Our story so far: Roughly six weeks into the demolition phase of project, we were pleased with the treasures we’d revealed in the old Methodist church we planned to turn into a home, but we’d also found a lot of dust and debris.

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For all the junk and debris we found in the church, we were delighted not to find two things: Rot and vermin. Besides the rotted roof in the belfry, all the wood we found in the church both hidden and exposed was astonishingly sound.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the lack of insects. Sure, there were a few spiders and spider webs in many corners, but none of those disgusting millipeds had taken up residence in the basement, and even the Asian lady beetles and box elder bugs that were infesting our nearby rental house were few and far between at the church.

As Tyler was carefully removing the tin ceiling in the basement, he found three enormous wasp nests built between the exterior wall and the floor joists of the first floor. Shortly thereafter, he found another one in the false roof of the entryway. But the honeycombed structures were at least a decade old, and their creators had taken up residence elsewhere long ago.

It seems only squirrels had been unwanted squatters in ye olde Methodist church (with five extremely mature pine trees on the lot, we shouldn’t have been surprised). I’d take dead squirrels over live bats any day.

Besides Stan, whose mummified remains we found in the belfry during one of the early showings, Reroofer also found a number of squirrel carcasses in the bell tower during his reconstruction foray. And I discovered an almost perfectly preserved squirrel skeleton in a box of plastic chandelier crystals that had been stored on the second floor.

I imagined her to be Stan’s dearly departed mate, tempted but ultimately doomed by the packing Styrofoam in the box that would become her coffin. Her creepy beauty transfixed me. I texted a picture of it to my stepdaughter who, with a degree in biophysics, I thought might find it scientific. Her response? “Ewwwww!”

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Tomorrow: The self-therapy begins. You can read about it here.