Shutters

As the weather is now beginning to feel autumnal, and rain might actually be a possibility soon - it's been a very dry summer - I've started to renovate the shutters on the farmhouse. The shutters are oak, and when new back in the 1920s must have looked pretty good. Now they are in very poor condition.



The picture above shows one of the corners, which are of course the most damaged areas, and the picture below shows one that I have dismantled:



The bolts on the hinges had to be ground off with the angle-grinder before I could take the framework off.

Here's a shutter in the course of being glued back together, though the original construction doesn't seem to have used any glue, just wooden pegs through the six mortice & tenon joints. The holes for the pegs can be seen in the picture above: the pegs knock out surprisingly easily with a drift. Quite a few were missing already.



The shutters below - a pair I did last week - could be dismantled without taking the hinges off, as the joints were open at the ends: the cross pieces could simply be slid out, either up or down, and reassembled with the four vertical planks of the shutter still together.



These have come up quite nicely, and should be good for a few more years - the weatherproof treatment will help, anyway. I am not so sure about the pair I am currently working on, as the wood is in worse condition. I will need to use some filler on a couple of the corners, but the resin-based stuff works very well, even though it shows afterwards: it doesn't take a stain.

The hardware shop didn't have any black japanned bolts for the hinges, so I am painting the mushroom heads, which will sit directly onto the wood, before fitting the bolts in place. That way I should be able to avoid getting paint onto the wood:



and I've put a coat of paint on the hinges too. I'll paint the other end of the bolt, the end with the nut that will be tightened up onto the hinge, when I've cut it to length and the shutters are finally back together.

Before starting today's shutters, I finished wiring up the lights in the workshop, so I should now be able to work there at all hours of the day. It's been quite cloudy today so without the lights it would have been too dark inside to see what i was doing.