House Numbers

Well, I'm still here...and Kalia's still not.  But it's most definitely not for lack of trying.  I'm keeping myself as busy as my tired body can handle these days!  Sigh...

Onto weekend projects...

We live in a community with a Homeowners Association (Chris was actually president last year...however funny that is!), and in our spring time mailing this year we received a friendly reminder that all of the houses needed to have the house numbers located on the actual house per the guidelines.  Hmmm...we've neglected that for 2 years now...oops!  The previous owner actually took the numbers with them.  How odd would it be if they actually moved somewhere with the same exact house number?

Anywho, on one of our many trips to Home Depot within the past few weeks, we picked up a wooden plaque :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

and these big plastic numbers :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

I forgot to take pictures of the actual purchase, but these are exactly the same ones we bought.  We actually wanted to test out the stain we had gotten for the front doord on something before committing and applying it to such an expensive purchase, and then hating it, so this plaque was perfect.  I told Chris that we could just use scrap wood and make our own plaque, but once we realized the plaque was only $5 smackaroos, I let Chris talk me out of attempting to tackle yet another project.  Although it would've been really easy, bending over to even use tools is a challenge with this big 'ol belly I'm rocking these days, so he won.

I applied two coats of stain on the plaque, and we decided we really liked the color, so we did the front doors with it.  Last weekend we had a marathon spar urethane session going on.  We applied a coat to the front door, this plaque, planter stands we got for the back pool deck area, 

and our hammock (which I like to refer to as 'the boat' since it was hammock-less while we were applying the urethane coats on it)...and then repeated the cycle again...and again.

We thought about getting plants for these planters this weekend, but I got too tired.  Those might wait until after Kalia gets here.  If she ever gets here...I guess technically my due date is in one more week, but I feel like I've been pregnant for 10 years already!

Sorry...pregnant brain absent mindedness...back to the house numbers...

Chris test sanded the plaque before officially deciding it was my job to sand the front doors because he wasn't any good at it, but I think it's just the different qualities of wood.  The sanding job scratched some of the stain off (we sanded with 220 grit sandpaper after applying two coats of stain and letting that dry overnight, but before adding the spar urethane), but it wasn't enough that I thought it was worth re-staining and then waiting to add the urethane to it.  It just gives it character now!

This weekend I added the three coats of spar urethane to the back of this plaque, and we made yet another trip down to the big orange store to buy some stainless steel screws.  After adding the plastic numbers on, here's what our house number sign looks like :

I think between the sign, the plastic numbers, and the screws, we spent about $12 on this.  I really love that it ties in with our entry way with our new front door too.

I plan on spray painting all of the lights on the front of the house the oil rubbed bronze, and that statue in the front has been on my to-do makeover list for forever now.  It's way heavy though, so it's something I'm waiting to tackle until I'm un-pregnant.  We'll get around to doing those two things when we repaint the rest of the house.

I think both Chris and I were shocked at how big the numbers actually look against the house, but I think the plaque does a good job of making it something pretty instead of just having the numbers there.  What do you guys think?!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Ours was entirely too short.  How is it that when you're this far along with pregnancy time seems to fly and stand still all at the same time?

Happy Monday!

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