From Trash to Treasure

Lessons from A to Z

Abby and Zoe have trash detail in our house. At first, they couldn’t have cared less about the garbage, trash day, or the mundane details like what size of can we had. Until it became their chore and they had to invest time into doing a good job.  It didn’t take long before they started to care that the recycle bins were sorted properly into glass, paper and plastic.  They even looked forward to the promised day we would get the all-encompassing recycle cans in our town.

As you can imagine, the day the larger recycling can came was a day of much rejoicing for them! So much so, that we took these pictures. We could finally fit the vast quantities a family of six recycles. No more stomping down garbage or bagging up the overflow. They ran out to meet the truck, thanking the sanitation workers, and brought the can up our driveway like a found treasure. A treasure! Because that’s what it was now.  A valuable commodity for their investment of time into that chore.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

~ Luke 12:34

This verse shows us how wise God was in building us this way. Do you ever wish you cared a little more about something, but honestly just don’t? I have. But there is hope! This verse encourages us to invest in the stuff we know is good and worthy of our concern, even if our heart isn’t in it yet. If we are faithful to place our treasures of time and money into the hurting places of this world, God is faithful to steer our hearts toward those very things. Where is your treasure?

Geometric/Chevron Wall - Before and After

This week I have been working on Resonate Church's offices. We have a Design Team in place and I have ADORED working with these gals, all of whom are studying Design at UofI. I want to go into business with them and be BFFs with them and, and... We have dreamed up some pretty great ideas for this much larger office space. And now we are beginning to administer them. Starting with a small grimy storage room we turned into a modern, clean-lined Conference Room.

Here was our inspiration for the walls:

These images are from one of the Fritz Hansen furniture galleries. Love the chevron inspired geometric wall! It has a mid-century modern vibe too. We want all of this up in here.

This wall is actually a mosaic of different colored wooden parallelograms. But for our wall we used 5 different colors of paint and A LOT of time and tape.  

The colors were inspired by Resonate Church's logo:

Here's how we did it:

Step 1: Choose colors. We chose 2 grays, 2 greens, and 1 white that all worked well together. All Valspar paint.

Step 2: Sketch it out on paper. Doing this on a small scale will help you execute the large wall so much faster. You won't have to second guess the pattern. (Although if you're like me and accidentally paint a shape the wrong color, you may have to make another sketch!)

Step 3: Measure & mark the wall.  Using a measuring tape, level & pencil, carefully (& lightly) draw the shapes on the wall.

Step 4: Mark each piece. To save time, put a dab of each color in their respective places on the wall. This way you won't have to constantly refer back to your graph each time. (The pic below was mid-project, but you can see "dab marks" for the deeper green.)

 

Step 5: Tape and Paint by Number. Repeat. This takes some time! Put on some good music and tune into the perfectionist in you. Work with one color at a time, taping the outside of that color's shapes. Each color takes 2-3 coats. Remove the tape carefully. If needed, score along the tape edge with an exacto knife to keep the edges clean. Wait until each color is dry before gently taping over it for the neighboring color! This process took a few hours for an 8'6" x 8' wall. But once you get going, you can touch up paint other areas while the current color is drying.

Step 6: Touch up. With this much painting, there will inevitably be touch ups needed. The better you clean up your lines and corners, the sharper your pattern will look. (Below you can see a white gap that needed touching up.)

And here is the final result of the wall in our small 8 1/2 foot wide conference room:

We love this fresh geometric take on the chevron. So graphic!