder (me) or dropped (by my wall insulation guys). Also, and the main reason we are painting them, is because they are cheap enough that they don’t have an ultraviolet inhibitor in them, so the UV rays from the sun have turned them all yellow. On a side note, the UV inhibitor in Vinyl and other products is made from a white pigment, so most often, plastic products that don’t turn yellow with age because they have the inhibitor in them will most often be white in color. Unfortunately for us, the previous owners bought these on the cheap, and the shutters have all turned a nasty, dingy yellowish-brown color.

Because of some of the shutters being cracked, and their poor quality, I was just going to replace them, until I found out it would be about $500 dollars to do so. Hmmm. We spent fifty dollars on spray paint instead. When this project has finally gone bad years from now, we’ll replace them at that point.

We bought six cans of spray paint and had to go back and get eight more! Isn’t that how it always is? Taking the shutters down wasn’t too hard. I did that on the ladder while Sweet Pea painted. We got her a nifty little tool that connects to a can of paint and acts like a trigger for your fingers. Instead of wearing out your finger pressing down on the nozzle of the spray can, you can “pull the trigger” and spray, and it is much easier on your hand, especially for a job with lots of spraying.

Once washed, painted, and dried, I hung them back up. It worked out well because she stayed just a little ahead of me, so there was always a new set of shutters to go up when I needed them. Putting them up was a bit more challenging because it is always easier to remove a screw than it is to put one in. However, the job is finished and we are proud of the work. Unfortunately, no one will really notice our handy work. Why? Because people expect things to look nice and only notice when something needs to be done! We wanted to leave one shutter up in the only dingy yellow color, so people could see what we did, but thought better of it.

Anyway, this two day deal is done and we are glad this project is now in the past!

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