Freelance - Water's Edge

Water's Edge is the community that I live in. The existing entry signage was severely aged and falling apart. I volunteered to create a design for a new sign, and the community immediately embraced it. I was so excited about the design, that I also wanted to build the sign myself, as I didn't think an outside company would put in the extra care and attention that I would. Once I submitted my bid to build the signage myself, the community offered me the contract over 3 professional signage companies.

When I moved into my townhouse, I began to do some serious woodworking. I finally had the room for tools and it opened a whole new world of creative design and craftsmanship that I had been craving for a very long time.
I got a lot of 'progress' shots of the smaller signs, but unfortunately, I was so busy with the main build, that I didn't think to take any pictures of the process.
I laid out and had all my wood cut for the sign, so a lot of the work was building a massive frame. I also had to account for the rock feature. I had never done anything like that, so I did a lot of studying and went right into it.

This is the design that I submitted when the community made an open call for designs. We needed a large 'main' sign, and 2 smaller directional signs for traffic.

This is the old signage that I had to remove. I took it upon myself to demolish the old sign. It was rather easy as all the wood was rotted.

Luckily, one of my neighbors owned a small metal shop, and offered to teach me how to do a few things. I learned how to use a plasma cutter, to cut out the letters from thick steel. I wanted the letters to 'float' off the sign, to allow light to create a nice effect behind the lettering, so I also had to learn how to weld some pegs on each letter.

For the smaller directional signs, I did most of the work in my shop, so that when the time came, I just had to put them on the newly placed post that I had set.