Our story so far: Among the finds we made while shopping to outfit the old Methodist church we were turning into a home was a pair of leaded glass windows to decorate the interior balcony.

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Meanwhile, Tyler found another set of leaded glass windows on eBay. Unfortunately, they didn’t survive transport; they arrived in the open package Brown left on our doorstep.

The second set of leaded glass windows were intended to replace the etched glass transoms on the front of the church. One of those windows had a crack in it. The eBay windows were exactly the right dimensions and, coincidentally, they were salvaged from a church in Michigan twenty years ago. The seller never put them to use so she put them on auction. Tyler secured a great deal and we paid $118 to have them shipped and insured, but we kicked ourselves for not driving to Michigan to pick them up ourselves. When they arrived on our front doorstep, nine panes in the two windows were cracked.

We had them insured, but Brown insisted on collecting the windows before paying the insurance. What? To throw them away? We wanted the insurance to pay for repairs.

After wrangling with Brown via email, the shipping behemoth agreed to let us keep the windows and send us a check. Now we had to find an artisan to make repairs on a pair of decades-old windows.

Which we added to our long to-do list. But we had another open window distracting us.

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Coming up: Chapter 19 opens with the truth of a maxim. Read about it here.