Trash to Treasure Challenge VIII
Trash to Treasure Challenge VIII
The winners have been chosen! Thank you for participating and making this challenge a success.
Read MoreOur annual crowd favorite Challenge is back for an 8th year (we can hardly believe it!), and we're excited to see the projects this group of talented DIYers come up with this year. Read on to find out how you can participate - let's turn that trash into treasure!
Welcome to Trash to Treasure Challenge VIII
Overview
This year's challenge will again be focused on transforming an item that some may see as trash into your very own treasure. Remember that how you present your finished product is super important too... because of that, we'll again have 2 bonus prizes that we'll award from all submissions received: Best Staging/Photography and Best Video!
To participate, your original "trash" item can be:
- A purchased item from a garage sale/thrift store/flea market etc. OR
- An item that has been hiding in a storage unit/shed/garage etc. that hasn't been touched in a while
Regardless of how you source your item, it must be valued at about $50 or less.
To participate in the challenge, you’ll need to use your DIY skills to refresh and renew your item... the bigger the change, the better.
Multiple photos of your project are required for your submission:
- A 'before' photo showing your piece prior to spray painting
- 'In progress' photos as you're working on your project
- An 'after' photo showing the final product
- We recommend placing this photo first so that it's the one highlighted in the thumbnail of your submission
If you find an item you love but don’t know where to start, feel free to post a ‘before’ photo in our Discussion Forums. Ask the community for help, ideas, and advice on revamping your item; and then once you’ve finished the project, come back to complete your submission before the deadline.
Once the submission phase closes, we'll put all the qualified submissions out for a community vote to narrow down our finalists. Our team of Rust-Oleum experts will then review the finalists to choose winners for each of our categories! Our experts will judge projects on overall creativity, use of Rust-Oleum products, and most dramatic transformation.
Categories
To encourage everyone to participate, the challenge will be broken into three submission categories, with a winner being selected in each:
- First-Timers
- Experienced DIYers
- Influencers / Professionals
Prizes
Winners of each category above will receive a $400 gift card to Home Depot, Lowe's, or another hardware retailer of choice (if available).
Bonus prizes!
- Our team will be selecting a winning entry based on 'best photography or staging'
- Anyone who includes a video as part of their submission will be eligible to win 'best video' (*please shoot your video vertically so that it can be used for Instagram or TikTok reels)
Each of these two 'bonus' winners will receive a $100 gift card (Home Depot, Lowe's, or another hardware retailer of choice if available) and the video submission has a chance to be featured on one or more of Rust-Oleum's social media channels.
Voting: anyone who casts a vote during our voting phase will be entered to win 1 of 3 $25 gift cards to Home Depot, Lowe's, or another hardware retailer of choice (if available).
Rules:
- Find one item valued at $50 or less (either something you currently have that can be upcycled or an item purchased at a garage sale, thrift store, flea market etc.). See the above "Overview" section for more details.
- Your item must be purchased and/or refreshed/renewed between July 14th – August 21st, 2023. Projects completed prior to this date are not eligible.
- You must use at least two Rust-Oleum products in your project.
- Complete the Trash to Treasure VIII submission form before 5:00 PM CST on August 21st, which requires you to:
- Include ‘before’, 'in-progress' and ‘after’ photos of your project
- List the Rust-Oleum products used
- Enter your submission in the appropriate category
- Choose First-Timer if you consider yourself a novice DIYer
- Choose Experienced if you have done a few DIY projects in the past
- Choose Influencers / Professionals if you have a ‘content creator’ label beside your username or if you consider yourself a social media influencer. If DIY projects/renovations/similar transformations are your main career focus, you definitely fall into the professional category.
- Only one submission per person is permitted. Members submitting more than one project will be contacted to choose which submission remains in the challenge. If no response is received, the first entry is the one that will remain in the Challenge.
- This Challenge operates under the overarching terms and conditions that apply to all Creator's Studio Challenges.
Voting
Once all of the submissions are collected, our Expert Reviewers will evaluate the projects to ensure all rules have been followed and Creator's Studio members will then be given the opportunity to vote for their favorite projects in order to narrow down the submissions to a list of finalists. We'll then pass it over to our Rust-Oleum panel of judges to crown the winners.
Rust-Oleum Inspiration
Looking for inspiration? Feel free to check out the submissions from our previous Trash to Treasure challenges:
- Trash to Treasure Challenge
- Trash to Treasure Challenge II
- Trash to Treasure Challenge III
- Trash to Treasure Challenge IV
- Trash to Treasure Challenge V
- Trash to Treasure Challenge VI
- Trash to Treasure Challenge VII
FAQs
Here are the answers to some common questions that seem to come up each year during the Trash to Treasure Challenge. If you have a question that is not on this list, please send Lisa L a PM or send an email to CreatorsStudioSupport@Chaordix.com
What’s the deal with the categories? We strive to create challenges that are fun and fair, so categories are important to us. If you’re new to Creator’s Studio but have done lots of DIYing, your project will fit in the “Experienced” category. However, if you’ve been a member of the community for a while but haven’t really tried your hand at DIY before, your project belongs in the “First-Timer” category. Send us a note if you have questions or aren't sure and we can help you figure it out!
What's the deadline again? There’s nothing like a deadline for motivation, and we recommend that you pay close attention to the deadline of August 21st at 5:00 pm CST to get your project submitted. If you click the 'submit' button even a minute after this, you will be unable to submit, no matter what you do. In the interest of fairness to everyone who submits on time, we can’t extend the deadline for submissions to this challenge beyond this date/time. So we recommend that you leave yourself plenty of time to submit your project in case you need any technical support from our team.
I'm having trouble submitting my project, please, help! Please don't hesitate to contact our moderator, Lisa L via PM or via our support email address if you need any help. You might also consider working on your submission text in a document until it’s just the way you want it and then copy and paste it into the submission form in Creator’s Studio. (We’ve had a few people whose wifi has cut out or their device crashed mid-submission and they’ve lost all their work and unfortunately, we can’t help with anything that’s not saved as a draft.)
How can I make sure that my project advances to the Crowd Vote phase of the challenge? When our panel of Expert Reviewers creates a shortlist of submissions, we are looking for things like:
- How well you executed your project
- Your use of Rust-Oleum products (for example, a project that uses a lot of clear spray paint in a finishing coat is an awesome and totally valid use for our products, but it often doesn’t show as well as other products)
- How much time and effort went into your project
- How unique and creative your project is - think truly transforming an item into something that will really 'wow'
- Since we rely heavily on your photos and video to show us what you actually did, the quality of submitted visuals is very important to us. So we recommend that you showcase your project in optimal lighting, with a background that makes the piece pop. Need help with this? Check out this 'How to' blog for tips & tricks!
Sometimes good projects don't get shortlisted for the voting phase because we just can't pick them all! But often projects don't get selected because the provided information wasn't as detailed as it could have been, there weren't very many good visuals of the project, because the amount of Rust-Oleum products used was minimal, or sometimes we just have to narrow it down and we don't want to have 10 different versions of the same type of project in the final shortlist. We know we say it all the time, but it really is difficult to eliminate projects from the voting phase!
Who can vote for my project during the Crowd Vote phase? Anyone who is a Creator's Studio member can vote for your project. It is ok to encourage your friends and family online or in person to vote for you. However, it is not okay to spend an evening at your computer creating multiple fake accounts to vote for yourself (trust us, we know when this is happening and you will be disqualified when you are caught). We also prefer that you don't solicit other Creator's Studio members for votes.