Marking Our Territory

As I’ve talked about before, we use the back door to our house as our main entrance — that’s where our driveway is, and that lets us enter into the sunroom/mudroom rather than into our small front hallway.

It works pretty well, except when we’re trying to give someone directions to our house. The driveway actually accesses from a different street than the front door, which means that if you type our address into a GPS, you arrive at the front of the house and have nowhere to park and no way to get in. To make matters worse, there’s no house immediately across the street at the back of our house, which means we can’t give that address and tell people we’re across from it. Instead, we give people a fake address that will lead them to approximately the right place and then tell them what driveway to look for based on what our car looks like. It’s a little clumsy, to say the least.

Ever since we moved in, I’ve wanted to make a sign to put at the end of the driveway that will make it a little easier to identify our house. However, I had not gotten my act together to make said sign, though I had bought some supplies that sat neglected in the basement taunting me.

Then one lovely day, my dear friend Zoe came over for dinner bearing a gift. The perfect gift!

Zoe is the same one who helped us paint the guest room, so she is pretty much the best. It’s from an Etsy shop called Starry Night Signs (affiliate link — read our policies), and clearly she had it custom made in my favorite color. It’s doubly sweet because we got married in 2014 so technically that is indeed when we became incorporated as The Ruths, but that’s also the year we bought our house (and the year we both finished grad school — it was a kind of a crazy four months in terms of plowing through Big Life Events).

The sign already had a little hanger attached to the back:

So all I had to do was some quick weather proofing. However, this can be tricky since some protective sealants (like urethanes) can cause latex paint to run — and I didn’t know what the sign was originally painted with, so I was nervous (I learned this the hard way in a past project when I applied a clear topcoat that totally ruined my paint job). So I asked a Home Depot employee, and they recommended a Rustoleum Clear Sealant Spray:

I hope it will hold up!

I gave each side two coats, and while I was waiting for the sign to dry between coats I drilled a hole in the fence where I want to hang the sign and put in a small hook that I already had:

Even though the sign is now sealed, I still want to be able to bring it in if the weather gets really bad (read: winter in Boston destroys everything), so I wanted a hook that would make it easy to remove the sign when needed.

The last step was to hang the sign, step back, and admire how much easier things are when someone gifts you something that’s ready to go. Thank you Zoe!!

 

(Sharing at Create It Thursday, Think and Make Thursday, Weekend Re-Treat Link Party, Pin Junkie Pin Party, Two Uses Tuesday, Tip Me Tuesday, Totally Terrific Tuesday, Create Link Inspire, Whimsy Wednesday, and Your Turn to Shine Link Party)