Porch Projects: House Numbers

Things have been a little quiet around The Ear over the past month; more art than house sprucing has been happening lately (like this, for instance). However, today I accomplished something small but beautiful: I painted our house numbers in our front transom window, where they belong.

Here is what our front door and porch looked like this morning:



You can barely see the black metal house numbers to the left of the door, since they blend right in to the dirty brick. You can, however, see the taped up pieces of paper, with our address printed on them, in the transom window. I used one of these as a guide for painting my numbers.



I used gold and black paint pens for this project. The Capitol Hill Restoration Society says that numbers painted in transoms should be in gold, in a serif font, and have a black outline or shadow.



So, I taped my printed-out guide to the outside of the window and traced the numbers on the inside of the glass with my paint pens. In this image I am almost done with the work, but you can see the print out behind the paint.



Here's the front doorway now. Much nicer and easier to find, don't you think? Now I need to remove the old numbers. Add it to the list.



Thanks to fellow DC house blog Row House for the idea for this project! Until I ran across this post, I thought I was going to have to use ugly vinyl decals. The power of the Internet...