Boys & Girls Club art gallery makeover for National Rebuilding Day

Inspired by the Boys & Girls Club in Philadelphia, we created a gallery wall to celebrate their artwork for National Rebuilding Day.

I love any project that helps inspire kids, which is why I was super-excited for the opportunity to volunteer our skills for an art room makeover project at a local Boys & Girls Club with Rebuilding Together Philadelphia.

The Boys & Girls Club at the Germantown branch is the first club in Philadelphia, and is a richly detailed building that had Mark and I in awe for parts of the day.

As part of National Rebuilding Day and ComcastCares day, volunteers were coming together to help transform part of the basement of the historic building into a new arts and crafts room. When I heard about this project, I was immediately inspired to help create a gallery wall just outside the room, so the kids would have a place to proudly display their creations. I also want to make the space that exuded fun, creativity, and hopefully inspiration.

Since we had just about eight hours to makeover the space, my design also had to be fairly easy to execute. I proposed the idea of painting 1-by and 2-by wood boards with bright colors in a wash-technique that would give bright hues and allow the textural quality of the wood grain to be enjoyed. And I planned to put some of the boards perpendicular to the wall, to create integrated shelving. The shelves would make it easy to prop up artwork against the wall or as display area for sculptures created in the new arts and crafts room.

The first step to creating this art wall was to make the wall ready for the wood installation. The walls are made of block, so Mark attached vertical strips to the wall, so we could attach the horizontal pieces to those. If you have ever tried to attach anything to block, you’ll understand why. And if you haven’t ever had to, well, you are lucky.

We had help from Chris at Philadelphia-based Lux Renovations to install the wood for the gallery wall. That freed me up to focus on painting the boards, and prepping an extra feature for the wall. I used some of the scrap pieces from the project to make a magnetic board. With magnets, the framed board would make it easy to change the featured artwork on the wall.

I’m looking forward to seeing artwork on display from the classes at this Boys & Girls Club.