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Thursday, January 12, 2012

Rail Road Crossing Sign

More decor for Oliver's room......yay!!!

His room did start out as a Thomas the Train AND Lightning McQueen room before turning into a race car room. Before it evolved into Cars, I had decided to make a rail road crossing sign.  At first I thought to buy one....a real one, but someone pointed out they were heavy and they were not cheap.  After a while, I figured I would just make one. I already had black and white paint, so why not.

We ended up with this:

I'm pretty proud of it.  I painted the letters free hand.  In hind sight, I should have used a template or vinyl stickers but it turned out okay.  Oliver says he loves it and that's all that really matters.  The hardest part was finding a way to connect the two boards (it's made out of 2 pre cut 24" poplar pine boards from home depot). 

Wes and I stared at the wall of screws at home depot until we found 1/2" wood screws.....took them home, charged up the drill, and...........it didn't work.  The boards wouldn't stay together and I ended up pushing too hard on the drill and punched a hole in the back of one board with the phillips head bit.  I ending up going back to home depot 2 weeks later and got screws that came with a hex nut so that they locked into place because the wood screws kept slipping out.

After getting the nuts on the back, the screw still stuck out some so I just grabbed a tool out of the garage that looked like it could cut screws (I have know idea what it's called but it looks like mean pliers) and just hacked off the end of the screw.

And now we have a hand made railroad sign.

Total Cost:
$.98 for screws and nuts
$1.75 x2 for24" wood planks
Paint was on hand
Total Time:
I honestly don't know but it was way too long. But it was worth it to see Oliver's face.

1 comment:

  1. Cant believe you did the letters by hand. Looks really great!

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