If you are considering having plantation shutters installed in your Denver area home, having appropriate expectations is important to ensure a satisfying ownership experience. If you’ve never had plantations shutters you just don’t know what you don’t know, so the following information is presented to help you gain a better understanding of what to expect.

Don’t Use The Tilt Rod To Tilt The Louvers
This is probably the number one thing that surprises new plantation shutter owners, and it’s understandable. The tilt rod looks like the natural thing to grab if you want to adjust the louver tilt.

Even though grabbing the tilt rod on a plantation shutter looks like the ideal way to operate your shutter louvers, the tilt rod is fragile and is only there to connect all the louvers so they move with each other. To tilt your shutters open or closed, you actually do so by using the louvers themselves. Grap one of the louvers gently and tilt it and the rest will follow thanks to the connection of them all to the tilt rod.

Size and Weight
Plantation shutters are substantial, high-quality shutters are sturdily built and on especially large windows they will be heavy. To protect your investment you should know in advance how to open and operate your plantation shutters.

With a large and heavy shutter, you must remember to support the shutter when you swing it open, no matter how well they are built, there can be a considerable weight on the hinges so give them a gentle hand of support underneath them with a hand when you swing them open and also don’t let it swing freely and bang into walls or your furniture, doing so might not only nick your furniture but might also damage your shutter’s finish as well.

Sunburst shutters
Many times the louvers will not be connected on a sunburst style shutter due to the nature of the design so you must operate each louver by itself.

Out of square windows
It’s very rare that any window is totally square or has perfectly parallel tops and bottoms and left and right sides. Plantation shutter professional measuring and installation is about working out the best compromise that reduces the defects of the window you are covering. Professional installers walk a fine line between dealing with the inherent defects of the original window installation while installing an un-yielding plantation shutter and making it look great. Homeowners should have realistic expectations and understand small compromises are normal.

Walls that aren’t flat
Like out of square windows, walls are often not as flat as the eye may see them. These defects might not show up until a nice large plantation shutter frame is placed on the window overlapping onto the wall. As a homeowner considering plantation shutters you need to keep in mind that caulking or further improvements to existing walls can sometimes be required depending on how bad the defects are and the angles they can be seen from.

Blackout product?
Shutter are not typically considered a complete room blackout product, some light passing through them is expected.

Room to open your shutters
The larger the plantation shutters the more room required in front of them to swing them open, furniture placement should be part of the consideration in choosing the style of plantation shutter. A bi-fold will need less room in front of it as it’s two smaller panels instead of one larger one.

Arch top shutters have individual upper louvers
Based on the nature of arch-top plantation shutters the louvers near the top get smaller and smaller and are often not attached to tilt rods or hidden rod systems and the top most louvers need to be operated by hand to open and close them

Bypass Plantation Shutters
You have to remember to close all the louvers on bypass shutters in order to open or close them, as they pass closely in front of each other and open louvers will hit the panel behind it

Divider Rails
Divider rails are located approximately when specifiying a divider rail location. This is because louvers will always be the same size, there is no such thing as a louver being cut down in size to place a divider at exactly a specified location.