DIY Faux Window Shutters From A Repurposed Door

Hey there! 🙂

Don’t you just love vintage window shutters? Especially the raised panel ones! They are so popular for home decor right now! Unfortunatley, I don’t see these much in my neck of the woods. 

What I don’t love is their price tag! I’m not saying that authentic vintage shutters aren’t worth the prices they go for these days. But if I can make a reasonable facsilile and save a few bucks in the process? As a DIY blogger that’s the way I’m going to go!

Here’s the door I repurposed. My hubs bought it when he was building our house, and long story short, he ended up not needing it.

We were going to return it to the store, but as with a lot of things we mean to return, we forgot about it until it was too late to bring it back. We tried to sell it at the garage sale we had a couple years back, but there were no takers. I mean, we couldn’t even give it away. The problem is that it’s not a standard sized door (it’s 8 feet tall), and it’s very solid, which means very heavy, which means it was too big and heavy for people to want to haul it off.

And let’s face it: six-panel doors are so boring. 

And so it sat in our shop, in the way, until a couple of months ago when my hubs asked me if I was going to do anything with it, or else he was going to chop it up and take it to the dump. It just so happened I had looked online for vintage shutters a couple of days prior, but didn’t buy any because of the aformentioned prices. I thought “too bad this door isn’t shutters.” That’s when inspriation struck and I thought “but this door could be made into shutters.”

My hubs was more than happy to help me cut up the door because it would no longer be in his way in the shop. I had him cut the door in half vertically to drop the bottom two panels, then horizontally to split the remaining four panels into “shutters.” He also cut the outside edges to make the edges an even length from the panels on all sides.

I’ve been wanting to try out some of Valspar’s furniture paint and glaze and decided to use them for this project. The paint is Valspar Furniture Paint in Sweet Mint and Valspar Antiquing Glaze. 

I really like the Valspar furniture paint! It goes on smoothly and covers well- I only had to do one coat. If the door was a dark color I might have had to do another coat, but it does really cover well. I then distressed the doors and applied the Valspar antiquing glaze. I worked in sections, painting on the glaze and then wiping off the excess with a damp cloth. The glaze like the paint went on very smoothly and was very easy to work with.

The only thing that I didn’t like about the Valspar furniture paint is that it does not distress very well. But to be fair, its not chalk paint so it’s not really meant for that. I’d definitely use it on a project that I was wasn’t planning to distress.

I put some mid-century hardware on the shutters to jazz them up a bit. I even got one of the hinges over what was left of the doorknob hole. Totally covers it up, right? 😉 

I think they turned out pretty good! The only thing is that they are heavy as all heck. If I were ever to do this again, I’d find a lighter door! 

I made these with using them as home decor in mind, but of course they can be used for other things. I plan on putting them on top of a table leaning against a wall like in the picture above, and then hang wreaths and whatnot from them. They could also be hung on a wall as wall decor. If you want to use them for a more practical purpose, they could be used for cabinet or hutch doors, or even window shutters.

So do you think this was worth my time, or should I have used the door for firewood? Let me know in the comments below!