DIY Emoji Mailbox Refresh + A New Outdoor Light

DIY Emoji Mailbox Refresh + A New Outdoor Light

You probably saw our post on Monday about our new front door color. We just love the cheerful front door, but we wanted to take the front of our house a step further with a couple other updates, so we replaced the old-fashioned light fixture and made some fun DIY updates to the existing mailbox. Check it out!

Here’s a close-up of the light and mailbox before. And Ruby because she’s cute:

The light we had before was kind of old fashioned and not really our style. It seemed better suited style-wise to our old 1890 home than this one built in the 1960s. So we wanted to update it with something more modern and cute, without spending a ton of money. If you’ve looked at outdoor lighting recently, you’ll know that’s easier said than done!

We totally lucked out by finding this zinc outdoor lantern at Home Depot for only $25! And I think it’s pretty adorable — simple and no-fuss. It reminds me of this much more expensive one from this blog post about outdoor lighting at our old house. We like that the light shines down instead of out, so it hopefully isn’t bothering our neighbors while it still does a good job of illuminating the front of our house. Of course because I’m me I thought about spray painting it something bright and colorful, similar to the inspiration light, but that would be too crazy with the new front door color.

The mailbox on the other hand, that definitely deserved a coat of spray paint! We don’t really like the designs on the mailbox we have, and we certainly weren’t big fans of the dark green color. Someday we’d like to get a new mailbox, but it just doesn’t seem like an expense we need right now when we have a million other things going on. Mailboxes can be crazy expensive. It’s weird. I’d also like to figure out a way to try to cover up the original mail slot that you can see down below, which drops mail directly into our hall closet, but that’s a whole other can of worms. With a simple coat of spray paint and a few minutes with my Cricut Explore, I was able to give our existing old mailbox a new lease on life for just a few dollars.

First Andy gave the old mailbox two coats of spray paint. We couldn’t find the exact shade of grey to match the light fixture, so we used Rust-oleum’s metallic black, which we ended up loving. It’s hard to see in the photos, but it’s a soft black with a glittery metallic finish, which looks really good with the light.

Getting rid of the dark green made a huge difference in updating the mailbox, but I also wanted to give the tired old mailbox a little bit of a sense of humor … and who doesn’t love emojis?! Even Andy recently started using them, well, pretty much only the burrito emoji!! I thought the heart envelope “love letter” emjoi would be super cute and perfect on a mailbox. I was able to find an image of it on Google Images (so ok, I kind of stole it, but whatever), that I saved down and resized with the Cricut Explore Design Space software (seriously, I love this thing), and then cut out the shape onto white sticky vinyl (you could easily do the same without the Cricut, with scissors or an Exacto knife). I also cut out our house numbers on vinyl, too (and these actually aren’t them, so don’t go trying to stalk us, ok?).

Seriously,  besides spray painting, this DIY mailbox “refresh” project took five minutes. Plus another five minutes because Ruby grabbed my one and only piece of vinyl and ran around with it for a while until I was able to wrestle it away from her (anyone want a dog???). This project turned out really cute and is a fun way to amp up the personality on the front of our house, especially in combo with the bright front door and the new, modern light fixture. While we still have a million plans and ideas for the exterior of our house (including painting the shutters and garage as we talked about on Monday and maybe hopefully someday a whole new paint color in general… or maybe even all new siding and facade???), we’re really happy to see it coming together and looking so much more like us. I smile every time I pull up and see our happy front door.

Oh, and in case you’re also wondering about the “hello” on the front door. That’s actually another Cricut project I made with white vinyl. I did it a few months ago when I first got my Cricut and wanted to play around and learn how to use it. I used it to cut out “hello” and mirrored it so that it would print backwards and I could stick it to the inside of the glass on our screen door. Just another super easy, quick project that turned out pretty cute!