When we moved into our third home, the only window treatments we had were Roman shades in the master bathroom. We had nice wood blinds in our first two homes. I knew we needed window treatments, but the open windows started to grow on me.
I matched the Roman shades that were in the bathroom throughout most of the house to provide some privacy. After I purchased 75% of the shades that we needed…they suddenly stopped selling them. Guess I learned my lesson about buying blinds in phases. Two of the windows that still needed shades were our front windows. I felt like everyone could see into our house at night, so I came up with a solution…barn door shutters!
The windows are on either side of our front door and we had a bunch of white wall surrounding them. I am a huge fan of barn doors and had already considered all possibilities of where to install one in our home. I came up empty…until now! I finally decided that I wanted barn door shutters for our front windows.
The windows are smaller than traditional door openings and I wanted to frame the windows with two shutters. I haven’t seen any products on the market that would provide the coverage and style that I was looking for, so I made the shutters myself. I used plywood for the main pannel and 1×2 wood for the decorative pattern. I painted both sides of the shutters white to match our interior trim.
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I purchased two double sliding barn door hardware track kits (one for each window). I mounted the rails on 2×4’s so that the barn doors would hang out further than the window sill to open and close freely. Once the barn door rail was installed, I was able to determine where the hardware needed to be installed on the shutters.
After the doors were hung on the tracks, I installed a sliding barn door floor guide on each door…mainly because I liked the way they looked, but also because it made them more stable if my little boys decided to play with them. Little did I know how difficult it would be to install these suckers.
I had to make little standoffs to space them off of the wall far enough to line up with the rails above and not drag on the doors when sliding. It was definitely worth the headache though! The final piece of the project was installing the cast iron cabinet handle pulls (these are the same ones that I installed in our kitchen).
I’m incredibly happy with how these barn door shutters turned out! They were quick, easy and fairly cheap to make. They add the perfect amount of character to our entry way!
