Want to make a totally unique and custom DIY house number sign for the exterior of your home?! Read below.
If you are interested in doing your own house number sign, you are in the right place! You will not go wrong with this how to guide.
I know it works, because I did it all step by step, you can watch my full YOUTUBE video on it here.
HOW TO: DIY house number sign
The Process:
With this hanging house number sign project, there is a lot of room for creative freedom; we decided to make our sign a hexagon, but you could make any shape you desire. We also decided to incorporate tile as an extra feature since I am ThatTileChick! I love this project because it is very easy for people that may not have a lot of DIY experience and you can choose to make it as simple or complex as you’d like.
As a little disclaimer. The hexagon shape was a bit tough so I wouldn’t recommend for beginner DIYers
The plans for the outdoor house number sign
Before purchasing any materials, I would recommend planning out a sketch of the size and shape of your sign. If you are a beginner, a square or circle may be easier than the more complicated shapes. We decided that our sign would have a height and width of 16 inches at the furthest point.
Below is our sketch>>, as you can see it is nothing extravagant; just helpful when calculating how much supplies you will need.
NOTE: These steps will vary slightly depending on what shape you decide to make. In our case, we used our piece of plywood and marked the center of the wood. From there, we measured 8 inches in all four directions.
After marking off 8” in each direction, we then measured 4” sections so that we could create a grid on our plywood. Feel free to mark up the plywood as much as you need; this will all be covered in the final product. Here you can see our completed grid in pencil and our final outline of our shape in sharpie.
Once you have drawn out the shape of your sign the next step is to cut it out! We clamped our plywood to our surface and used a fine-tooth blade on the jigsaw to cut out the hexagon shape.
Once we completed cutting the hexagon, we moved onto gluing our stained pieces of wood to the top half of our sign. We stained the wood prior to starting so they had time to dry.
We wanted to add tile to the bottom half of our sign, so we only continued the strips to the middle of the sign. To create a nice transition from the wood to the tile, we added a Schlueter profile to our sign. The profile helps conceal the cut edge of the tile as well. We used the same construction adhesive to adhere the profile to our DIY house number sign.
Tiling the DIY house number sign
Of course I cant make just any old custom house number sign. I needed to have TILE on mine. After all, I am that tile chick haha okay lets get to the next step..
Time for Tile! First we flipped the tile over and traced the bottom portion of the hexagon onto our 12” by 24” tile. Using the snap cutter, we cut the tile into the desired shape. If you are unsure on how to cut tile and would like a more in depth tutorial, check out my blogpost and YouTube video where I go over some tips and tricks.
Once the tile was cut, we adhered he tile to the plywood with the construction adhesive.
Disclaimer: this tiling technique should not be used in other applications! Normally you should be using thin set, but we went with the outdoor-safe construction adhesive to minimize weight. I have had this sign on my house for a little over a year now and I have had no issues so far!
We chose to wait overnight to make sure all the adhesive was thoroughly dry before continuing. I would recommend following the instructions for whatever brand adhesive you choose to use on your own sign. After we allowed plenty of time for the adhesive to dry, it was time to trim down the wood strips on the top half of our sign. You can choose to measure beforehand and trim the pieces with a jigsaw prior to gluing them on as well.
Once the wooden strips and tile was dry, we flipped over the sign and used the Ryobi jigsaw to trim the excess wood from the edges.Now the face of our DIY house number sign is complete, but we wanted to add a frame around the edge to have a more finish product. We painted the wood for the frame black to tie in with the black accents on the exterior of my home. This framing process is just like making a picture frame; once again these angle measurements for the edges would be simpler if doing a square compared to the hexagon we chose. Once we had all of the angles for the six sides of our hexagon, we used the Ryobi Miter saw to cut the wood to the correct angle.
We then used the Ryobi drill and driver to make the pilot holes for the numbers. PRO TIP: be sure to use a drill bit made for tiles when making the holes on that portion!
After our holes were drilled, we installed our numbers and got ready to install the mounting hooks.
When picking out your mounting hardware for your sign, be sure to read the weight limitations to ensure that it will be able to hold up your sign. We flipped our sign over and screwed in our hardware using the Ryobi impact gun.
The time has come where our DIY House number sign is ready to be hung! Just like hanging a picture inside your home, we used a level to mark the two locations for the anchors. We used the Ryobi drill and driver to drill into my brick and inserted the anchors. Then we used the RYOBI impact gun once again to screw in the screws and voilà the sign is hung.
TADAAAHHH!! – I love it 🙂 Let me know what you think. And if you want to follow along the full tutorial check out my YouTube.
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