Our beautiful hand made exterior wood sign for South Lodge had aged badly over the last 6 years. It now needed restoring before failing completely. We restored it to a better than new state in this article. It will now need little maintenance and looks fabulous. Michelle made this beautiful hand made wooden sign from old slow growth pine floor boards for our house. This article was originally written in 2019. That sign has been on the gates in our damp environment bare since then, and the maintenance record and pictures at the end show it’s durability across that time.
The Aged Exterior Wood Sign
Our exterior wood sign had aged badly in our damp environment. Discoloured with algae, warped and cracked it had clearly suffered from the damp, despite being decent old slow growth timber.
And this is what we are going to turn it into.
It’s a finish fit for any boat, door or window frame and it will last like no varnish finish you have ever had has lasted before.
It will need maintenance, but just extra coats – not the endless starting again with sandpaper.
Once this piece of pine was flat. The crack probably wasn’t there when Michelle routed and carved our beautiful hand made exterior wood sign either.
Let’s get the sign down and do what we can for restoration. We clearly need protection from weather, and I am keen to make the lettering stand out a bit more too.
Refinishing Our House Sign To Make It Look Great
Restoring the Sign
First we sanded the sign with a random orbital sander and 120 grit paper. The discolouration went deeper than that. Refinishing needs more effort than I was prepared to do by hand on the edges.
We rerouted the edge using the correct profile bit (a cove ) in a Ryobi palm router (also known as laminate trimmers sometimes). Simple; nice clean edges and the original look and feel of the hand made exterior wood sign restored.
As the discolouration of the faces was rather deep, we used the random orbital sander from 40 grit down to 400 grit. This left the faces pretty nice, with odd patches of discolouration where damage to the timber had allowed deeper discolouration.
We used a small hand held rotary tool with a rotary wire brush to clean out the hand carved lettering that made our external wood sign say something useful.
Finally we addressed the last few bits of discolouration on our external wood sign, as far as possible, by a three hour bath in a gallon of water which had a mug of bleach added to it. We submerged the sign in the bleach bath, and then dried it in the conservatory over four days.
The finish was probably as good as when new now. So – How do we keep it this good when we put our sign back outside, and how do we make the letters more readable?
We have broken those stories into two parts:
Varnishing the sign
Protecting the sign from future damage is covered in how to varnish properly. This article also follows the life of the sign as it ages. Remember this was restored in 2019, this document covers the maintenance requirements and how well the finish lasts. You will be amazed. Suffer no more failed varnish finishes.
Colouring the letters
Making the lettering stand out is covered in Colouring Epoxy Resin, which gives full details of the techniques required to fill these letters, personalise a breadboard or many other creative uses.