One Sunday in December, I was coming in from the store and really noticed how crappy the house numbers looked, especially when compared to others in the neighborhood. Actually, a lot of those suck too, to be quite honest. A house across the street just got a nice makeover, but for some reason they have yet to change the old tiny house numbers next to the new door and new mailbox that literally look like stickers out of a cereal box. Actually, they’re the type of numbers about an inch tall that you stick out on a mailbox out by the road or something, not on a house. Anyway, where theirs look too small, the ones here were big tin plate looking things that were nailed on and pretty rusty.

Before:

After spending way too much time looking into all sorts of fancy custom made plaques at mailboxes.com, I ended up getting cheap black plastic numbers from the local Home store. All the nice plaques were all just a tad too wide for the post I wanted to hang it on and I figured it would look pretty stupid.

Anyway. this was a simple task. I removed the old tin numbers (without slicing off a finger) and used some spackle to fill in the dents I made in the wood while trying to dig out the rusty nails with a screwdriver. Then I put a couple coats of white paint over the area after that dried to cover the pleasant rust outline the plates left behind. This actually took a few days because I had to keep waiting for it to dry and slap on multiple coats to try and match up the existing white paint (I was using cheap white primer). After about 3 days with no house numbers, I finally laid out and nailed the new numbers up.

After:

Oh yeah. Slick, effective and cheap. I wish everything was like that.

Total Cost: $12.00

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2005 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Exterior, Projects (completed). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.