It’s the first day of school, and parents are waiting in lines to drop off their children at the junior high, high school, and nearby Holmes Park Elementary. At the corner of Adams and Hobson, everyone turns an eye to the yard that looks like it should be in one of the nearby elementary school’s classrooms.
Giant markers, highlighters, pencils, notebooks—even a larger-than-life watercolor set, complete with a paintbrush, dot the yard across the street from Holmes Park Elementary.
The eye-catching classroom decor is the work of Andrea Hobbs and her husband Mike, who have lived at the address for the last several years. Andrea says she’s been decorating since before her kids were grown.
“I did it on a smaller scale at a different address, but here we’ve been doing it just the last couple of years,” she told Sapulpa Times in an on-camera interview on Thursday morning.
“When my kids were smaller, I did it for the holidays and their birthdays,” she said. “When we bought this house, we started remodeling the inside. After we finished the outside, we started decorating the yard again.”
Hobbs said she’d never done anything for back-to-school, and decided to start this year with a collection of oversized school supplies. “Everyone has to do it—we’re close to the high school, too—and buying school supplies is overwhelming.”
The yard decor, which also features a giant pair of scissors attached the fence, and signs with encouraging phrases like “be bold, be brave, be you” and “stay focused,” is made largely out of foam board and repurposed thrift-shop items.
“I like to collect antiques,” Hobbs said. “We go thrift shopping a lot. We got a miniature shopping cart and I thought the school supplies overflowing would be fun.” The shopping cart is contains pencils and erasers, while an oversized calculator reads “74066.”
Most of the work is done inside, and then she and her husband help plant the decor in the yard. “It took about 30 minutes (to set up),” she said.
Hobbs said she loves the attention that the yard is getting, and hope it brightens someone’s day and maybe inspires them. “If it can just get someone to smile, maybe look twice, or forget about their troubles for a bit, it’s all worth it.”
Andrea Hobbs says the back-to-school decor will stay in the yard for the first few weeks of schools, but she’s already planning to switch it over to fall decor in September. Watch the short on-camera interview on our YouTube Channel: