When a Saturday finally opened up when we were both available, we went digging around in my garage for scrap wood and we found these two pieces. Both had potential.
The second piece of wood was the winner. It would need some reinforcement. So we hunted around in her scrap wood pile and found a 1x4 piece of wood. We nailed it to the back and then cut the whole piece to the right size. This all took about 2 hours! Two hours!! And we hadn't really done anything yet.
So, onto the paint. We concocted an acceptable color of paint by mixing what we had on hand: a sample size of Renwick Golden Oak and ceiling white. It seemed to work alright. I watered down the paint so the wood grain would show through. We liked that rustic look. We didn't sand the wood or prime it.
Once the prep work was done, we were ready for the lettering...the really exciting part! We had to make some design decisions now. How big would the letters be? (3 inches) How many sentences would fit on the board? (9) What color of paint for the letters? (black) We wrote out what we wanted on a piece of paper and then went to work. The steciling took a lot longer than we anticipated. I was thinking a couple of hours or so. We had scheduled a movie with the fam at 9pm. No problem! HA! At 10:45pm, we were painting on the final letter.
We filled in the stenciled letters to make them solid. The stenciling is what I call putsy work. You can't rush it, and you can't take short cuts. We worked on more than one sentence at a time so we didn't smear the paint. For some reason, I've always enjoyed putsy work. For this project, the putsy work is the last thing to do. Once all the lettering is done, the sign is done!!!
What a great way to finish!
So, here's our finished product! I think it looks fantastic!! I'm so glad we did it! Now, all Sandy has to do is hang it up in her kitchen.
What a beautiful way to remind each other how we choose to live.
This is so great! Loooooved seeing it in the kitch when I came home!
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