TUTORIAL: Address number plaque

As you may have picked up from all these staging posts, we are selling our home.  (Or maybe I should be more realistic and just say we are putting our home on the market.  Whether it will sell or not remains to be seen.)  However you say it, what it means for us is to finally finish the projects we've been wanting to accomplish for years (just in time to leave).  Oh well, makes for good blog post, right?  Here's a quick tutorial for making a plaque to mount your address numbers.

SUPPLIES:
Piece of wood, cut to size
Sandpaper
Outdoor primer
Outdoor paint
Address numbers
Screws for mounting the wood to the house

Here's what we started with, a piece of plywood and some address numbers which had been reposing in a closet for over a year.  I wanted to use an extra piece of a fiberglass "wood" product we had used to case our front porch post last year, but apparently the extra pieces got tossed or hidden.  I decided that it wasn't worth buying a whole long piece of that product to use just a little bit (they sell it in 8 or 12 foot lengths only), especially since we are leaving the house; hence, the classy plywood, which we we already had from another project.  I did still prep the wood so it will last quite a few years, though.

First, I gave the board a good sanding on all sides to smooth it out.  

I applied 2 coats of exterior grade primer on both sides and let it dry between each coat.

Finally came the 2 coats of exterior paint.

And it looked like this (lovely background, no?):

Then we added the numbers.

Then we mounted the plaque on the house.  Looks better than before, right?  (Yes the house still needs siding.  No we will not be getting that done before we sell the house...)

BEFORE HOUSE:

AFTER HOUSE:

Nice, right?  Wish we had done this last year when we bought the numbers so I could have enjoyed this longer.  Ah, well.