BROOKINGS – The life-size displays in the break room at Larson Manufacturing are humorous and sentimental: a gingerbread house, a fireplace with stockings and a tree, and a functioning snowglobe, among others. 

What makes them special is the employees constructed them with scrap material left over from their everyday business of assembling doors and windows.

The idea was born a year ago when Kristen Purcell from Human Resources was decorating for the season and ReAnn Knust from the windows team noticed.

“She had made a comment (along the lines of) it would be cool to make a Christmas tree out of the parts and pieces of Larson doors, instead of the balls you usually put on their tree,” Purcell said. 

“It’s something that wouldn’t cost us anything because it was all scrap,” Knust added.

“And something that showed Larson. It was all products that we all touch and feel every day. But to look at it in a different way was pretty cool,” Purcell said.

She remembered the conversation and when Halloween rolled around this year, she reminded Knust about the tree ornament idea.

“One thing led to another,” Knust said.

“And we came up with the idea to have a challenge,” Purcell said.

Employees respond

And, boy, did the employees respond. 

Forget just making ornaments. They went way beyond that, to decking out seven complete floor scenes, all constructed from various items left over from manufacturing.

“Scrap, lots of it; all kinds of it,” said Lori Rydell, who also works in windows.

Window spacers, cable, foam, saw blades, weather stripping, pallets, Styrofoam, cardboard, and screens, just to name some.

“Every part of the door or window that you could throw away,” Purcell said.

After getting approval from Plant Manager Ryan Johnson, Purcell announced the challenge to everybody, just hoping she could get a handful of people involved so the project didn’t fall flat.

That’s when the questions started, most of them from Serenity Vande Weerd, in Cell 3. 

“I had a lot of ideas running through my head,” she said. “I went to her and asked what can we and can we not do, what will I get in trouble for and what won’t I get in trouble for.”

“The more questions they were coming up and asking me, I knew that we had an interest,” Purcell said.

That interest sparked ideas and the ideas sparked competition that got quite fierce. 

“You had people guarding their scrap, that’s the funny thing,” Purcell said. “You’d go digging through something and (they’d say in a stern voice) ‘What are you doing with that?’” 

“Maintenance was on me all the time, every time I was taking stuff,” said Vande Weerd, who gave them attitude in return. “You mind your business. Worry about you; I’ll worry about me.”

Off-the-clock teamwork

In the end, more than 100 people were involved in building the seven projects, said Johnson. The plant has 350 people, but just the production facility was involved in making the projects, Purcell added.

The projects required a lot of teamwork, but it was all off the clock.

“I gave everybody projects,” Vande Weerd said. “You take this home, bring it back to me; this is the day I need it.”

The hardest part was “trying to get the dolls to stand up,” said Vande Weerd. She came up with the idea to use her supervisor’s, team lead’s and specialist’s faces as the dolls’ mugs. 

Another tricky aspect was the sleigh, which was made from pallets and kick plates.

“Our sleigh, I had to take that home and do that,” she said. “There was a lot of yelling in my garage.”

She figures the ornaments took the longest to make. Her team took broken drill bits and spray-painted them. She took keys from Cell 2 and “those are in the shape of stars,” Vande Weerd said.

Her cell completed their project in about five days.

“The hardest part was deciding what we were going to do,” said Knust, who worked on the winning gingerbread house with Rydell and Brian Hornkohl. Most of it was planning.

It turned out to be way more than Purcell and Rydell had initially hoped for.

“I never imagined the stuff that came out there,” Purcell said. 

Knust’s favorite part was watching everyone come together and work as a team.

“Seeing the result. Watching it come together,” Rydell said.

“When everyone’s pitching in, putting all the pieces together,” Hornkohl added.

“I’m just competitive, so all of it was fun for me,” Vande Weerd said. “Getting everybody else to actually get in on it with me was probably the best part.”

Winning designs

“In the morning when they came, they all turned the lights off so they could see them all lit up in the dark. That was pretty neat,” Purcell said.

That’s when Johnson and Nicole Nuttbrock from Human Resources had a tough decision to make: crowning the winner.

“It was extremely hard,” Johnson admitted, adding they were looking for unique innovation and “best use of scrap.”

First place went to the gingerbread house made by the window line. The group got movie tickets and a catered meal, but most importantly, bragging rights. 

Each entry got a title, and that means a lot, said Vande Weerd.

“It shows us that work on the floor, that we are being recognized for what we do. Not just for the work we do on the line, but for the work that we did outside. So that makes everybody else feel good, too,” she said.

With all the work and creativity that went into the sculptures, the folks at Larson want them to be seen.

“We’re hoping to take most of them up to our Christmas party that’s going to be in January and use them as our decorations,” Purcell said.

After that, the fate of the projects is unknown.

Some joked about what they’d do with theirs, others planned to bring grandkids to see the creations. Storage is a key point for long-term use.

“I don’t know if there’s a way of doing it, to save them that long, but … to display them all on the Parade of Lights would be cool,” Hornkohl said. 

Vande Weerd figured if nothing else, individual pieces could be salvaged, like the ornaments on her team’s tree.

“They were all so great, they really were,” Purcell said. “Just the pride that everybody had was pretty neat to see. I think people were surprised by how much fun they had doing it, too.”

It was such a success they want to take another run at it.

“Trust me, I’m already working on next year’s idea. I have it in my head. I need a whole year to win,” Vande Weerd said.

Contact Jodelle Greiner at jgreiner@brookingsregister.com.