Trash to Treasure Challenge VII
Trash to Treasure Challenge VII
The winners have been chosen! Thank you for participating and helping us transform some trash into treasure!
Read MoreOur annual crowd favorite Challenge is back for a 7th year(!!), and we can’t wait to see what gets created. The entries just keep getting better and better. Read on to find out how you can participate - let's turn that trash into treasure!
Welcome to Trash to Treasure Challenge VII
Overview
This year's challenge will be focused on refreshing/renewing - we're looking for you to turn those dusty, old, tired-looking items into something truly impressive. Remember that how you present your finished product is super important too... because of that, we're introducing 2 new bonus prizes that we'll award this year 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. Be sure to take before photos of your item and document the steps along the way as you transform it from trash to treasure. 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, our team of Rust-Oleum experts will review entries, and then the community will be in charge of casting votes to crown the winners! 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 Amazon.
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 Amazon) 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 Amazon.
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 June 20th – August 15th, 2022. 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 VII submission form before 5:00 PM CST on August 15th, which requires you to:
- Include ‘before’ 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.
- Note: for this Challenge only, we are waiving the stipulation that a previous winner can not be chosen to win. If a recent winner in our last Challenge is selected as one of the winning entries, they will be able to claim their prize.
Voting
Once all of the submissions are collected, our Expert Reviewers will have a chance to evaluate the projects to create a shortlist ensuring all rules have been followed and select our favorites. We'll then pass the final vote to the Creator's Studio to crown the ultimate champion in each category.
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
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 15th 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.