April is a good month. Mrs B’s garden springs into bloom, we tidy away all the rubbish, and generally get things looking beautiful after a winter of neglect.
This is usually a good plan. February and March are often a bit cold or wet to be doing much outside, and by May things are getting too hot – apart from anything else, pulling weeds out of baked hard soil isn’t very practical.
This year something has gone wrong! We have leapt straight from winter to summer in the space of about 24 hours, and the last couple of days it’s been around 30 degrees here in the sunny south-west. Great weather for holidaymakers, less fun for actually getting much done.
My big job this ‘spring’ is painting the shutters on the house – at least a year overdue, I can’t put it off any longer despite the sunshine.
The real challenge isn’t in painting the shutters themselves (although having the paint drying in about four minutes does complicate things slightly) but in choosing the colour to use, and each time we have a round of shutter painting we get through numerous sample paint pots, and just as many disagreements, before we find ‘just the right colour’.
Usually we don’t have much success, but I have to say that this time we have excelled ourselves. After 10 years of testing I think we’ve got the colour (a kind of grey meets light green) just right.
Some regions have quite specific ‘typical’ shutter colours which makes life much easier. In the Basque villages of the Pyrenees-Atlantiques they like blood red, for example, as shown in the photo of Espelette, something to do with a tradition of painting the shutters with real bull’s blood if I remember correctly (which I probably don’t).
Around here it is every house for itself – and no one seems keen in giving away the ‘secret’ of where they get their shutter paint from, so you always have the impression it is being created illegally in a back-room somewhere and sold under the counter to those who are ‘in the know’.
As an aside, it’s one of the oddities of France that for insurance reasons every single window has to have shutters or bars – but we are the laughing stock of the neighbourhood children because we actually lock our doors when we go out. Seems that no one else ever bothers – so imposing rules about shutters and steel grills on all windows seems just a tiny bit superfluous when doors are left wide open.
I have the impression this is one of those rules created so that expats and foreigners can be spotted a mile off, while French people just go about their business and ignore such silly regulations.
In my small Burgundian village I am the only one with no shutters n the house windows – my neighbours. There is something in the fact though that shutters keep out the sun and cold and prying eyes.
We’ve just installed shutters on our house in Costa Rica – to general astonishment. It keeps the house a lot cooler.
I hated the shutter painting at our last house in France. swinging out of windows four storeys up only to find someone who shall remain nameless standing below in the garden helpfully pointing out bits i’d missed….
And as for the paint! I think the French have invented non stick paint.
When I was first in France, shutters were all blue grey…army surplus…or a dubious shade of brown….railway surplus.
Funny how countries like Costa Rica don’t use shutters, like you say they are great for keeping the heat out – although people who come on holiday here always throw all the windows and shutters wide open as son as they arrive, and then regret it a couple of days later when the house is too hot.
At least our house only has two storeys, that’s high enough for me. I daren’t take them off to paint (probably a bit safer than dangling from a window) because I’m sure I’d never get them on again. Looking nice though, two sides of the house done now!
We went for white shutters, it being the safest option and because they had always been white. In fact there were so many layers of white gloss paint we took them to a decappage, had them dipped, it worked a treat, then primered, painted and rehung them. In our bit of France the exposed stone and crepi on old houses is a mellow yellow/ brown colour which reflects the clay soil in the ploughed fields, so we didn’t want the shutters to compete. I think if you have grey crepi on the walls as they have nearer the mountains, it would be good to have coloured shutters..those inbetween farrow and ballish colours which your local brico can mix up are always good. We rarely close the shutters, though I did read they are as effective as double glazing, but it’s hard to sit in darkness during the day time.
White shutters are quite unusual around here on old houses – the houses are mostly quite white stone, so I don’t know why. Never seen Farrrow and Ball paints in our local brico, perhaps I should travel further afield next time, would certainly save a lot of bother.