Easy DIY Scrap Wood Welcome Sign for Your Front Porch

Craft a DIY porch welcome sign for your front door! This DIY project is budget-friendly and easy to make!

Your front porch is the first impression your home makes, and a warm welcome sign sets the tone for all who visit.  Why not ditch the store-bought signs and create a DIY welcome sign that reflects your unique style?  

In this post, I will show you how to create a DIY welcome sign. This step-by-step tutorial will inspire you with creative ideas and show you the tools and supplies you need to make this adorable sign.

This is the perfect DIY sign project waiting for you to make, no matter your skill level or budget. I’ve include the printable design for you as well. More on that later in the post!

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This post is sponsored by Dixie Belle. All opinions are my own!

Planning Your DIY Welcome Sign

Who doesn’t love a good scrap wood project? I love this kind of fun project that is easy to make and useful. You can use any type of wood, but I chose to use leftover fence pickets from our many projects.

Choosing the Type of Wood

There are several options to choose from when making your wooden porch sign. I used scrap wood for our porch sign. My fence boards are reclaimed from my niece’s home. She no longer wanted a white picket fenced-in yard.

We gladly said yes when she asked if we wanted the old fence boards. All we had to do was come and get it! We used other fence boards to create a variety of farmhouse-style home decor pieces, so we were familiar with the versatility of fence boards. 

For this welcome sign I used pickets cut in the Gothic style. You can purchase individual pickets at your local home improvement center for about $2-$3 each. You can find them in the Gothic style or the dog ear style. Both would work great!

Here are some ideas of the type of wood you can use:

• fence boards leftover from your fencing project including dog ear cedar wood pickets
• scrap 1’x 3″ or 4″ boards from any DIY project
• scrap pressed board
• scrap wood from furniture makeover projects
• reclaimed pallet wood

You can make the wooden sign any size you like. My own DIY welcome sign measures 20″ tall and 31″ wide. Each picket is 4″ wide. This sign is made of five pickets. We will talk about assembling the sign later in this post.

Selecting the Right Paint

Choosing paint is an important consideration. If your sign will be directly in the weather, consider using exterior paint or sealing it with an exterior clear top coat. If your welcome porch sign will be on a covered front porch like mine, then you won’t have to get specific exterior paint.

I chose to use Dixie Belle Silk Chalk Mineral Paint. It has a built-in primer and sealer so this is an easy choice to make. If I was concerned that the sign would get direct weather, then I would have also sealed it with Dixie Belle’s Gator Hide. It is the toughest sealer they offer and it is amazing!

Since the design I’ve created is a large sunflower, I grabbed two colors for the blooms (Mojave and Yellowstone) and Black (Anchor) for the letters. I also needed a warm brown color for the center of the flowers but I didn’t have any on hand. That was not a problem because I used the Dixie Belle Color Mixer. 

You can use other colors they offer and mix them online before actually mixing them for real! This tool was a lifesaver! 

First I used Anchor and Yellowstone and digitally mixed them. The brown I got was lovely but not the color I imagined for the centers of the sunflowers. I looked at the other Silk colors I had on hand and saw that I had Sequoia (Red). 

It only took a click on the color mixer to digitally add the red tone and wa-la, I had the exact color of brown I wanted! I mixed an equal part of each paint to create the perfect brown for the sunflower centers!

Gathering your DIY Tools and Supplies

Here are the tools and supplies I used for the welcome sign project. You might already have some of these basic tools and supplies on hand but I have links for you if you need to grab supplies! Many of us have paint leftover from previous projects like furniture makeovers, repurposed projects or thrift store upcycles.

Creating Your Welcome Sign

Now that you have the paint chosen and you have your tools and supplies gathered, let’s create and assemble this adorable sign for your home!

Preparing the Wood Boards

As I mentioned earlier, we have a stack of pickets that we can pull from for projects like this. My hubby built this sign but I have also made plenty of them over the years. When we sold our repurposed items at a local shop, we made about 200 farmhouse-style signs over five years we were vendors. They were very popular signs! 

Assemble the Sign

Building the sign is easier than you think. Once the fence boards are cut to length (mine were cut at 31″ long) you will need to give them a scuff sand on the cut ends. You might need to also sand off any loose paint.

Using two scraps pieces of wood cut to the height of the sign (mine were 20″ tall) and attached them to the back of the fence boards with glue and screws. I go into full detail about assembling this sign in the video (linked later in the post) but I am sure you can figure this out! It’s so easy. You will notice that I alternate the gothic design of the fence boards to create a cut look.

Designing Your Sign

You can design your sign in different ways. I ultimately designed my sign the old-fashioned way. More on that in a bit. 

