There are few things that raise ire in Wendy like that of an often requested, but long unfinished project. Add into the mix the fact that the project seems like it should be relatively easy, yet it remains incomplete, and you've got yourself a bit of a Wendy volcano on your hands. In recent months, few things about our house have infuriated Wendy more than our lack of shutters in the master bedroom.

When we bought our house way back in 2003, we were fortunate to find a place with enough intact original and period details to understand the true style of the house. Sure, many details had been lost or damaged over the years, but from molding to a lone sash lift, the various architectural details within our home give the necessary clues and are the items that set it apart from any other home that happens to be out there. Of all of the various features that came with our house that we thought were really cool, the interior shutters were one of the things we really lucked out on. Here they are in our master bedroom back on our 2nd day of homeownership.

Upon our arrival, both the old original windows and the newer windows throughout our house were adorned with these unpainted wood shutters. You could easily see that these architectural details were, at the very least, very old, and quite possibly, original to the house.

As we've renovated rooms, we've removed these shutters to place them in storage in order to protect them. Starting with the front living room, we've slowly taken down the majority of the shutters and placed them in the attic or basement. In each situation we've fully intended to use the shutters once again, but they are more or less the last thing we reinstall as we near the end of a project.

At one point during our work, our immediate next door neighbor, who lived there when we bought our house, thought we were removing the shutters and it would be a good idea to take advantage of us. He came over one day and said "You know, if you're getting rid of your shutters, let me know, I'll take them off your hands so you don't need to deal with them." It seems he was attempting to pray on the naïveté of the new young homeowners. I didn't suspect it at the time, but I later learned he had actually told another neighbor "I hope they give me those shutters, I'd absolutely love to get my hands on them for my house, you know they're original to our homes and mine are long gone." We declined his offer and have instead kept our plan to reinstall them...at some point.