How to Hang Window Shutters So the Screws Don't Show

I built my own cedar shutters for the windows on the outside of our house, and then hit the part nobody covers in the build videos: how do you actually hang them without a row of screw heads staring back at you from the driveway? I bought a mounting system to solve it, abandoned it, and ended up with something simpler that worked better. Here's what I did.

Quick Facts

• Project: Hanging exterior wood shutters on aluminum siding with hidden fasteners
• Difficulty: Easy once you commit to the angle — the ladder is the hard part
• Time: Roughly 5-10 minutes per shutter once you find your rhythm
• Main challenge: Getting the screw heads to disappear from normal eye level, and not splitting the cedar
• Best for: Someone comfortable on a ladder with a drill, working on aluminum or wood siding
• Call a professional when: You're not sure what's behind your siding, your siding is brittle or already leaking, or the windows are high enough to need more than a step ladder

The Situation

The shutters themselves were already done — cedar, board-and-batten style, built in a separate project (click here). The only thing standing between me and finished windows was the hardware question.

My first move was to buy a shutter mounting system online. Interlocking hangers: one piece screws to the siding, a matching piece screws to the back of the shutter, and they slot together so nothing shows from the front. On paper it's exactly right.

I gave up on it. Those systems only work if your measurements are dead-on — on the shutter, on the siding, on both sides, on every single window. One hanger a quarter inch off and the shutter either won't seat or sits crooked. I looked at how many windows I still had to do and decided that wasn't a game I was going to win.

So the real question became: can I just screw these on and hide the heads?

⚠️ Before You Start — Read This Part

I'm not a licensed contractor. This is what I did on my own house, not instruction for yours.

Two things worth naming on this specific project. First, the ladder. Most shutters sit high enough that you're up there with a drill in one hand — solid footing, someone home who knows you're outside, and don't stretch sideways to reach that last screw. Climb down and move the ladder. Second, every screw is a hole in your building envelope. Mine went through aluminum siding into sheathing. If you don't know what's behind your siding, or you're working on vinyl, fiber cement, brick, or stucco, that's a different project than this one, and it's worth a call to a siding contractor before you start drilling.

What I Used

• Stainless steel screws, 3 to 3½ inches — not coated deck screws
• Drill
• Countersink bit
• 100% silicone (optional — see the last step)
• Ladder
• The cedar shutters, already built
• Level

What I Did

1. Picked stainless, deliberately. Coated screws will hold fine for a while. Stainless will outlast the shutters. These are going into the exterior wall of the house and you do not want to be back up on that ladder in eight years dealing with rusted heads — the price difference is a few dollars.

2. Worked off the battens, not the shutter face. Mine are board-and-batten, so there's a horizontal batten across the top and another across the bottom. That's where the screws went. The battens are the thickest part of the shutter and they're already a visual break, so a countersunk head settles into them in a way it never would in the middle of a clean board.

3. Pre-drilled every hole — no exceptions. Cedar splits. It's soft and straight-grained, and driving a 3½-inch screw into it cold near an edge is how you crack a shutter you just spent a weekend building. Every screw got a pilot hole first.

4. Drilled those pilot holes at a diagonal — this is the whole trick. Instead of going straight in, I angled the drill: the bottom batten gets drilled diagonally upward, and the top batten gets drilled diagonally downward. Standing in the yard, you're looking slightly up at the top of the shutter and slightly down at the bottom. Angling the holes tips each screw head into a face you can't see from where people actually stand. From the driveway, from the sidewalk, from the street — nothing. You'd have to be seven or eight feet tall, or standing on a stool right at the window, to spot them.

5. Countersunk each hole. The countersink bit cuts the cone at the top of the pilot hole so the head pulls down flush into the wood instead of sitting proud on top of it. The angle hides the heads; the countersink is what keeps them from catching light. You want both.

6. Drove the screws straight through the aluminum siding. I was mildly worried about this and didn't need to be — the stainless screws punched through the aluminum on their own. No separate pilot hole in the siding required. Aluminum is soft enough that the tip just bites and goes.

7. Backed off and pushed forward on the bottom battens. The lower screws gave me a little resistance where they met the siding. What worked: back the screw off slightly, then push forward into it. That short reverse-and-press gave the tip enough purchase to penetrate cleanly instead of wanting to walk across the surface. Small thing, but it made the difference down low.

8. Put silicone on the threads — not the heads (optional). If water getting in behind the siding at the screw penetrations bothers you, here's what I did: a bit of 100% silicone on the screw threads before driving. On the threads, it travels in with the screw and seals the hole from the inside as it seats. On the head, all you've done is give yourself a visible blob of silicone to look at, which defeats everything above. I'd call this genuinely optional depending on your exposure and the condition of your siding.