LED installation on the front door (porch) area of my house and Custom House Name sign

LED lighting installation on the front door and name sign creations, the ups and downs of the journey

A friend of mine asked me to look after his house and pets whilst he was away for two weeks. Upon arriving at the address I was in shock.

The house was a huge mansion on a private estate, there was a guard entrance and barriers to get in and out. Given the average home in this estate was millions and millions they are very particular.

This led me to appreciate the importance of a house name!

Every house on the estate has its own name with matching signs at the front of the house. I found this very beautiful and having a house that has a name and a number, admittedly I never use the name.

After two weeks living in this estate, I have been inspired to create a house name sign.

I have a wall at the front of my house so initially I thought I could print letters and stick the letters on but then I thought the signs did look rather nice and a sign would look better.

To make the light stand out at night I wanted a backlight for the light, and glass to give it a posh finish. Then I remembered my LED lights that I brought my mother and she never used. I rang her up and asked if I could have them.

I started to make the sign using CAD software. I engineered a holder for the screw to go into the wall. Then sized up the spacing for the LED lights with a gap for the light power to come through at the bottom to be hidden.

Once printed after 14 hours … I went back and made modifications as I was not happy with the quality of the print with the initial so I ended up printing a 20 hour better quality print in slightly different shape and depth too.

Then I primed the prints, sprayed to the color, and applied resin for the finish. Then I tested the LED lights on the prototypes to see which I prefferred.

Amazingly the worst quality print looked best. This was mainly because the letters were clearer, as the 20 hour print picked up filament left other from other prints which took away the crisp finish. So word of warning if you don’t get the initial part clean when printing letters it will look bad.

I siliconed the sign to glass and then wired up the LEDs in place. Once I was happy when I wanted all the lights I then cut the lights and picked up 4 wire arm wire to make the distance inbetween.

I soldered the lights to the wire which meant the nosey neighbours were walking past three times in a space of 10 minutes to see what I was up to. I am sure it looked odd with a girl in the cold soldering outside.

TIP: heat sinks, due to my ADHD I am sometimes too fast and kept soldering without applying the heat sinks, which was annoying as I had to then break and re-solder.

I siliconed all the lights in place and tested each one to make sure they were working before being stuck down. And this is how the finished product looked…

However, I did not wait long enough for the sign to take before peeling off the holder as such the sign feel down and the glass cracked. Now I needed another bit of glass!

At this point I needed a break from the sign.

Whilst waiting on the glass I decided to print off letters for the wall. This took a few days as each took over 2 hours due to higher quality.

Once all was collected I siliconed them in place. With a fresh coat of paint, they looked beautiful on the wall. The neighbourhood noticed as I saw people stopping and looking!

So, watch this space, I will be getting new glass for my sign soon.