Pay It Forward launches month-long contest for bathroom remodel

Published 8:02 am Thursday, January 3, 2019

For those looking to make a clean start to 2019, the Pay It Forward project can help by remodeling their bathroom.

This marks the sixth year of the Pay It Forward bathroom remodeling contest through T’NG Plumbing, as a way of showing kindness and support for individuals with physical, mental and spiritual needs, according to Gina Grundmeier.  For the entire month of January, Mower County residents have the chance to nominate themselves or someone they care about to be chosen for the bathroom remodeling project.

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“Bathrooms tend to be the last room in the house that can be taken care of, but are expensive to renovate them,” Grundmeier said. “Whether it’s for updating for handicap needs, or upgrading them after there has been some deterioration of them. We want to encourage people, if they even entered in the past, to do so again since we only can help one family a year in this capacity. But we’d like to help anyone and anybody we can.”

Since the contest’s start in 2014, Grundmeier shared that she still feels joy from helping someone in any capacity, including helping with bathroom renovations.

“I think my most favorite piece from this is when the family or person arrives on that Friday at 5 p.m. and comes home and gets to see what we’ve done,” she said. “We’ve heard about it being life-changing for recipients and it’s something that gave them a restoration of hope for a physical need that they had.”

Contest rules include submitting an essay with two photos of the bathroom. The essay prompt basically discusses the family or person that’s being nominated and why they need help. The residence must be an owner-occupied house and can be self-nominated or be nominated by someone with all necessary contact info included.

“We want to thank people for not only believing in us, but helping us try to give back to the community,” Grundmeier added. “It’s definitely amazing knowing the strength of the community for coming together and being a solid foundation to start something like that.”

For those interested in entering the Pay It Forward contest, nominations can be submitted on www.payitforwardtng.org. Entries will be accepted through Jan. 31.