In late summer 2019, we began the process of giving the museum a makeover. The place to start was literally a place to start: a space we could use as a base of operations.
Enter the kitchen.
In the museum’s early years, this space actually was used as a kitchen for events like the ice cream social. Over the years it became a sort of hybrid display and storage space, with kitchen-related collection items mixing in with extra chairs and tables. Since it is also the only closed room within the museum, it made sense to give the space purpose again.
To clear some space, we first moved the tables and chairs out. We then cleared out the two large built-in cupboards before starting on the actual collection items. Some pieces were moved to be displayed elsewhere, some we chose to keep in the space we now called the kitchen/office or “k/office,” and the rest we moved to our storage room (the organization of which is for a different post, but every item we stored is now easily located for future displays).
Then it was time for a deep clean, a fresh coat of (donated) paint, and the return of a few work tables.
Of course, it only looked like this for about two minutes. Currently, it looks something like this:
This is where we have been sorting, cleaning, indexing, storing, and creating new displays for the rest of the museum. The chaos in the K/Office translates to a refreshed and reorganized Renville Museum that we can’t wait to share.
