Creating Beauty With Items from Our ReStore
There are lots of regular visitors to the Forest Grove ReStore, people who come in weekly, or a few times a month. Many of them are looking for specific items to restore and upcycle.
Here are two examples of what community members did with items they bought at the ReStore:
Jason visits our store regularly looking for what he calls “cool-looking” lamps. He restores what he finds and puts them throughout his home as art. We asked Jason to pass on photos of his restoration work. This blog features two of the photos he forwarded to us.
The first is of his backyard, where lights of different styles and colors illuminate his lovely patio at night.
The other scene is also of different light fixtures with different colors, this time lining the ceiling and lighting a hallway in Jason’s house.
Note that none of the light fixtures are the same. None match. Many are of completely different styles and eras. And, yet, the way Jason has repurposed them and uses them, they all mesh together so perfectly.
We passed these photos around the ReStore staff first and everyone’s reaction was the same: “WOW!”
Thank you, Jason, for sharing this with us! We are astounded at how you took such a variety of donated lamps from the ReStore, which probably came from dozens of different people, and created such lovely living spaces!
Another customer bought large folding closet doors at the Forest Grove ReStore. She refinished them in a darker color, cut out the top panels and tacked in rectangles of Shoji Japanese paper. That customer now uses these former closet doors as a room divider in her large living room. On the other side of the divider is a standup piano and a space to play darts!
She preferred to buy and adapt used doors, rather than buy new room dividers, for four reasons: one, most new room dividers she saw weren’t tall enough for the room; two, she loves the idea of upcycling something and keeping it out of a landfill rather than buying something new; three, when estimating shipping fees, she found that this idea was cheaper than buying new room dividers; and, four, she loved the idea of her purchase helping West Tuality Habitat for Humanity.
We love when customers share their project ideas with us at the ReStore. But we’d loved to see your before, during and after photos too! You can send those to marketing@westtualityhabitat.org or send us a link to where we can find them online and tell us some details about your project. We then might feature your photos and your story on this blog!
Come to the ReStore and find your DIY project to add beauty or function (or both!) to any room in your home - or in your garage or in your garden! We're open Monday through Saturday, 9 to 5. And remember: sales benefit the home building, critical home repairs and advocacy efforts for affordable housing by West Tuality Habitat right here in Western Washington County, Oregon.
