Our story so far: As we continued renovating the old Methodist church into our home, my husband began most days by flinging open the double front doors and leaving them open all day to clear dust and cool the men working inside. The open doors had an ancillary benefit: They welcomed visitors. 

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While neighbors were dropping by to get a peek inside, we were thinking about looking outside.

When we purchased the church, all the windows in the sanctuary had obscured glass. Not frosted, exactly, but some sort of cloudy glass that prevented parishioners from daydreaming during sermons. Conveniently, it also prevented thieves and other marauders from peering inside the church, too, so we left it in place during many months of demolition and restoration.

It was time to replace the obscured glass with clear glass and let the sunshine in. Also, we wanted the sashes painted, and we might as well replace the glass first. So every window in the sanctuary was removed and hauled to the glass guy’s workshop where he replaced the glass. Meanwhile, You-Can-Call-Me-Al added quarter round to the frame edges, and Low Talker caulked the cracks. They discovered decades of dust and pine needles stuck in the top of the frames, easily twelve feet off the floor, and they shop-vacced it up. Surely, no church member had ever bothered to dust up there since the 1940s when the orientation of the sanctuary changed from east-west to north-south.

The windows came back to us with sparkling clear glass, and Low Talker lined them up along with wall like sentries in order to paint them.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 35 wraps up with a little door trouble. Read about it here.