Plantation Shutters

Plantation shutters (I'll use shutters from here on) are fairly popular here

in the UK. They are expensive, though, so when we were looking to put them on our windows (a few years ago now), the price was around £1000-£2000 per square metre. With thirteen windows, each about 2 sq m, the bill was getting quite large. So, I had a look at making them. This turned out to be a long process, and the shutters weren't fully complete until a couple of years later. This post is an attempt to document the process i went through to make these shutters. Is it worth the effort? Well, I was happy with the result (people have commented on them) and I worked out that the cost in parts was around the £25 per sq m mark. That's a lot cheaper than bought in ones (although I think the price may have dropped a bit over time from when I first looked). Of course, it takes time and effort, but that was mostly fun. It got a bit wearing around window 6, but things like a patio door double decker version made things a bit more interesting. Of course the 8 panels I had to do for that (the equivalent of 4 windows) tempered the excitement a bit.

What do they look like? Well, like this:

That's a standard sized window, we have several like that. The shutters are in four panels, pairs of panels bi-fold on hinges so you can open them and get full light from the window.

You can open and close the slats with a central control rod;

The slats must be closed when folding the panels back to the fully open state.
The patio doors have a double decker arrangement, so you can open the top or bottom independently.

 The panels latch into place with magnets set into the panel edges:
 

There are quite a few of these per panel.
Some of the windows required a frame that was surface mounted

 and some required other arrangements:

The control rods are attached to the slats using staples which I hammered in by hand. After a couple of hundred staples I got the hang of it.

The slats are elliptical on profile, I used a router bit to shape them on a router table from rectangular stock. All of the shutters and frames are in pine. It is finished in Osmo wood wax which is a stain, rather than paint. This means it doesn't affect dimensions after it is applied. It also allows the grain of the wood to be visible.

The windows didn't have window sills so I added some where needed:

Of course, there was a window that required three panels rather than four:

And the one odd sized window:

That is a single panel, which is hinged so you can open it if needed. It's also the last window I fitted shutters to.

These are the pins and router bits that I used:

https://gb-woodline.glopalstore.com/products/plantation-shutter-set