There has always been a bit of a wasp problem on our porch, which is one of the reasons why we don’t spend much time out there. We’ve seen wasps casually fly in and out between the slats of our porch shutters, but other than occasionally spraying, we’ve never done much to manage the problem. Just thinking about them back there gives me the heebie jeebies. Well, this past Saturday morning, we decided to finally check out what we had going on behind those faux shutters.
Peering between the slats on the shutters, we could see that there were definitely some *creatures* taking up residence. We knocked on the shutters and blew some air into them (both super professional techniques (hehe) that we don’t recommend trying at home) and determined that the nests were empty, at least for now.
So began the task of removing the porch shutters. It didn’t take long for us to realize that the shutters had been caulked and painted in place. Even the pins were stuck. We ran a box cutter down the sides and basically peeled the shutters away from the house. They weren’t going down without a fight. Let’s just say… they were toast.
Now, these shutters were fine. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, besides the fact that they were glued in place. Honestly, we would have preferred to have been able to pop them off, clean up the creepy crawly stuff, and stick them back on. But I’m not going to say ripping them off wasn’t fun… because it was! Well, aside from feeling like a family of wasps could swarm at any moment.
I should mention, we had no idea what would be behind these shutters, besides wasp nests and a few spiders. We certainly didn’t expect to see another set of shutters. But sure enough, we had shutters on shutters on… well, that’s it. Just a double layer of shutters. I don’t know much about old windows, but I’ve never seen these before. They were solid, with no space between the slats. Not like our dream shutters or anything, but will certainly do for now!
Using a flat blade, we scraped off the wasp nests, vacuuming them up with the shop vac, and used a little soapy water to scrub down the shutters and the window. Goodbye, creepy crawlies!
With a good rinse, the “new” faux shutters were already looking so much better.
We are far from done with our porch clean up. We’ll need to fill in the holes, caulk around the cracks, and hopefully remove the caulk from the outer shutters. Then we’ll do a few coats of black paint to match the other shutters on our house. Okay, have I said ‘shutters’ enough times??
We have a lot of fun projects in the works for our porch space! But hey, at least you can see our porch now! Keep an eye out for future renovation posts as we work on each step with *hopefully* less wasps!
P.S. Tyler thought I really missed an opportunity in not using a “shudder/shutter to think” pun, but I think we’ll just save those dad jokes for the dad posts.