Chair rails are wooden decorative trim pieces that are placed at about one-third of the height of your walls. They are usually about 30 inches from the floor to protect your walls from chairs that may push against them. Chair rails can be decorative in any room of your home, and they leave a divided flat surface below them to apply wallpaper, paint or wainscoting on the top and bottom of the wall.
In order for an interior shutter in Utah to fit and look like it belongs, modifications need to be made to the frame, so it doesn’t take away from the beauty of the chair rail or the trim around the shutter either. The thickness of the shutter needs to be specially ordered and made to be the same thickness as the wood paneling on the wall. Filler strips need to be applied above the wainscotting that is below the chair rail. The front also needs filler strips, and then the chair rail needs to be cut out to enable the installation of the window shutter, so it appears as if the shutter was part of the newly built home.
Sills are any type of item that protrudes into a room from the wall. This includes a window sill that may be over a kitchen sink or any other window sill. The sill cut needs to be made to remove the bottom lip on the shutter frame so it will fit perfectly.
The best option is to use a Z-Frame with a sill cut option for an inside mount shutter frame. They have an overlapping trim that goes around the window opening, and they are used for windows with no trim. Usually, a kitchen window sits low enough over the sink that it doesn’t leave room for trim. We remove the overlapping shutter frame lip, so it has a flat bottom frame that rests on the sill. This works especially well for Utah basswood shutters.