How to turn your fellowship hall into a polynesian snack hut

Oh, you just need to turn part of our fellowship hall into a Polynesian snack hut for VBS and by the way you can't set the room up until the afternoon before it starts.  Oh, is that all?! {smiles}

When we have VBS at our church, there is always a teacher break room for the volunteers to come and get a snack on their break.  It's a nice treat that not all churches are able to provide and it brings the volunteers together and keeps them happy (hopefully).  I was the volunteer in charge of hosting the snack hut this year along with my absolutely fabulous team.

First, I had to come up with a vision for the snack hut.  When dealing with an area as large as a fellowship hall, the first thing to do is understand how much of it will be utilized and what the set up will be.  There is no way to effectively proceed without this understanding.  Next, most of the time when doing this for a church, there is little budget.  Therefore, it is important to have an understanding of what is already available to use and how much you are allowed to spend.  The children's ministry had bookoos of luau supplies from previous events.  I spent time doing inventory on all of those items and then started my decorations planning based on that.  In this situation, it's important to be a good steward of what is available, so the trick is to try and use things you normally wouldn't in a creative way to incorporate it into your vision.  Then start sketching it out so that when you stop to take the kids to the pool, fix dinner, clean up, put them to bed and finally get back to it, you remember what you thought of :)

Next, I was lucky to have 2 sweet ladies willing to loan me some of their personal items for my room that brought it more in line with my style.  I really couldn't have achieved what I wanted without these items. Sarah's parasols were perfect:

This piece of fabric was exactly the vintage type south pacific environment I wanted to provide and became the inspiration piece for the room.  It was a crazy way I came about finding out about this piece of fabric, but happy Stacy was able to loan it to me.  This pic shows the fabric and the scene we built around it:

We had the entrance where I envisioned what it would look like to walk along a wooden pathway and leave your beach stuff at the door before coming in to the hut.  I worked on what we already had in inventory that I could use (grass skirting, cue lines from kids' church that I covered with brown paper bags to look more like wood, basket with sea life, straw hat, and life preserver rings).  Then I added to that the surf board, welcome bunting and pallets (thanks to my hubby!).  This is how it turned out:

picture courtesy of Stacy Brown

The biggest area is the wall where the food would be served.  It's bigger than you think and if you don't fill in the space, it looks funny.  So I did a mural that was almost 16 feet long.  The plane was used to tie into the aviation theme of vbs and these wonderful planes made by the interns were hung up all over the church.  The mural was started by me, but in one of God's many provisions, was "fixed" by my team member Carla, who just happens to be an artist.

Speaking of Carla, she too fell in love with the vintage fabric and was able to help me with a wall using her artistry.  I was upset because I just plain ran out of time to prepare a project for this wall ahead of time.  Carla said she would paint 4 pieces that looked like the fabric to help create the look I had wanted.  So she went home after set up and painted them in 2 hours - they were beautiful!!

The above picture also shows another project.  I knew I wanted string lights and any specialty ones were outside the budget for the amount we would need, so I used cupcake liners and regular string lights to customize the look.  They were very budget-friendly.  My team members, Joan and Paula, took the time on set up day to figure out the pattern and how to make it look good!  As far as the plastic table covering on the tables - well, it's just a plain necessary evil when moving 300-500 people through a room 4 days in a row on a budget.  We had over 200 volunteers and by the end of the week, most were coming more than once and the youth workers, well, as much as they could get away with!  There was no way we could realistically wash real tablecloths or replace all of them (we had 12 tables) each day to be ready for the next day.  It's better to focus on other areas because no one really notices that with everything else going on.

On set up day, I knew my husband and I would be there the whole time, and I had asked for my team to come if they could for some amount of time, but I didn't know exactly what to expect.  Again God provided who I needed to put this room together.  Most of my team came as well as the preschool minister and another artist who doesn't even go to our church.  Everyone got along so well and bounced ideas off of each other to implement almost all of the ideas I wanted to include.  For our limited amount of time we had - that was amazing - and only I know the projects that had to be scrapped because of time.  Here are a couple of other pictures:

photo courtesy of Stacy Brown

Planning for the food was done in stages, and included the children's ministry providing some, our church food services providing some, and securing donations from several places, the biggest of which was Publix.  They were very generous.  My team and I prepared the trays of food (the favorite spinach dip and homemade tortilla chips were made by our kitchen), and kept everything full for the almost 3 hours that we were open each day.  It kept us running, but again, my team rocked!  I wished I had pictures of what it looked like full of people, but I didn't think about stopping to take any pics. We finished off the atmosphere by dressing tropical each day and playing calypso music in the background.  

Anyone who has been involved with VBS knows that it is a huge amount of work and always crazy, but seeing how much my kids love it, makes all of it worth the work!!  Us volunteers feel blessed by the week as well as the kids!