DIY Lighted Letters

This is a DIY I've had on my never ending want-to-DIY list for quite a while. I saw the tutorial from the a beautiful mess girls and I knew I had to crank mine out. This project came together fairly easy, in an afternoon with the help of Travis. I rushed out to get the letters to spell "JOY," but they didn't have the complete set. I was bummed but then Travis reminded me I had the exact letters I needed in storage! Originally, I bought these letters from JoAnns for a DIY Anthro knock off project, but since they were just collecting dust, I figured I would re purpose them! 

First, with a pencil, I marked out where I wanted to drill the holes for the lights and then when I was sure of the spots, I marked it with a sharpie. I didn't worry about the sharpie marks because I knew I was going to be painting over them later. My handy man then drilled out the holes for me. He chose a drill that was a little smaller than the lights so that the lights would fit snug in there.  Next, because the letters were enclosed, we took the backs off to expose the holes. This is when I decided to paint the letters a Martha Stewart acrylic gold. They took about two coats of paint and they dried fairly quick.

 After the letters dried, we strung the string of lights through them, making sure we started at the bottom of each letter and ending back up at the bottom of the letter. We did this so we could string garland in front of the letters, when up on my mantel, and you couldn't see the string of lights going from one letter to the next. I kinda had to play with the excess string to get it to stay inside the letter. I didn't want to tape it down with electrical tape because I knew I wanted to disassemble this decoration for easier storage.

Pretty simple DIY that doesn't take much time but definitely makes a statement and can be done for any season!

PS: Check out the rest of my Christmas decor in this post!