Start with something easy - painting signs!

Since we own a business here in town, we became involved with the local business association.  The purpose of a business association is to promote the businesses that are operating here now and do things to encourage new businesses.  And a big part of promoting businesses is to capture the attention of tourists and others passing through town to destinations such as Bayfield to the east or Duluth to the west.

One way we have planned to do that is to look at our town, especially along Highway 13, as if we were strangers "just passing through."  We decided that those things we see every day, but don't really pay attention to anymore, are like those cluttered corners or piles of things in our homes that we become accustomed to and don't see anymore.

So Leann and I started looking at signs around town and decided that some needed some freshening up.  That thought on our part coincided with a clean-up effort the town was planning and soon we had the first three directional signs in our garage for some painting touch-ups.

Done and ready to hang up again.

If you go through just about any resort town, you'll see signs like this - several boards fashioned into arrows, connected top to bottom with big hooks & eyes, and pointing in whichever needed direction.  This group of arrow signs originally consisted of six signs pointing toward "downtown" and the lake.

We got the first three signs right away because they were lying on the ground under the sign, so were easy to get to.  They were also easy to repaint because they weren't very worn yet.  So we got those done first.  Now we have two more and they are a little more of a challenge.  We're waiting for the sixth and final one but I guess it was put there to stay! Someone will figure out how to get it down.

These are older and have a black border around them.  And the sign for the school has the lettered routered out which we're hoping makes it easy to "paint by numbers" by filling in the ridges.

And now that we've started this, someone has suggested a SEVENTH sign to put up there - pointing the way to the beach, of course!  And we're also taking this opportunity to replace all the connecting hardware on all of the signs so it will be easier to work with them in the future.

Oh, yeah, the big Port Wing Clean-Up Day is on Saturday, May 31st.  Painting and cleaning up town parks is on the list of things to do.  Come and join us!