Painting the Bridge Progess

Before class on Monday, my team and I came across a lot of problems. As I have mentioned in my last post about our progress, Ellen and I were attempting to find organizations or businesses to donate paints and brushes for this project to no avail. Secondly, a team member came up with 6 different designs in the past two weeks, but we couldn't agree on one design to use. We were unable to compromise as well. The flyer for the event still was incomplete, but the event is drawing near. The residents need to hear about it soon. With all that in mind, each one of us were anxiety ridden. During class on Monday, my team and I finally got a lead on where we could get paint and brushes/rollers for free for painting the Marlo Heights bridge. Amory informed us about Austin's Household Hazardous Waste Disposal service. We heard about it last week, and Ellen and I made numerous phone calls. We've left messages, but they didn't get back to us for a week. They did finally get back to Ellen on Tuesday, I believe. In any case, Amory suggested that we could just drive to their location and assures that we would be able to get paints from them. We also will be supplied brushes and rollers from Amory. Thank goodness! We also finally agreed on a bridge design which I came up with the base design from looking at someone's t-shirt. Then, my team members suggested adding trees to the design. The final design that we were all in agreement for looks like this:

I think that this design is great for Marlo Heights, because it has a good representation of their unique neighborhood. Each house is different from another, and they aren't all equally distanced from each other. Marlo Heights also has many shrubbery, so the trees in the design helps represent that. I think we'll have the name "Marlo Heights" written somewhere on the skyline as well. Plus, we got the flyers for the event finished, with Spanish translation on the back as well. We felt so much more relieved and excited for the day we paint the bridge to come. Then, Anna, Ellen, Lucille, and I went to the Household Hazardous Waste Disposal service to check out the paints they offer. Fortunately, they had a bountiful amount of free paint to offer. They had various shades of brown or tan made up from interior and exterior paints that people donated. The staff assured us that the mixed paint should still work on concrete outdoors, since they had sheds that were painted by their mixed paint. The paint on the sheds lasted at least 8 years! Thus, we decided to stick with their paint and got 3 3.5 gallons of a darker shade of tan and 2 3.5 gallons of a lighter shade of tan. On Friday, we'll purchase one bucket, from Home Depot, of a different color paint to write "Marlo Heights" and possibly paint the rail. Hopefully, Home Depot will also let us borrow or rent a tarp to make sure we don't get paint all over the sidewalk when we paint the bridge. All we have left now is to hope and pray for sunny, dry weather this weekend! Please, don't rain! We are really pumped up about painting this bridge!