Use a Cricut Machine

If you have a Cricut machine, then you are all set. Create your welcome sign design in Cricut Design Space according to the dimensions of your sign. Create the word ‘welcome’ using the font of your choice.  

You can either make a vinyl stencil for the letters or you can have the Cricut cut the vinyl letters out for you. The Cricut cutting machine does all the work for you!

I used the Cricut to create a scrap wood sign for our back entrance. Later in this post, I will include a link to the video. My friend Crissy from First Day of Home has many tutorials for using this amazing machine for so many projects!

Use the Old-Fashioned Method

I opted to create my design the old-fashioned way. The first thing I did was to find something that was round and the size I wanted for my sunflowers. Lo and behold it was a thrift store lampshade! It measured about 14″ in diameter. It helped to give me a visual for the blooms.

The next step was to create a sunflower design. I grabber a large piece of wrapping paper and quickly sketched out the design in my mind. Then I used a free online design studio called Canva to finalize the design.

The sunflower was too large to print on an 8.5″ x 11″ paper so I divided the main sunflower design into quarters. I saved the file as a PDF so you could use it too! The design is in my free printable resource library. You can sign up to get access to this design as well as some other fun printables!

While I was still using Canva, I also created the letters for the ‘welcome’ part of the design. I chose a font I liked and made the words fit over three sheets of copy paper. I have that saved for you in the free resource library too!

If either of those ideas doesn’t work for you and your sign, you can also go to your local craft store and purchase pre-made wooden letters. These often come with phrases like ‘welcome’ in a pack. Using a ‘welcome’ stencil is another option!

Painting and Decoration

Here are the instructions for transferiringthe designs onto the scrap wood sign. I will share how to get access to the designs later in the post. For now, these are the steps you will take to create this adorable sign!

Paint the ‘welcome’ Letters

The first step is to transfer the ‘welcome’ letters and the sunflower design to the wood sign. I used transfer carbon paper to transfer the design. Layer the printed PDF design on the assembled fence boards the way you like it.

I centered the word ‘welcome’ on my sign. I taped the three pages together to spell out welcome, then folded it in half to find the center of the letters. Next, I measured the sign and found the center. I matched up the two centers and used painter’s tape to hold the three pages to the sign.

Then I used transfer carbon paper and a pencil and traced the letters. This leaves the perfect line on the fence board sign. The next step is to use a small paintbrush and black paint (Anchor) and paint in the letters! It’s not as daunting as you think. Put on a good podcast or audiobook and paint away!

Paint the Sunflowers

Ok, now for the really fun part! Don’t be nervous to paint the sunflowers! I will break down this simple design step by step! Trace the sunflowers in the same way as you did the welcome letters.

Remember the design is on one-quarter of the sunflower. You can trace it directly on the wood sign or you can trace it onto a large piece of paper to create the whole sunflower then you can trace it onto the wooden sign.

That’s what I did. I traced the full sunflower onto craft paper I had on hand. Be careful to line up each fourth of the flower so that it forms a circle.

​Start by painting each petal using the lightest yellow color (Yellowstone) towards the tip of the petal. Then, with another small paintbrush paint the centermost part of the petal with darker yellow (Mojave).

Paint towards the first color and meet somewhere in the middle. You can blend the colors in the middle of each petal. Chalk paint is blendable on the spot. This is fun to do! Paint one petal at a time and you will become an expert sunflower artist!

You will also notice that I left a thin outline around each petal to create definition. 

The next step is the paint the center circle of the sunflower. Use the warm brown color we mixed earlier and with a dabbing motion, dab the paint on in the circle and some around the perimeter. This creates texture and an uneven look around the outside edge.

Then use the two shades of yellow and dab color over the warm brown. Don’t be intimated by this! The great thing about this style of painting is that it is fixable. If you don’t like it you can either wipe it off with a damp paper towel or allow it to dry and paint over it!

Adding Final Touches

​Now it’s time to seal the porch sign if it is going to be in direct contact with the elements. My front porch is covered so I didn’t need to seal the sign.

It’s also time to add a hanger. This is easy to do with heavy wire and a screw to hold it securely to the top of the sign.

Seasonal Welcome Sign Ideas

Here are some additional ideas for a front porch welcome sign DIY project you could make for your home!

• Cut the fence boards longer and create a vertical welcome sign to lean near your front door
• Create a matching welcome mat on a sisel outdoor mat using a stencil and spray paint
• use the same flower pattern and bright colors to add a pop of color for the spring season
• Look for simple designs you could draw yourself. Pinterest is full of ideas.
• Use red and green colors at Christmas time and paint a poinsettia instead of the sunflower.