Savings You Can Salute

I've been wanting a flag forever. It just feels so American you know? There's nothing like an American flag hanging proudly from the front porch. 

There's just something about a cute house with a flag...

I've thought about all the different flags I could hang: Indianapolis Colts, Purdue Boilermakers, Texas state flag, and of course the American flag around Memorial Day and 4th of July. I've got big plans for this project!

I went out to Home Depot and Lowes looking for one at the start of the summer and was shocked to learn it would cost me $46 for the flag pole, flag, and the hardware to mount it on the house. And, even worse, the flag poles were wooden or white with cheap looking hardware. Yuck!
So over Labor Day weekend, Malibu Ken and I tried again. This time we went back to Home Depot. Perhaps there were other flag pole options I hadn't seen? Nope. The options were still the same, and they were just as expensive as I had remembered. However, we did think the mounting hardware for mounting a 1 inch flag pole on the house was a good deal at $6. And even though it was painted white, Malibu Ken so smartly pointed out that we could spray the hardware to Oil Rubbed Bronze or "ORB". (Ever since he started reading Young House Love with me, he's been full of good ideas!).
With that piece of the puzzle solved, we started out for Micheal's Crafts hoping to find a flag pole. We scored a silver flag pole for $10 at Michael's, using a 50% off coupon, which I found using an app on my phone called Geocoupons. An American flag for $9 brought my total for the project to $25. Eat it Home Depot.
Malibu Ken got busy straight away sanding down the silver flag pole with some light grit sand paper I had laying around.

Real studs help their girlfriends with house projects ;)

Next it was time to spray the flag pole and the mounting hardware. We debated about spraying the screws that the mount came with, but decided against that as we thought it would make them "sticky" and harder to actually twist in place. They were a normal silver color after all, so I thought we'd just wait until we were done to see if something needed to be done about that later on.

First we laid all the items to be sprayed out on some extra cardboard scraps on the floor of the garage (far away from the car should the spray can go a little crazy... errrr the person using the spray can)

Then since the end of the flag pole which the finial attached to was actually just plastic, we wrapped it using regular masking tape. This way, it would stay clean, and we could spray the pole and the finial separately and then put them back together without the finial getting stuck on gooey paint.

Spray time using Rustoleum All Surface Paint in "Hammered Brown"

It ended up taking a few coats over the course of a week, and we sort of had a little crisis with the sprayer. See the sprayer is basically a trigger that allows the paint to come out. The trigger got stuck because there must have been a dried paint glob or something. When this happened, we had to stop paint operations. At that time, I thought I would just give Rustoleum a call as their paint can advertised a full refund/replacement if the product did not perform as advertised.
Flash forward to the following weekend when my dad was out visiting... We played around with some spray nozzles that were "borrowed" from other brands of spray paint. The winner ended up being a spray nozzle from some can of window cleaner. We just popped the new nozzle on and finished the paint job. Now that the paint was finished, we hung the mount on the house.
Charlie so graciously lent me his super man drill since all I have is the lady Bosch, which does a fantastic job on many of my projects, but probably wasn't going to cut it on drilling through mortar. So using the yellow super man drill with hammer setting (??), a special drill bit that goes into brick houses, and 1 1/2" special screws that fasten into brick and mortar, my dad put up the mount for me.

Apparently special strong screws must be identified by a neon blue color

So we cut out a mount sized hole in a scrap piece of cardboard, and using another piece as a shield from the wind, sprayed the blue screws to bronze

Now everything matches. Very important.

We still aren't done. Now we had to hang the flag. Who could have thought this would be such a complex project!?
Basically all that's involved here is sticking the flag on the pole and then sliding the flag pole into the mount. Seemed simple, and even though dad did it, I'm pretty sure I could manage in the future whenever I decide to change out the flag. Now picture time!

Pretty quaint huh? And I think just perfect for today 9/11

So what does everyone out there think? Should I stick with the American favorite? Or should I switch to something else for football season? Maybe a Colts flag or a Purdue flag?

Peace and Patriotism,
Engineeringirl