DIY: Kitchen Wooden Letters

We have a huge wall in our kitchen that I wanted to fill with SOMETHING. After spending way too much time searching for ideas, I finally decided I wanted the word EAT to be hung there. 

I spent a long time searching Etsy for possible Eat signs that I could purchase premade but I didn't find anything I was in love with and everything was more than I wanted to pay. 

Since I'm already pretty much the DIY genius over here (ha ha) I decided to make my own. 

I started by ordering my wooden letters from Craft Cuts. They have hundreds of fonts to choose from and that's more or less why I decided to go with them. You can also get 10% off your order if you like their Facebook page. 

I chose the font Zurich BDxCN BT. It's the very last one on the list. 

You can also choose the height and thickness you want the letters to be. I chose 18 inches and 3/8 thickness. When I called customer service they said they recommend 3/8 or 1/2 inch thickness for most things and they suggested I do 16 inch but since I wanted my letters to be BIG I ultimately sized up a bit. 

The letters ran me just over $40. 

They also sell painted wooden letters but those are MUCH more expensive and since I was trying to save on cost I decided to give painting a shot on my own. 

Here are my letters when they arrived-

The letters are already sanded so you don't need to do that. 

I started by priming my letters- 

I did two coats within two minutes of each other and let them dry ALL DAY LONG. I used rust-oleum spray primer. 

After they were all dry I painted TWO COATS of rust-oleum satin Colonial Red spray paint. 

Here they are after the first coat- 

Definitely put them in a box or on the grass so spray paint doesn't get all over. 

Here is my finished product- 

I used Velcro and sticky patches from Home Depot to hang my letters. All you do is put one or two on the back of each letter and then another one on the wall. 

I love the look of this so much that I'm thinking of doing one big W (for our last name) to hang somewhere else in the house. Have you guys ever painted your own wooden letters? What's your favorite way to do them? Any tips?