Taking a PBK look and making it your own

Chelsey Branstetter, a young wife and mom, says she loves "to mix old and new, and find ways to reuse items" when it comes to decorating her family's home in Ferndale, Calif.

So it wasn't any wonder that she made a beeline for our vintage sign letters when she first visited Timeless Treasures in early July.

As luck would have it, we had just received several old wood letters with remnants of dark red paint that had once been part of a sign for a lawn and garden center in Pennsylvania.

Chelsey chose the letters to spell out her four-and-a-half-year-old son's name, Lane. Even the oxblood red paint coordinates perfectly with the color scheme in his room.

As she explains, her son's furniture and bedding are straight from PotteryBarn Kids, so Chelsey wanted to add decorative elements to his room that no one else would have. "The red wooden letters are old and simple, yet completely my style," she says. "The look of the letters flows with the rest of our house, mixing old with new."

Everybody who has seen the letters has loved them, according to Chelsey. Inspired, she made the 5-hour drive to San Francisco again last Saturday and picked out vintage letters for her next project. . . spelling out the word family to highlight a wall of personal photographs.