DIY Entrance Pillars

Make a statement with these DIY entrance pillars.

Prior to moving in, Brett had mentioned here and there about wanting a statement entrance – you know… pillars, posts, a gate, etc. – to our house.

Since he usually doesn’t have a strong opinion on many of the things, I figured this would be a good project for him to take and run with.

We ran into a few hiccups along the way [shocking, we know], but it looks wonderful and Brett is happy – I’d say that’s a win.

This project began the weekend we poured the cement counter tops. We had some extra cement – the real fancy stuff you use for counter tops – and didn’t want it to go to waste.

Unfortunately, the cement dries extremely fast so while Brett was working on the counter top, my parents and I quickly dug two holes for the posts.

I didn’t know exactly what he wanted them to be squared off with, so we just winged it.

Wrong wing.

When Brett came out twenty minutes later, he said he wanted them facing the other way, so the post had to be dug up and reset.

So much for saving that concrete 😉

After getting the posts in and cemented down, we ended up filling in each hole with five more bags of concrete. Don’t worry, we used construction grade this time around.

We stained the wooden pillars with Minwax Special Walnut and went over them with Varathane Polyurethane Outdoor in Matte.

Next up was the actual pillar assembly.

If you’ve never had the misfortune pleasure of working from a stone-focused direction packet, let me tell you, it’s quite the adventure.

It’s like trying to put together Ikea furniture, but permanent and a lot heavier. Because the stones are glued together and they are heavy.

Naturally, the directions suck and are not at all clear.

We spent half the time trying to decipher if the stone was on top or underneath or something else entirely.

After wrestling with the ‘cutout’ for several hours, Brett went rogue and just created his own pattern from the stones we had left over. Thank goodness because we could have been there all night.

All-in-all, that first pillar took an entire day, countless curse words and a few stones flung across the yard.

In our defense, we had a wedding the night before and were running on about five hours of sleep and were probably hungry. Because hunger makes everything worse. 

After getting that first one completed on Saturday, he was able to throw together the second one while I was out running errands Sunday morning.

Practice makes perfect, I suppose!

We’re thinking about adding a solar lantern either to the top of the post or hanging from each pillar, so I am on the hunt for those – if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear!

We also want to hang our house numbers from the second post and are on the hunt for some DIY vertical numbers we can put together.

P.s. the pillars were called ‘Aspen‘ from our local home improvement store, Menards.

All our best,

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