Weddingbee Blog

Haha. Gotcha. This is not an invitation post. Those babies have left the building and we’re waiting on those last few RSVPs before I can share the results. In the meantime, let’s talk about mailboxes.

Image via Warner Bros Studios

Way back before I started heartily searching the wedding blogsphere, I had no idea that one needed a box specifically for cards at the wedding. I kinda assumed that cards would go in a pile on the gift table, then be stuck in a bag somewhere during the reception. Nope, apparently that’s not actually what’s done. So once I realized that the cards at our wedding would need a vessel, I became immediately obsessed with the idea of using a real mailbox to hold those babies. Of course my vision wasn’t just any mailbox, this one needed to be red and I’d LOVE to have our new last name written on the side.

Finding a plain red mailbox is much more difficult than you might think.

The regular ones tend to come in white, black and grey for $7.50 or you can pay upwards of $50 for a red one. Excuse me? The stores must be joking. After scouring the internet a number of times and almost giving up hope, we wandered into a Walmart in a small town in Kentucky for one last attempt. They didn’t have a red one at all. Bummer. We surveyed the options and just picked up a grey one and a can of red spray paint and were in business—all for less than $10 including tax. Hooray!

Once we got home, I put aside the project for a couple weeks because of rain and general laziness. But once the weather got better, I set myself up with newspaper in the back yard and went to town with the spray paint.

Before - Dull and Grey

After - Shiny and Red!

After the paint dried, I printed out “The Bacons” in a few different fonts to decide which one would look best on the mailbox, and would be easy enough to cut out to make a stencil. I settled on La Point’s Road and started the somewhat tedious task of cutting each letter out with an X-Acto knife. Good thing I had the first season of Glee to keep me motivated! Once I had it all done, I taped the stencil to the mailbox and got to tracing. I had a white paint pen left over from invitations and it worked like a charm, but I did have to go over it a few times to get the truest white to come through since it was picking up some of the red paint and making more of a light pink.

Ready to Stencil!

Drying between coats - Can you see how faint some of the letters in “The” are?

After a few rounds with the white paint pen, I removed the stencil and did a couple more touch ups on the letters that were splotchy and we were done. Ta Da!

Sorry for the blurring…

Hmm, the blurring makes it hard to tell how great this little project turned out. Maybe this is easier to visualize?

The Bacons!

I was so bummed when I couldn’t find just what I wanted, but this (unlike the dowel debacle) was such an easy project that saved us tons of money and only took about an hour of work (besides the drying times) to do. I’m so glad to get it checked off the list!

Do you have any projects that you put off but ended up being so easy?