It’s been about three weeks since I last posted, and for good reason. Dan and I (finally) got hitched! Everything came together even better than we imagined. From the ceremony surrounded by family to the limo bus with our closest friends, pictures at my favorite Buffalo landmark to the perfect reception with amazing food and even better dance moves, we couldn’t have asked for a better day.

And although the writing may have stopped, the work certainly didn’t. The day before our wedding, Dan was still out in the garage tinkering around with his new tools and ongoing projects. And because we got married on a Friday and didn’t leave for our honeymoon until Monday, that left a bit of time for him to wrap up projects before we left (although admittedly, Saturday was a complete relax, binge-watch netflix, and recover kind of day).

And because Dan has officially changed my last name,  there’s no better way to celebrate than with yet another name-inspired project. This time, a marquee WAZ sign that would hang in our garage/bar room/man cave.

Dan once again started with a paper template, a trick that’s come in handy with some of our oversized projects recently, especially with the Buffalo skyline, polish falcon clock, and of course, the other Waz sign.

Using the templates, each letter was cut out of plywood using a Band saw.

Holes were then spaced and cut throughout each letter, allowing for the iconic light bulbs of your typical marquee sign to be added later. Dan then used dark walnut stain on each letter.

Dan’s initial thought was to border each of the letters with aluminum painted black, but that didn’t go quite as planned. The aluminum was tough to work with, and bent and bowed in places we didn’t want it to.

Instead, he ended up going with wood for the border. A bit more work, but a lot better result. And as mentioned, the wood border was still be painted black, offset by the wood stain of the letters themselves.

With the painted wood border secured on each of the letters, the sign was already starting to come together. All that was left to do was string the lights. Somewhere along the way, we inherited an entire bin full of large-bulb Christmas lights that we used on our backyard fence last year. And now, they’re being re-purposed once again for this project.

Once complete, the marquee sign found it’s way home to our garage. And our first time to show it off will be this weekend when we have our families over to help us finally open the bar for the summer.