Our poor old house needed a makeover. We put on some fresh white paint and replaced decaying shingles last year (Beginning the Transformation) but she was still dressed in boring brown. We’ve just added some bright window “makeup” to help her look beautiful.

Our home’s attic is a treasure trove. We were fortunate that the previous owners kept everything! One of our “finds” was storm windows, screens, and shutters for the whole building. We were very surprised, since we didn’t know our house originally had shutters! However, they all needed stripping and painting. After a shocking quote for having someone else do the work, David decided to do it himself. He began the process in May, and worked evenings and weekends for the next three months to finish the job.

All You Need to Know about Window Screens

The work may be tedious, but screens are actually more interesting than you might expect. When David started stripping, he discovered that many of the screens were originally a light green color. He painted them white for now, but we may think about changing them in the future. The original house was far more colorful than we had imagined.

I walked around Cranbury to see what other homes did for painted screens. I was surprised to discover that very few of the homes here have any. It turns out that most of these homes are too old for screens. Window screens didn’t become popular until the 1890s, when it was discovered that mosquitoes and flies carried diseases. Public health officials and wire cloth manufacturers promoted window and door screens as the first line of defense.

Once the screens were painted, David had to figure out what went where. Fortunately, one of the great features of our old house is window numbers. Each window jamb has a small brad with a number on it, and each screen has a matching brad….in theory. Most of these were missing from our windows, so once we figured out where they went, we purchased tacks from House of Antique Hardware and put them back.

The Big Shutter Puzzle

The next big job was stripping and painting the shutters. While most of the shutters in the attic were white, we know that was not the original color–our best guess is either black or dark green. It’s possible that there were two colors, black on the main floor and green on the upper floor. Since we don’t have a color photograph, we may never know. We do have a hand-colored black-and-white photograph where the shutters are colored a dark green. From previous experience, however, we know that the colors in these types of photographs cannot always be trusted. Given that the shingles have now aged to a dark brown, we wanted to add a little more life to the exterior with a slightly brighter color. After lots of searching on Pinterest and looking at historical colors, we narrowed it down to two colors, made sample boards of each, and made our choice. And the winner is…. Benjamin Moore’s Hillside Green.

 

When we took the shutters out of the house, we had no idea where they all went–or even if they were all there. Since most of the windows and shutters still had their hinges, getting it right mattered. We discovered no less than three different numbering systems on the shutters! None of them seemed to make sense. Some of the shutters had a number in pencil in addition to two sets of contradictory Roman numerals cut into the side.

Once all of the shutters were painted, we tried to pair them up. Our biggest clue for getting started? One pair of shutters was shorter than the others. It could only be for one of two windows. We discovered that the penciled number (34) matched up with our master bathroom window tack. Then we found two shutters marked with 33. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, we didn’t have penciled numbers on all of the shutters. We had to switch to figuring out some of the Roman numerals. I think, in the end, we were pretty accurate with the placement. And we were short only two shutters. One of them was a long folded shutter for the north side of the house and the other was the shutter for an attic window. This is the only attic window with shutters, so we are debating if we will even buy a replacement.

The Big Reveal

It’s amazing what a little makeup will do! The exterior still isn’t perfect, but perhaps it’s time for a little reminder of how far we have come in the last 15 months.