Monday, October 22, 2018

Street Numbers for the House

Back in July, we replaced the front door.  Collateral damage of that was that we are now missing street numbers.  Originally they were over the door.



But when the trim was replaced, along with the door, the numbers are no longer there.



We could put the same numbers back, but they don't really show up that well as brass numbers against a dark brown trim.  So what do we have for an alternative?

Looking at Home Depot, they have almost nothing in the store, but they have a variety on their website.  We picked a simple rectangular plaque for the street numbers "10601" : Whitehall Products Hartford Rectangular Black/Silver Petite Wall 1-Line Address Plaque $43.00, delivered to the nearest store.  Ordering it was very strange, and then it was sent off to the manufacturer, and took over 2 weeks to get.

Once we got it, we decided it would look best on one of the stone pillars in the front, and installed it there.



We mixed up a bunch of mortar and slapped it on the stone, and then pushed the plaque onto that.  We held it in place with a strap around the pillar until the mortar was dry.

The problem was that while it was all very nice, it was also much too small to be seen from the street.

Bummer.


So we went back thru the process again, and found the same product, in a larger size: "Whitehall Hartford 1-Line Wall Plaque" (notice how it is missing the word "petite".)  The smaller (petite) plaque is 8.5 x 3.25 inches.  The larger plaque is 16 x 7.25 inches, so almost twice the size in both directions.  And of course, more expensive.  But the best cost was from Bed Bath & Beyond, for $77.93 mailed to my door, in 10 days.

We noticed, that even if the smaller one was bigger, at night there was no light on it, and so it was hard to see.  So we decided to put the bigger one on the wall under one of the front door lights.



And again, we slapped a bunch of mortar on the wall, but also drilled two holes, for the mounting screws, and put anchors in the wall for them.  Partly that was because we couldn't strap it to the wall, like we did with the pillar.  We needed the screws to hold it in place while the mortar dried.



Hopefully that will solve the problem of people finding the house.