Christmas Sign
A couple of years ago at the beginning of December, my roommates were joking around about Christmas lights, and about how we could put up a sign with a pun about our address (we lived on Mary Street) saying “917 Mary Christmas”. We put of a few Christmas lights, and we tried to spell it out just by taping the lights to the side of our house. This completely failed, so I decided I had to figure out how to make a proper sign. I went home and scrounged through my mom’s garage and found some scrap foam board insulation. I printed off some giant letters (1 letter per page) and punched holes in them for where the lights should go. Picture soon:
I measured out and taped the letters to the sign and marked where the holes would go for the lights. I then used a screwdriver to poke holes in the foam board for all the lights, and used 3 strands of lights to spell it out. It turned out a bit better than I expected:
I then had to figure out how to mount it outside the house without screwing into anything (i.e. with just tape). I made a wood frame out of scraps in the basement, then screwed the sign to the wood frame using large washers. There was a square frame, then a piece of wood in front of the bottom to keep the bottom of the sign from being pushed forward off the front. This way most of the weight of the sign as resting on the bottom, and the front wood and screws just kept it from falling over. To mount it outside, there was a small (less than 1 inch) window sill sticking out past the brick on each of the 2 front windows. With the help of my roommate, we put the sign across the two windowsills, and put tape from the lower board in the bottom of the window, again holding the sign from falling off the windowsill, but not holding any weight. We then ran tape from the top board to the tops of the windows (and in the window) to keep the top of the sign from falling over. This turned out to be quite strong, the sign showed absolutely no signs of falling, even through all the snow and rain (we left it up for quite a while out of laziness).
Here’s what our house looked like for Christmas that year:
Needless to say, our electricity bill was quite high that month, but I think it was worth it.
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