canobielake, I will follow up on the other thread with info from our GC as I get it. I know there are several people planning to use the product that are interested. If you want a bit more information and some pictures, you should check out stanza30's lovely house on this thread (Alternative to cedar shake shingles). This is where I originally learned about the product a little over a year ago and there is quite a bit of good information there. I think it varies by the part of the country, but I will warn you you might have a bit of a challenge "talking" a builder into using the product. We ran into resistance with everyone we talked to (except the wonderful builder we choose), mostly because no on had any experience with it and didn't quite understand the "look" we were going for. However, I will tell you that I'm SO happy we stuck to our guns and tracked down a supplier, a flexible GC and installation team. When the product was delivered to our job site, our GC was extremely impressed with it's thickness and apparent durability and the few boards we have up look exactly as we hoped they would. Best of luck! I'd love to see pictures of your house (or plans?). Lake houses are so interesting to me these days. :)

I've installed 4 different types of shutters over the years: used vintage, homemade wood, custom wood, and custom vinyl. The used shutters were by far the least expensive. I ran an ad in the paper and paid $25 a pair. They all needed scraping and painting and minor repair, but looked great in the end. We screwed them directly into the front of the house, with the inner edges propped up by the old shutter hardware still on the windows. Looked like a correct installation. Even though they weren't functional, at least they weren't flat against the house. The home-made shutters (old pantry doors) turned out surprisingly well, although I had to paint them several times. A worthwhile experiment, although somewhat crude. I got new custom cedar shutters from Timberlaneshutters.com for my current house. Expensive, but drop-dead gorgeous. They've been up for 6 years now and look good as new. We stained them and used correct hardware and they do open and close, handy for cleaning behind. Money well spent. On the side of the house, I recently tried a custom vinyl shutter, from Shutterland.net. When I took the shutter out of the box, I loved it. But when we installed it, the screws slightly depressed the vinyl (even with backer boards added) and you really can tell that it's made of plastic. Plus, it's flat up against the house, very fake-looking. I won't be using any more vinyl shutters.

Moonshadow, you're right about the regular vinyl fading. That's why we had to paint ours in the first place. We didn't know about primers back then, so we just cleaned them up good and painted them. If/when we do it again they'll get a good quality primer coat first. We painted ours in place, just taped a bit in areas where we were afraid of getting paint on the siding. DH was afraid he'd never get them back on after prying those plastic dealies off. BTW, for anyone considering painting shutters, a little paint color tip: look at the paint strips outside when you pick the color. :) Maybe everyone but us would think of this! We wanted dark navy, so we picked what looked like a rich, dark navy on the paint chip. After the first coat of paint went on, DH came inside and said "Do NOT go out there and look at them; I think it will dry down darker." Well, of COURSE I went out and looked at them. :) They were bright cobalt blue...eek! We took the rest of the gallon of paint back to Lowes and had the guys add a ton of black to it and painted the second coat. Perfect dark navy, and a lesson learned.

Whatever you decide to go with make certain they look believable size-wise as even non-functional shutters should look like they conceivably could cover the windows.