A sign

Last October, Dawn and I spent a solid week working on a street sign, but we didn't like any of our designs. We finally met with a signmaker, but we didn't like his designs, either. Frustrated, we shelved the whole thing until...now.

We've been using the mansion as our logo, but it didn't make sense to put a picture of the mansion on a sign in front of the mansion. (Especially when the picture is of the back of the mansion.) So we decided to just put our name, tagline, and phone number, but then we realized we aren't going to get any drive-by traffic, so that didn't make sense. We tried forge-related logos, like a hammer or a blacksmith, but that screamed "industrial park" instead of "historic elegance." Finally we just put our name, "[no] vacancy," and the picture of the speedwell flower (from our home page) on a simple red background.

We were actually pleased with this, until we saw what it looked like hanging from the existing sign:

So back to the drawing board, literally. This time we decided to work with the existing sign, but since it already said "Speedwell Forge" there wasn't much we could add. Finally, in a stroke of inspiration, we just made a small matching sign that read "bed and breakfast."

Not only was this direct and to the point, but it was small and therefore cheaper, or so I thought. I got the quote back from the signmaker today: $1,001 for a double-sided sign with gold leaf lettering. Ouch.

We also need to order the sign by Monday if we want to have it for our grand opening.