Hope Filled Heritage

Heritage Luminaries - 

Heritage Luminaries is our outdoor luminary sign brand. Our current product offering is the "Merry Christmas" luminary that measures (dimensions) and is available for purchase in (light options). Currently, this is our only design, but we hope to have more offerings in the future.

Heritage Luminaries History - 

Our Heritage Luminaries brand is what started it all. The original "Merry Christmas" luminary, mentioned above, lived on our childhood home which was nestled at the end of the street in our small town of approximately 800 people. Our neighbor to the right was an open field and our neighbor to the left was an empty lot turned to garden. Needless to say, the original luminary was enjoyed by the few neighbors we had across the street. Demand for the luminary didn't rise until our empty nester parents moved out of our childhood home in 2018 to a new home on a well traveled road on the outskirts of the "big city", our neighboring town of just under 27,000. Since then, they have sold X luminaries strictly by word of mouth, X of which were complete strangers who just dropped by the house asking where they could get one of the "Merry Christmas signs." Having customers literally knocking on our parent's door demanding a product they made sounds like a dream come true to anyone with a bend toward entrepreneurship, but like every good thing, making it to this point did not come easy. A lot of hard work and trial and error has brought us where we are today.

From start to finish, the original sign took my parents eight very involved man hours to make. Essentially, they enlarged and traced the luminary letters on paper using a projector, cut out the paper to make a stencil, traced the letters on a sheet of plywood using the stencil, cut the plywood with a jigsaw, drilled 500 holes in the cut out, painted it, poked Christmas lights through the holes, and stapled the lights to the back of the luminary to keep everything in place.

We know. That's a lot, but we shared the process so you can see just how daunting it was for our parents to have a growing list of people asking if they would make them a luminary. They didn't want to turn people away, but they knew they couldn't possibly commit to making the luminaries if the process took that long and was that involved.

With a bit of an entrepreneur bend himself and a great mechanically inclined mind, our dad was determined to find a quicker way to cut out the luminaries so he didn't have to turn anyone away. In his research, he came across people who were making CNC machines at home as a hobby. Years ago, he worked for a CNC company, so when he realized he could make a machine at home, he instantly knew that this technology would help reduce the time and effort it took to cut out the luminaries, and it would also do it with more accuracy. So he decided this was the tool he needed to streamline the luminary creation process.

In the spring of 2019, our dad and his dad got to work building the table and bed of the machine. They built the bed in one weekend. Then it took approximately two weeks to install the x, y, and z axises and the wood router and another week to calibrate the machine.

Between the time the first luminary was manufactured in our parent's garage and today, our parents have tried a number of different methods and materials to create the finished luminary in a fraction of the time it took them to make the original by hand. Today, we are proud to have a process in place that allows us to more efficiently create what we now call Heritage Luminaries.

Heritage Essentials - 

Heritage Essentials is our product recommendations brand. Those who follow us on social media know our content revolves around "Simplify life to make room for what really matters, creating hope for our heritage." At first, our product recommendations brand might seem contradictory to our "simplifying life" montra, but we like to remind people that simplifying life doesn't mean never buying anything. What it does mean is being more selective with the products we do buy and making sure they are quality products that will stand the test of time and provide solutions to our household organization and functional needs. 

It is our goal for Heritage Essentials to provide our followers an honest review of products we love in case they are looking for similar items to serve their household function. We love to research different products to fit our needs, and we'd love if our research and reviews were able to help others make informed purchases while saving them time in the process.

Visit our Herritage Essentials Shop to see our product recommendations!

Heritage Essentials History -