AmIright?
During the stay-at-home order I found myself doing some serious nesting, both indoors and out. My cottage was built in 1952 (I think) and at some point in time, the person that lived behind this house put up a decent sized storage shed.
Right on the property line.
Mmmm hmmm. The back of my neighbor's shed, faces our covered back patio. In fact, the back of the shed is the first thing you see upon coming out to the covered patio from the garage. (To get to the backyard, you go through the kitchen, then the laundry room, then the garage, and out the door to the backyard.)
It wasn't hideous, but it was....big.
One day I got the idea to go buy a piece of thin plywood and design a giant four foot by eight foot sign. I would paint it and have Ralph help me hang it on the neighbor's shed backside with screws, I thought.
Then I worried about drilling on my neighbor's shed.
(Hmmm, maybe not the best idea.)
Then it hit me that I could simply paint my design directly on the shed back.
Yes!
So, I designed my sign, and then made a graph layout so I could gauge size of letters.
(I got pretty excited at this point.)
I used regular blue painter's tape to make my rectangle, using a level to make sure I kept things straight...
...and then I primed and painted the white four by eight foot backdrop. I used the blue tape to create a green line around the outer edges...
I used my little design template to figure out how big my letters should be, and then printed the largest words (Back Porch) in my cheesy print program....
....and I tried doing a chalk transfer, but it was a rather epic fail. I then cut out the letters, traced around them, and painted them in.
Success!
For the smaller letters, I used my Silhouette cutter. Now, I had not used this machine in about...oh, maybe eight years, so I was a little nervous, but it turned out that it was like riding a bike. It all came back to me.
I transferred my letters to form words in the fonts and estimated sizes I wanted, and used them as stencils....
I then made a rectangle out of my blue tape to create the green painted background for the bottom of the sign....
....and it started really coming together.
I'm crazy about it. What do you think?
The cost to do this project was my time (I guesstimate it took me about four or five hours) and less than five dollars in new supplies that I didn't already have around the house. (I had the tape, white paint, and the paper and such needed for my patterns all around the house, so the only item I had to buy was a sample size of exterior green paint for $3.89 at Home Depot.)
Have you ever tackled a project like this? Just got brave and said "it's only paint!"? I'd love to know your thoughts!
