DiY Painted Door Mat

Since the boys have been in camp, I have been working really hard to clean out our laundry closet and playroom.  And lo and behold, in doing so, I have discovered tons of things I had long forgotten we even owned.  Like a plain door mat I had purchased at IKEA...back in October of 2011!!!!

Considering our current door mat was faded and worn down, I was pretty stoked.  And immediately got to work making that plain ole door mat not so plain.  I couldn't really decide what I wanted to do with it, so I went with my old faithful: chevron.  I figured it would give people a pretty good preview of what to expect when entering our house (yeah, there's a lot of chevron in here!).  

I'm lazy. I'm impatient.  I just eyeballed my chevron with painter's tape.

Of course now I notice the funky spot on bottom left, but I didn't notice it before I painted.  Oh well...it turned out ok!  I spray painted it black and let it sit for a few days.  But I knew it needed something more.  And I figured an "H" would be the perfect addition.  Josh is a little paranoid about me giving away too much personal information on this blog, but H happens to be the initial of our last name (in case you hadn't figured that out).  I had one of the Michaels H's on hand that I had covered in yarn for our winter mantle, so I traced that on to poster board, cut it out, and used it as my stencil. 

I whipped out some of the left over blue paint I had from our front door and filled that H in!  Because of the texture of the mat, I couldn't really brush it on, but instead had to sponge it (I was using a foam brush).  I got it all filled in though and was pretty pleased with the result.  So pleased that I decided to finish this guy off with some fabric protectant and go ahead and put it out on the front porch.

And now the boys have a new game every time we leave the house.  Colton stops, touches the H, and says "H for _____ (our last name)," while Levi follows behind, points, and says H.  We're nothing if not creatures of habit around here!

And I must say it seems to have finally completed our porch's mini-transformation (pardon the very thirsty plants in the planters!)...