ReStore

When we were in Charleston, WV for our service spring break trip with Cru, my team spent a rainy day helping out at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. We were in the group that was working on the Habitat houses for the week, and when it rained they sent us off to this fun store to do some clean-up and help organize the place. I didn't know much of anything about Habitat before the trip, and had definitely never heard of a ReStore. I learned a ton about it that day though and thought it was awesome enough to share!

Habitat for Humanity builds homes for people living in unsatisfactory living conditions and can't afford to upgrade to safer, healthy environments. It's actually a fairly intense process, so the people who get the homes definitely deserve them - they have to take several classes about home repair in addition to putting in 100 (I think) hours working on the house themselves.

Habitat homes are funded mostly through donations, and the labor is mostly supplied by volunteers (electrical wiring and such are contracted out, of course). A lot of the funds come from the Habitat ReStore. The ReStore is a Goodwill-esque Home Depot. People and businesses donate used or imperfect doors, tiles, sinks, furniture, and home odds and ends. At the store we were at they got palettes of tiling for free that would have just been thrown away because it was extra or the wrong color or whatever. Habitat then sells the furnishings and donates the proceeds to build houses. It costs about $50,000 to build a house (they only pay the bare essentials), and the store we were at had fully funded 7 houses over the last few years. If there's one near you, you should check it out - you could find a great deal on a desk or cabinets and donate to a great cause. A couple of years ago some guy (local artist?) donated a TRUCKLOAD of bottle caps that he had been collecting to the ReStore. They didn't know what to do with them all, so they created this awesome picture of recycling on the wall of the store! Each bottle cap represents one ton of material that has been diverted from a landfill due to it being recycled to the Habitat store. They are divided by year. It's so cool to see the level grow each year! Cool recycled bottle chandelier.

I got to try my hand at decorating this room to make the furniture look more appealing so people would buy it. I totally transformed the look of the room by rearranging all of those pictures you see on the wall - that wall was completely covered with those canvases! They weren't lined up or straight at all and the wall was just really cluttered; it looked terrible. We opened the vintage chest (to the left of the fireplace) that they were itching to sell and made it and the pictures marketable by stacking the canvases inside so people could look at them. We leaned other pictures in strategic places and arranged the back wall so the pictures were even. We took down a lot of the pictures and only displayed the best ones so they would catch people's eye, making them want to look at the rest.