Bumpy and Smooth

Gary Townsend from East Heights Baptist Church in Tupelo, MS brings us this cool approach for a church with ambient lights on.

We wanted to find something that would give a bit of an update to a pretty traditional-looking church plus something that would make a good impression on guests. Plus rounding out our back corners does help a little with projecting our sound forward. I began brainstorming by looking at churchstagedesignideas.com where I saw the woven wall concept and the block wall concept. So I tried to meld these two ideas together.

Materials:
2x4x8 – 16 @ $5 – $80 (we already had these so no cost to us now)
– 3 2x4s per panel, plus some 2×4 used for bracing
4×8 3/8 plywood – 4 @ $33 – $132
Titebond II wood glue – 4@$8 – $32
screws and brad nails supplied by volunteers
Total: $244

Now for the fun part – All the small block pieces and horizontal slats came from pallets. My side gig is building things from pallets, so I disassembled, denailed, cut, planed, and sanded all of this wood (with a little cutting help from a choir member).
The blocks were actually 3×3 posts that were cut to 1″, 1.5″, 2″, 2.5″ and 3″. Then were glued onto a plywood panel with wood glue.
The horizontal pieces were given that woven effect by just placing a block under one end. As you may see in pics, our outside panels had longer pieces and really short end pieces with more of a common pattern whereas the inner panels were more random placement and sizes. This wood was attached with a brad nailer.

Initially, we decided to leave the wood raw, but future changes could involve staining, painting, or polyurethane.

We plan to use some minimal lighting for effect, but current issues prevent us from doing much more than that.
As far as the time involved, a couple of guys with some handyman knowledge could get it done in a couple of days or so.

So far, so good, all positive comments.

The next step we intend on adding soon will be some lightweight fabric “swooping” down from higher up on the side walls.