Homemade Sign

Hi! A number of you inquired about how I made our sign this weekend. So I thought I’d share some info and insight. After looking on and off for years for a place to order a proper sign and sign post from and not finding anything that seemed right for my business, I decided to use some standard hardware store items to make my own.

The sign itself is made from lumber: a 1/2 inch thick piece of plywood that I framed with cove moulding trim. The trim allowed me to attached the wide frame, which is made of 2x2 lumber. I used lots of wood glue and clamps to attach the trim to the plywood. And a nail gun, wood glue, and clamps to attach them to the heavy duty 2x2 frame. I used a chop saw and a table saw to cut the lumber.

It took me a while to decide how to add the logo. For a while, I was headed to the path of least resistance: a plain white sign with black vinyl lettering cut on a Cricut machine or ordered in.

Ultimately, I decided that signs that are a brand color (as opposed to white) are more memorable to me, and I thought about how highway signs are a light color of lettering against a darker background for increased visibility. White signs reflect a lot of light and those might be difficult to read on bright sunny days when we have the majority of our visitors. I decided to use the farmhouse red for the background and our house’s cream trim color for the logo and lettering. I needed to hand paint it.

I painted the sign in several coats of white exterior paint before I switched gears and used the farmhouse paint colors. In the end, there are about 4 coats of exterior paint on it. Hopefully this will help it hold up to the elements a bit better.

To transfer the design, I first put my sign design together in Photoshop (you could also use Canva or another design software) and I saved it as a .pdf file. I opened Adobe Acrobat (a .pdf reader) and I pressed print and chose “poster” and “zero” overlap. This allowed me to print my whole design at the proper size on multiple sheets of paper.

I trimmed off the edges of the paper, tested the fit of the design, and chalked the back of the design with regular white chalk. You could also use graphite, but I find the chalk lines to be easier to remove when you’re done painting. If you don’t mind spending a little extra, you could also buy transfer paper.

I used a regular ball point pen to press hard and trace the design, transferring the chalk lines to the sign for painting. I checked my work frequently by peeking under the paper to make sure I wasn’t missing areas.

Then, I found some small paintbrushes around the house and used them to paint the design as best I could. It’s not perfect, but hand painted signs aren’t perfect and that also makes them special. I cleaned up any messed up letters or lines with the red paint.

The sign post is a pressure treated 4x4 post with some 3/4 inch plumbing fittings. I attached a 3/4 inch flange to the post with long screws, threaded a 3ft, 3/4 inch pipe on to that, and capped off the end of the pipe with a 3/4 inch pipe cap (to keep the sign from sliding off the post).

To ensure that the post remains level, you could dig a bigger whole and add some quickcrete concrete mix and water if you wanted. We might have to go back and do that later if the sign starts leaning.

The sign hangs from the post pipe with 2 screw eyes, 2 quick links, and 2 hitching rings. Alternatively, you could use a screw eye, hitching ring combo, like this. That would have been my preference, but I could only find one at the store. I pre-drilled holes for the screw eyes before manually screwing them into the frame. Pre-drilled holes prevent the wood from splitting.

Let me know if you have any questions. And make yourself a sign! (Even if it says “don’t come here without an appointment” — ha, like ours).