Our travel memories post project has been on our “to do” list for years. Years and years actually….when we lived in our first house, and in our second house. We are now in our third house since returning from Scotland and FINALLY took a Saturday to turn this old tree trunk into our travel memories post!
Notice the stone path in the photo above? Another DIY re-purpose idea Jim had! We had an area on the side of the garage that had a goofy area of concrete that had been neglected over the years by the previous owners. Jim dug it up when we moved in last year and we had a small pile of concrete pieces laying in the drive. Jim thought of using those pieces to form walking paths in the gardens in the back yard. It turned out brilliantly! He placed the flat side of the concrete pieces down, so the cobbled uneven side is exposed. It gives it more of an old worldly charming look. Double bonus – the pile of concrete pieces is gone!
Back to the travel memories post….
How we made the travel memories post
We had an 8′ piece of old fencing that had been left at our new house by the previous owners (thank you!).
Jim cut off the upper section of the fence and tore off the pointed ends.
We then loaded up on spray paint from our local ACE Hardware, and went to work.
Notice Jim cut notches in the flat ends of the pieces, just because we thought it looked better.
Once we had spray painted the boards with the primer, we were not convinced that the fun bold colors we had picked for the pieces would show up well. The wood was very old and the spray paint primer really soaked in as you can see above.
Jim decided to roll on a coat of white primer which made a ton of difference as you can see:
Once the boards were all bright white (we only painted one side), it was time for us to make a list of all the places we had lived, visited, etc. That was super fun and we had actually started the list years ago while on a road trip. We revisted the places on the list, added new destinations and fine tuned the places to grace the pole. We ended up with 24 places (we could have had so many more but we only had one tree trunk and wanted some space for future destinations). I checked Google and found the distance from our house to the destination and those are the mileage numbers noted alongside the name.
The boards on our travel memories post don’t necessarily point in the correct north/south/east/west direction. We wanted to be able to see and enjoy the names on the post from our backyard patio….so that means all the boards are placed so that we can see them.
I used black craft paint to hand paint each destination and mileage. We let the black paint dry overnight and then applied 2 coats of clear sealer. Each board was installed with 2 screws (pre drill the boards so they don’t split as you are installing them).
This project took a while, but we are so happy with how it turned out. It’s the perfect addition to the area in the garden and every time we look at it we smile. It’s already been a conversation starter with visitors too!
Do you have a list of favorite places you have visited or lived? This is a great DIY way to bring those memories to life.
