Ben Taylor from Silver Creek Church in Marquette, MI brings us these cool wood panels wrapped in Christmas.
One of their church members has a portable saw mill at his house and does a lot of woodworking from there. They had an idea for a rustic sort of wood stage design for their auditorium. Their stage is pretty wide, but not very deep, so the backdrop had to not take up much physical space. They have an open spot underneath their screen where they put the main piece of the design, also utilizing it as a built in backdrop for our sermon videos.
They asked the guy with the saw mill if they could get some rough cut pine boards from him and he gave a stack of them to the church. The boards were around 9ft long and a mixture of 7″ and 10″ wide. Given the fact that the width of their screen was 12ft wide, they made a 12ftx5ft frame out of 2×4’s with studs at 4ft and 8ft. They cut their boards so that each level of it would have a 4ft and 8ft board in it, alternating seams on the way down as well as width of boards as well. When they had it attached, they used spare wood to create a lip all the way around to give it a little more depth as well. This part took 2 guys 4-5 hours in total.
Then they got more boards from the man in their congregation and decided to make the 2 smaller, outer pieces. They made 3ftx8ft frames out of 2×3 [save on weight] and simply cut 3ft sections and attached them directly. After those were done, they put a similar lip on them as well to match the main piece. There was no staggering done one these. This part took Ben about 4 hours to do on his own in one day.
Next was stain. They wanted to darken the wood, making it looked weathered, but maintain the really cool grains that were in it. They bought a Minwax wood finish that at first was extremely dark, but after using a LOT of mineral spirits they got it to a nice mellow finish. They only used about 1/4 of that can of stain on almost 125 square feet of wood.
To hang them, they put big eye hooks on each side from the top, attached to vinyl coated wire rope. On the other end of the wire rope was an S hook that they attached directly to a big I beam up in the ceiling. They crossed the two ropes so that the S hooks would work properly. Once they were hung, they had tied them off from behind to make sure they didn’t rotate and stayed love instead.
The final touch was the greenery and lights that a few ladies from the church put on for them to tie the whole look into our Christmas graphics.
All of the main boards were free. After stain, framing boards, and hardware, the total cost asunder $150.
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