HOPE HAVEN EDIT
the trinity voice / spring 2016
14
EXTREME MAKEOVER:
WOW (WithOut Walls) Week at Trinity has served as a rite of passage for our 5th-8th grade students for the past 13 years. Trinity puts “regular” classes on hold and sends students out into the world to learn various lessons through real life interaction with their community and beyond. This year, Josh Thornton, inspired and impassioned by working with Hope Haven, one of our 8th grade Service Learning partners this year, proposed our first annual “Extreme Makeover: TES Edition”. I eagerly signed on along with a few trusty alumni parent volunteers; the next
thing we knew, we found ourselves in the thick of the EXTREME part of a makeover project. If you have not seen the actual Extreme Makeover television show, here is a little explanation: The show revolves around a team of designers, contractors and architects reworking the visual appearance of an entire home in one week with a limited budget. We took this concept to Hope Haven, and they LOVED the idea of having our students renovate the younger kids’ play room. As we prepared our plans for WOW Week, we added more rooms to be renovated.
By the time it was all said and done, we renovated four rooms and added a few sparkly touches to some recently renovated rooms. Our budget was by no means a TV budget but rather a real-life nonprofit kind of budget! There was no way we could “buy” the things needed for these rooms; so we went to the drawing board, asked for donations, cruised Craigslist, begged for discounts and learned to work around the colors offered in the “oops” paint section at Home Depot. Once the group of students was assembled, we were off to the races.
LIFE LESSON #1: RENOVATION = MANUAL LABOR The students spent the first morning learning how to clean (yes, we taught them how to mop, sweep and sanitize a countertop) before we even set off for Hope Haven. We also had the task of packing all the donated furniture items onto a borrowed trailer and into cars. There were so many trips from the carpool line to the track that we were dizzy by the end. The spatially-minded students quickly took over packing the trailer and cars while the rest became the pack mules carrying everything out. Once we got to Hope Haven, we unpacked the
trailer and cars into the two staging rooms,then headed to the four rooms we were renovating and began to completely empty them of all the existing furniture, books, toys, rugs...and all before lunch on the first day! As the week progressed, the manual labor simply increased as we moved furniture, built lofts and tables, primed and painted benches, and taped and painted walls. At the end of each day, students and adults were physically wiped-out. Students proclaimed that they didn’t know their arm muscles could hurt so much after just painting!