Refurbishing The Woo Fridge
By: Ariel Amasifuén
Last month, we were asked by our local community fridge, Woo Fridge, to refurbish their pantry boxes. They were spraypainted pink in the winter, so we knew going in that we would have to sand down the existing paint before we added a fresh layer back on.
While we were at it, we thought we could add some designs to the fridge to make them prettier and have some information included on them, which could get made with vinyl so that there would be less risk of it falling apart due to weathering! Plus, if it ever needed to be refreshed, we’d already have the files on hand to make them again.
After we brought the pantry boxes up to Technocopia, Eric and Riley got to work with sanding the boxes. It took a fair amount of manual and machined sanding with the spray paint. Spray paint in the winter can have a harder time drying properly, and it can cause bubbling which adds additional texture.
After some manual sand papering, we brought the boxes to the wood shop to use the electric sander and to clear out the dust particles created by that so we could repaint the boxes. We had a nice assembly line going after a bit, with Eric sanding away the paint and Riley clearing the dust out, and with myself bringing the boxes back out to the work table and prepping the paint supplies so that we could get to work on the next step.
After that, we started painting! We used some of the white paint we already had on hand, and started painting the boxes. We stuck to what Woo Fridge had already set up, which was only painting the back panels. This was the easiest part of the process, which we completed in turns.
While painting was happening, I started up a design file for the Woo Fridge’s logo. I’m pretty used to having to replicate logos when I don’t have access to the original creator’s files, and since we were doing the logos as vinyl designs, it was important to design the logo in a way that made it easier to cut out in multiple layers anyways.
After I did a preliminary pass of the logo and the text that we would use in the pantry, Riley went over the logo to simplify it as much as possible to make it easier to layer. We planned to use blue, yellow, and black to replicate the Woo Fridge logo design as closely as possible. After setting up the files and setting up the pantry boxes to dry, we headed over to the design studio to start up our Cricut. We cut out the lettering in the fridge first, and then started working on the multi-layer project of making the logo.
After Riley weeded and set aside the text vinyls, they layered the Woo Fridge logo vinyl and our vinyls were ready to go on the fridge!
We carefully set the vinyls down onto the pantry boxes, and used pressure to set them in place. After that, it was a pretty easy run down to the Woo Fridge once more to set them inside, and stapling in the QR code we created to redirect people to donation facilities for non-food items that were accessible via free public transit.
Thank you to the Woo Fridge for coming to us with this project! Supporting mutual aid efforts, especially one that provides food without barriers to folks, is something we immensely appreciate and are happy to help out in the ways we can!
