Extreme Makeover Joplin: Tooling Up

Tooling Up in Joplin’s Cunningham Park with Extreme Makeover.

It took 10,000 volunteers and multiple builders to make Extreme Makeover: Home Edition‘s 200th—and final—episode a reality. Seven houses in seven days plus our playground and memorial wall in the tornado-ravaged city of Joplin, MO is no small feat.

And like any endeavor where many are marching toward a common good and goal, it takes the efforts of all to make nothing into something extra-special.  So in the run-up to Joplin, as Theresa and I assembled our build team, finalized the construction details with the city, planned travel and care for the kids, secured donations of wood and stain, and planned with the EM:HE team, it was very clear that while all this was forward progress, we still needed tools.

And we would be very far from our home in Philadelphia.

We soon came to learn that Stanley Black and Decker had been on the ground in Joplin right after the tornado. People lost not only everything, but they lost places to go buy new things as Jimmy Addison from Stanley Tools shared with us. They were gone. Just gone. The city was impassable.

So when EM:HE greenlighted the project, Stanley’s brands teamed up with the show and provided tools for out-of-town builders and volunteers—including MyFixitUpLife—to use. They set up a lending library complete with DeWalt gear like cordless tools, miter saws, tile saws, generators, pressure washers, and hand tools. They had Bostitch nailers. Heck, they even helped us with multi-plugs. So for a week of 20+ hour days we cut boards, gun-nailed decking, routed edges.

And when it came time to raise the sign on the playground, designer Michael Moloney was there (that’s him next to me in the white hard hat) along with our build team and the EMHE camera crew.

All told, Stanley brought about $450,000 worth of tools to Joplin. So when you watch the 200th episode of Extreme Makeover, and see someone using a black and yellow tool, it’s not because we brought them. It’s not because we were told to use them. It’s because Stanley made it possible for us to build in a place that is now only geographically far from home.

Curious about the name of the playground? We’ll share the details of why we named the wood playground Boomtown….later.