DIY Verdigris House Numbers

Hello from the homestead! As COVID has kept us mostly home, we've been tackling lots of home projects and I have to admit: this is maybe one of my favorite DIY's ever.

I'd never given much thought to our house numbers, which is surprising, because I'm very into house number design! I just hadn't thought much about replacing ours until I had a couple packages delivered to the wrong house in the same week. Suddenly it was obvious; our old brass numbers were aged enough they blended in with our wood mailbox post.

I had stumbled upon these beautiful verdigris house numbers on Terrain, but by the time I saw them, they were out of numbers we'd need. I couldn't get them out of my head, though, and one day while we were out on a walk, I wondered aloud if I could DIY a verdigris patina. It turns out the answer is YES.

Verdigris is a blue-green patina that occurs on copper due to oxidation -- it's the reason our Lady Liberty is that beautiful green! It's one of my favorite colors, and is a natural complement to our front door color (Benjamin Moore Wythe Blue).

I was happy to find out you can buy online kits to create the patina yourself. I ordered this Triangle Coatings Patina Green starter kit, which is plenty for just 8 house numbers. For about $25, I was able to revive my existing numbers to create something totally unique!

First, I painted a coat of copper paint on each number and let it get mostly dry before spritzing it with the patina liquid, which I put in a spray bottle. The box says the process takes "minutes," and that's technically true, but I found it took hours. In some cases, I had to reapply both materials to get closer to the color I wanted.

But I got there! I loved this project because it was one of the rare times I saw something, thought "I could do that" and then was able to execute it fairly simply. Very satisfying! And it gives our house a college pottery professor vibe and that's the vibe I'm always trying to project in my life.