I had always thought shutters were there for protection in storms but
Dan's point about them being a great sun-shade makes a lot more sense.

Some thoughts on my experience with shutters and wooden storm windows:

As one who grew up in old houses with wooden storms (the first without
shutters and the second with) I can look back with fondness to the Fall
days  when my dad would struggle up the extension ladder pushing the
large wooden storm ahead of him.  Windows in old houses tend to be quite
large and therefore the storms present quite a sail to the Fall and
Spring winds.  You can understand why the hideous triple tracks became
popular...

I agree that the inside storms are not the way to go but after dealing
with the outside ones I can see how people would put up with them for
four or five months out of the year.

Our first house had clips at the top on which the storms hung and a
mechanism for allowing the window to be pushed out at the bottom for
ventilation on warm days during the storm window season.  When opened
like this the wind could, theoretically, blow the window off the clips
at the top but I don't remember that ever happening.

My parents' current Victorian house (part of a three-house historic
district in Ithaca, NY) has shutters that were, at one time, functional
but they've been wired to the side of the house to keep them from
blowing in the wind.  The layers of paint on the hangers build up to a
point where the latch feature of the hinge that is supposed to hold it
open no longer works.  I seem to recall there was a latch mechanism of
some sort at the outboard end of the shutter but I don't ever recall
seeing a mate on the side of the house so I assumed these were there
just to latch the shutter closed on the window sill, not hold them open
against the side of the house?  I suppose a hook and eye would work to
hold them open but would be tricky to latch/unlatch from inside the
house.

I don't ever recall seeing our shutters installed on either side of the
center window of a bay (or on the adjacent corners of the side windows
of the bays).  They would've stuck out and presented a lot of surface to
the wind.  I'm not sure how these could be latched open and still be
conveniently closed for sunshade but there were a lot of clever gadgets
around back in Victorian times so maybe they had a solution for this
problem as well.

Over the years the shutters probably would've doubled in thickness from
all the layers of paint on them.  You can imagine what a chore it would
be to try to scrape the paint off all of the vanes.  I'm guessing
chemical dipping is the only way to clean off decades of paint.  At any
rate it doesn't atke much paint before the shutter vanes are not
operational anymore--I presume they'd be "opened" (horizontal) when used
as sunshades rather than "closed" when parked against the side of the
house.

Over the 30-plus years my parents have owned their large Victorian house
they've paid painters well over what they paid for it, even taking into
account the money they poured into it before we moved in.  The most
recent outfit looked to be trying to stretch it into a three-season (as
in 1997/1998/1999, not Spring/Summer/Fall) job when my dad threw him
off.  The shutters were the last thing left to do...

I remember back in the early 80's when I worked in the New England
small-scale hydropower industry I toured an old shutter mill up in
eastern New Hampshire (near one of the Ossipees, I believe) that was
powered by water.  The demand for shutters was down to the point that I
think they had diversified into making dressing screens for NYC interior
designers.  I imagine custom-made shutters cost a pretty penny these
days.

You can understand why sheet metal shutters screwed to vinyl siding
became acceptable in suburbia (I guess once you accept suburbia you're
headed down a slippery slope...).

One other comment to tie shutters and storms and together--we struggled
with how to get the storms past the shutter hinges which projected into
the opening that the storms fit into.  We ended up notching the storms
at the hinges but this defeated one of the purposes of the storms, that
being to provide an air-tight seal against the wind (matching blocks
could've been installed in the window frames I suppose).  Perhaps the
hinges used aren't the right style for this situation (most are like
small mating cones that point up but some are a pin-and-tube type).

Another fun Fall chore is cleaning the leaves out of the gutters.  It
brings to mind that someday, when I get around to replacing the roof and
soffits on my Italianate house, I will need to decide how to replace the
built-in wood gutters.  They are currently covered over with roofing and
presumably rotted like the rest of the squirrel-infested soffits.  I
thought of pretending that the shape of the sheet metal gutters, though
much smaller, looks like the detail now in place on the house (the
gutter seems to be separated from the rest of the soffit by a half-round
band) but I don't know if I can convince myself it's an acceptable
compromise.  In the meantime I'll continue to read Fine Homebuilding and
look for ideas...


-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Becker [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 1998 9:24 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Storms


>Yesterday I was asked why people no longer put working shutters on
their
>windows.

Shutters or blinds were one element of a total package of environmental
control that was active and passive, as opposed to the mechanical
systems
employed today (HVAC).