DIY Wood Welcome Sign

I’m a hoarder.

But really only of hand written notes from my kiddos and wood.

Aah, I love wood.  Especially the aged and abused looking wood.  The weathered, rusty nail kind of wood.

So when we took our canoe and paddle board out to the lake recently for some family time, I was ecstatic when my daughter found a beautiful piece of wood floating around and swam it over to me.  You know you are loved when your children automatically bring you aged wood.  🙂

It took me a little while to decide what I wanted to create with this piece.  It was too pretty not to be shared, so I decided to make a wood welcome sign and attach a Mason jar to serve as a vase for fresh flowers.  What could be more welcoming than fresh flowers in the spring?!

Here is my piece of wood before…and my a#&hole adorable dog, Murphy.  You may remember him from the post about his DIY bed I made.  The color of the wood alone makes me swoon!

Supplies:

board, cut to size

Mason jar

twine

paint and stencil

I got super scientific when I was deciding on how long my sign should be and just held it up to the door to see what I liked best.  I ended up cutting mine to 20 inches long and left the width as it was so I could preserve the rough edges and unevenness as much as possible.

Another great thing about old and aged wood is that there is no need to sand or stain it.  Yay for lazy girls like me!  I printed out a quick stencil with my Silhouette (you could free hand it or use regular stencils if you don’t have a die cutter) and painted my greeting in a bright, fun blue.  When that was dry, I held my Mason jar where I wanted it to hang and marked both of the upper sides with a pencil, marking just behind the jar so that when the twine was around the jar it would be tight enough to hold it up.  I drilled both holes and then proceeded to wrap my twine around the jar and through the holes, tightly knotting it behind the board.  *Quick tip: you may want to tape the ends of your twine to help feed it through the holes without it fraying.

I added some 3M Picture Hanging Strips to the back of my board and stuck it right onto my door.  Fresh flowers were added to the vase and I had a brand new, welcome sign with very little work and super low costs.

If you haven’t been lucky enough to stumble upon any aged wood lately, you can always buy yourself a board from your local hardware store and beat it up.  There are tons of tutorials on the internet on how to distress wood and you can take out your pent up aggressions on it!