Ship Ahoy!

ryantinney
May 23, 2015
3 min read

The love of a family truly is one of life's greatest blessings!

I was in search of something to make a sign for my son and his wife for Christmas a few years ago. I was perusing one of the local salvage places when I came across an old door. Sorry I don't have any before pictures as it was prior to me even thinking about starting a blog.

I found out from the owner of the shop that this is a galley door off an old boat from the eighteen hundreds. I love it when they can impart a bit history attached to it.

If you look closely you will notice that I kept the original hardware, both the latch and the hinges. It did take quite an effort to take them off as the screws were quite rusted from all the salty ocean air. Once the hardware was off I wiped it down a bit, careful not to destroy any of patina. The more patina, the more character I always say.

I gave it a light sanding to smooth any roughness or splinters and to help the chalk paint adhere to the surface a little better. Although, the great thing about this paint is that as long as the surface is clean, sanding is optional with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint.

After cleaning and sanding I added a coat of Annie Sloan Emperors Silk. Once dry I topped it with some Old White. Before the Old White was dry I used a wet sponge to distress it a bit. Well, now that I'm looking at it again, I can see that I distressed it a lot!

I did this sign the old fashioned way, as this was before I had my Silhouette machine. I printed everything to size and then traced the outline on graphite paper. Once that was done to my satisfaction I painted the design on with a paintbrush using Annie Sloan Graphite, Emperors Silk and Cocoa for the shadowing.

I found some bird graphics on The Graphics Fairy, and printed them on my ink jet printer. I used the modge podge method to transfer them to the sign. I will eventually do a tutorial on this method, but there are tons out there already if you just Google it.

I absolutely love The Graphics Fairy! Check out her website. She has tons of gorgeous graphics to choose from. Her vintage selection is second to none.

Once everything was on, I sanded to distress the lettering and the graphics, applied one coat of clear wax and then a little dark wax here and there for contrast. I then gave it a good buffing with my Annie Sloan brush to make it look nice and polished.

I added the original hardware back on, drilled a few more holes for some extra knobs of various styles and took a step back to view my work. What do you all think? I love the history of the door and that I was able to reuse the old hardware. It now hangs on my sons dining room wall and every time I sit down to break bread with them I swear I hear the wind and the waves lapping at the hull!