DIY porch sign to show off your school spirit

It was an absolute PERFECT day in our small town today that I took a couple hours to make something for my own front porch. I could just feel the fall weather coming in and that reminded me that I needed to decorate for the upcoming season. Which totally meant that I NEEDED to make a new sign lol! Every year I try to incorporate a school spirit pieces on our porch, really it only makes sense because our school colors are ORANGE & BLACK but truly I do it because my husband and I absolutely adore the schools where we live.

The teachers are amazing, the staff in general is amazing, they take such great care of our girls while they are there for 8 hours a day. We can’t say enough nice things about our small town schools! So we show off our school spirit every fall blended into our fall décor.

I wanted a bigger sign than what I usually put out. The old one is a small 40”x5.5” leaning sign that honestly I’m tired of looking at lol! So today was the day for a new one! I had a pretty general idea of what I was going to do but I didn’t know it was going to turn out even more perfect than I planned!

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Here’s what you need to make your own school spirit rustic porch sign

• repurposed wood

• 7/16” OSB {oriented strand board}

• 1”x2” pine wood

• Cricut

• cardstock

• Ryobi miter saw

• Ryobi scroll saw

• Ryobi sander

• hook & loop sandpaper

• Ryobi brad nailer

• brad nails

• paint brushes

• black acrylic paint

• orange acrylic paint

• white acrylic paint

First

You need to decide how large you want your sign, mine is approx. 24”x 22”. Then decide how large you want your lettering to be. I wanted my letters to take up a big portion of the base so I made my lettering roughly 11.5” wide and 14” tall each.

Measure out your wood base pieces and cut them to size using your miter saw. Then cut two pieces of your 1×2 a little shorter than the height of your sign. These are the pieces you’ll use to attach your pallet sign together. Place the pieces that you’ll be using for your sign face down on a flat surface. Then place your 1×2’s on it so it looks like the picture below.

Second

Use wood glue {I use gorilla wood glue} to glue the 1×2’s in place, then use your brad nailer to nail them down.

Third

Cut your letters out on cardstock using your Cricut.. The cardstock I had on hand wasn’t long enough so I butted two pieces together and taped the seam and it worked perfectly!

Fourth

Trace the letters onto your OSB. You can use pine for this but I chose OSB because we had this leftover from building TRIPLE LOFT BEDS for our older three girls…and yes, they came out AMAZING! I still have yet to write the tutorial for their U-shaped lofts but I promise, I will have it written before the end of the month ;)!

After you have them traced, cut them out using your scroll saw. Then give them a good sanding just on the front and around the edges. You won’t see the back so don’t worry about sanding that.

Fifth

Paint your letters. I chose to paint mine all black but you can get as creative with this as you’d like.

I wanted to add a pop of color to my sign so I painted just one of the boards orange, just lightly brushed over it so it was medium coverage.

Now add your letters to your sign. I didn’t align mine because I like the offset look. I didn’t bother gluing these down I just popped a few brad nails in each letter using my brad nailer.

Now for the fun part! I love making these adorable free hand painted garland. I wanted the color to pop so I painted the triangles white, then once those dried I painted over them with the colors I wanted them to be. At first I wasn’t going to paint any of the triangles black but once I started painting over the white with orange I decided to break it up a little with every third triangle painted black. Then I used the end of my paint brush to add polk-a-dots to them. So CUTE!

I just LOVE this rustic porch sign and it will tie in PERFECTLY with the rest of my fall décor.

I hope this inspires you to show off your own school or town spirit where you live. Let me know what you think below.