Our story so far: Despite the raised eyebrows of our friends, I was sure a converted church would make a divine home, and I talked my husband into taking on the project.

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I especially scoffed at the notion that a church might be haunted. One naysayer asked if I was going to burn sage.

Harumph. Sage. No.

Why would ghosts want to haunt a church? Only someone who didn’t attend church would suggest such a thing.

Church buildings are places of joy. Babies get baptized in churches. Couples get married. Children sing songs, and people celebrate holidays and anniversaries. Yes, people have funerals in churches, too. Funerals are sad. But people who have church funerals believe they’re going to heaven; they’re not going to hang around a church pissed off about the afterlife. And we had established, as definitively as you can without breaking ground, that no cemetery had ever been part of the property so we were confident we wouldn’t have a Poltergeist incident.

(Then I looked up what a sage smudging ritual involved. Sage smoke absorbs conflict, anger, illness or evil, according to Google. Couldn’t hurt to take an metaphysical shower, right?)

I have been accused of being naïve Pollyanna, so maybe when I said I was convinced we could successfully tackle this job, save money in the process and love our new digs, well, maybe I was wrong.

But I was also a fatalist who believed it did no good to resist the inevitable. Any house we purchased, or any lifestyle we adopted for that matter, could get us killed or cost us money or make us miserable if that’s what the future had in store for us. Not to mix my metaphors, but if we were going to go down in flames, we were going down in a church.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 3 opens with a look into the maw of our first potential money pit. Click here to read.