Welcome Sign Shutter Porch Decor

This easy porch decor and a stenciled welcome sign are great for your fall porch.

While I was cutting some shutter (bi-fold door) door projects on my compound miter saw, this piece fell off the saw and busted. I picked up the pieces and started putting it back together, one.slat.at.a.time. It was very tedious. As I neared the bottom, I decided that it was long enough and proceeded to put the larger piece in place with my Ryobi nail gun and Gorilla Wood glue. That sort of left some ends hanging off. I took it to the saw to cut off the end pieces. But just as I got to the saw, I stopped—took another look and decided that the end pieces resembled legs…

Materials For Welcome Sign

• Shutter (I used 1/2 of a bi-folding door)
• Welcome Stencil (I made mine on my electronic cutter, but you would buy one at a craft store or online)

Supplies For Welcome Sign

• Paint
• Spray Paint
• Press-n-Seal

Tools

• Paint Sprayer Finish Max You could spray paint the shutter welcome sign.

You can see that I still had about 8-10 slats to go when I stopped. I had enough of trying to get those slats back in place. Just as I was going to the saw, I had second thoughts.

Design the welcome sign in Silhouette

I made a stencil for the welcome sign in my Silhouette program. You can see the font is Adobe Thai and it’s about 518 pt. I cut it out of contact paper to save on using vinyl.

Paint the shutter that will become the welcome sign

I used my Homeright Finish Max to give the shutter a couple of light coats of diy chalky paint primer with a couple of light coats of semi-gloss over it. If you’ve ever painted a slatted project by hand with a brush, I’m sure you can relate to how much easier it it with a sprayer. The Finish Max Fine Finish Sprayer by Homeright will not give you runs, or drips on the back side of your project. I’ve had that happen to me a LOT when I was using a brush on the slats. Not only do you get drips, it takes a LOT longer to get your shutter or bi-fold door painted.

Apply the welcome sign contact paper stencil

When I stencil with contact paper, I remove the contact paper backing from the entire piece, place the stencil on my project, then weed out the letters.

Using Press N Seal to protect spray painted project

After placing the stencil on my welcome, then weeding the letters, I used some Glad Press-n-Seal to protect the rest of the shutter from over spray. This is a much easier process than using painter’s tape. It really did work like a charm.

Pin this idea of using Press-N-Seal!

While removing the press-n-seal you can see that my shutter was protected from the overspray. It’s resting on my potting bench-a great outdoor work station that I use a lot.

Welcome sign made out of a shutter or bi-fold door

You can see the paint sort of got under the stencil, but I LOVE how the repurposed shutter welcome sign turned out. Perfect projects are soooo overrated, don’t you think? The Press-n-Seal did a perfect job keeping the rest of the shutter paint free. Have you tried this trick yet? Notice how pretty the slats are because I used the Finish Max.

Isn’t it the perfect addition to my fall porch? Since fall will be well on it’s way soon…. I think it will head to Glendale with me. I have lots more shutters—I can always make another one because it was so easy.

You can see how this all came together in my post, Easy Fall Porch Decor.

gail