Don’t Buy What You Can Make Yourself.

A true motto of a starving artist’s life, “Don’t Buy What You Can Make Yourself.” We love this phrase. And try to live by it when we can, like this week when it came to getting some house numbers. Yes, those simple little numbers that identify where your house sits, numerically, on a certain road.

And our new structure had no such numbers. And we were not keen on spending our hard-earned money on some plastic, metal or cheap wood varieties. Why would we do that when there’s an exceptional woodworker and craftsman living on the premises?

So I created some paper templates of the “numbers” and Mr. Basketmaker carved them out of some pressed wood that was laying around the farm house when we bought it.

But of course, and as usual, he had to make them perfect! He first glued my paper templates to the discarded pieces of wood we found. And if you’re wondering why two “1”s were not grouped together on one piece of wood, it’s because there were small splits in the wood at places, hidden on the backs, and Eric is a perfectionist all the way.

Then he cut them out on his bandsaw, which I thought that’s all he had to do and then paint them. But he continued by bringing each of the numbers to his sander and meticulously sanding the edges and smoothing the curves. Next, he removed the paper and glue and got them ready for painting.

Several coats of black paint later and voila! Custom house numbers that really make this previously-used-church building entrance look more like our home. (And painting the white doors lime green and brass door handles and light fixtures black helped as well!)

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