Submitted by Melissa Hinton
Pikes Peak
Monument
We are Hannah B. and Chloe W. from Cadette Troop 43107 in Monument.
Our Silver Award project was creating a Lending Library to bring more reading into the community. Our goal was to share our love of reading with others and hopefully get others to enjoy reading as well. Our steps were to get permission to build the library, plan a structure, ask for donations, build the structure, and supply it with books. Overall, our project went pretty well; however, we did have some problems along the way.
While doing the project, many things worked well in the process. Our steps that went really well were getting permission to build the library, planning the structure, and of course being able to finish the project on time. We were able to quickly set up a meeting with Tom Tharnish and Sadie Ernst, who work for the town of Monument. They promptly gave us to permission to build the Lending Library in Lavalette Park. When planning the structure, we used the Free Little Lending Library website, which had dozens of easily accessible plans we could have chosen from to build our library. We ended up combining two of their plans into one structure and making it our own. Having the opportunity to work in a woodshop at Mountain Ridge Middle School really helped us be able to have an easier experience building the library. We were also very lucky to have finished the project on time and for it to have turned out so well.
Although our project had many things that went well, it was not without things that didn’t go as planned. When we were looking for donations and building the structure, things didn’t go as we would have thought. It took us more time than expected to get donations; we ended up having to go to three stores before receiving the majority of our donations. While building, we ended up having to put on more layers of paint than what we had thought. We also had to do a second layer of shingles because we didn’t put on the first layer correctly.
During the project, we learned many lessons. One of the lessons that we learned was to ask for donations from a store, and to also host a money-earning activity to earn more money for the project. We also learned a couple of lessons about building and woodworking such as: how to cut big pieces of plywood and how to install plexiglass. We also learned to take our time on painting and do more than one layer. We learned to plan proper placements for shingles before nailing them onto the roof of the Lending Library.
Overall, we immensely enjoyed doing our Silver Award project and although not everything went as planned, we still took away many lessons. We learned not only how to build a Lending Library, but huge life lessons that we can use in future experiences that come our way. In the end, we accomplished our goal to bring more reading into our community.
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