Gingerbread Diaries 1.7 | Monogrammed Mailbox Makeover {video}

The Gingerbread Diaries

Blowing the sawdust off a video from before we actually moved in last year (at which point we were way too busy to actually edit and post house videos) and it’s actually a video I did more in than just act as camera woman and peanut gallery!

(Direct link for the feed readers: Gingerbread Diaries 1.7: Monogrammed Mailbox Makeover)

The plan had been that I’d be able to give the rooms a good cleaning and maybe even paint or some small touch-ups inside between when we closed in April and when we were slated to move in June. Said plan was derailed when we realized just how futile any of that would be with the contractor & crew traipsing through and leaving mess in their wake every week. Not to mention the delay in getting hot water and all that good stuff.

So, finally, I found something that I could do, on my own, that the contractor couldn’t mess with, while Todd did things like hang smoke detectors and replace the doorbell buzzer thing. We knew full well going into this house that Todd was Mr. Fix-It and I was Mrs. Decorate It. Each to their own strengths. And I was feeling pretty damned useless those first several weekends up there since we were firmly in triage mode for so very long.

But I love our mailbox and it’s held up very well over the last year. The paint looks brand new and, really, the only wear that shows is on the very top where the spray varnish (Rustoleum, I think) is worn from the sun and weather combo and you can see a bit of ghosting on the edges of the wear area. But you pretty much have to be Todd’s height and standing right there to see it. So totally not a big deal at all.

As I said in the video, I used the testers of house paint so the colors are the same ones we painted the house (instant match). While I had a flat (1/4″ ish) brush and a round brush, I found the round brush the most useful, even though the style of the letters totally looks like it would be a snap with the flat brush. Go figure. The monogram on the front was hell to figure out–the V and J were easy, but the T just fought me so hard. Were I to do it again, I would probably make both the J and T a more serifed typestyle and less of a cursive/scripty sort. But it works, so I’m not going to be stripping it anytime soon.

I finished the first coat of the first side at the Thomasville house, then brought it back to Tallahassee to work on it when I had the chance between bouts of packing . The decorations added to the letters are based on some I found in an illuminated capitals book from Dover Publishing. They’re a little deco, which is a little newer than the house is, but they were also fairly simple, which is more what I was concerned with.

So that’s our mailbox project, the last official video update from our first year in the house, now it’s time to work on Year 2 videos, right?!