Author: Monica Lee

Monica Lee is the author of four memoirs/autobiographical fiction books: her latest is Church Sweet Home: A Renovation to Warm the Soul. Also available: Truth, Dare, Double Dare, Promise or Repeat: On Finding the Meaning of "Like" in 1982, How to Look Hot & Feel Amazing in Your 40s: The 21-Day Age-Defying Diet, Exercise & Everything Makeover Plan and The Percussionist's Wife.

Stewards of memory

Monica Lee4 Comments

Our story so far: Our purchase of the old Methodist church to turn into our home created a buzz around town.

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“Old houses,” author Gladys Tabor once wrote, “do not belong to people ever, not really; people belong to them.” The old Methodist church had been a cultural center in our little village for more than a century. It had been such a long-time mainstay that members who were baptized there had gotten married there, and their funeral service had been held there when they died.

basement before demo
Many church potlucks were probably served in the basement kitchen. Here’s how it looked when we purchased the church, before demo.

Every room in the old church belonged to people from all over the region. Families were formed when couples married beneath those rafters and baptized the children they raised together. Performers found an audience and worshipped God singing in the choir loft. The seeds of faith found soil when little children learned about Jesus in the Sunday school rooms. Women earned reputations for their seven-layer salad and pie crust in the basement kitchen where many meals had been served and fellowship enjoyed. Unlike most homes—even long-standing ones—that possessed the memories of a few families, ours carried with it the feelings of generations of people.

We owned the building now, but we were only stewards of the memories the place held. I felt responsible for honoring those who came before us, and both Tyler and I wanted to be true to at least some elements of the historical architecture even as we transformed what had been a church into a family home.

To a person, everyone who chatted with us about our project was complimentary and supportive. If a former church member was upset that we were changing the building into a private home, they didn’t share that disappointment with us.

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Tomorrow: A correction and a story of discovery. Read about it here.

Tell me what’s a-happening

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: We bought an old Methodist church to turn into our home and spent a couple of months demolishing the interior.

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Chapter 14

Our purchase of the church injected the village grapevine with fresh subject matter. Unlike any other house either of us had ever owned, this one piqued the interest of a whole lot of people beyond our close friends and family.

“What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening,” the apostles sang to Jesus in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I imagined this was what former church members, neighbors and village officials asked associates over cups of coffee or bottles of beer.

No doubt about it, there was a lot more activity around the church than there had been for a year and half when the congregation ceased having services there and the food pantry exited the basement. The building had sat empty and dark, the only signs of life in the bushes and trees, which we had liberally trimmed in our first days.

interior post demo
Welcome to our mess.

The neighbors, the former pastor, a parade of contractors stopped by during those first weeks of demolition. Our friends were very interested in this latest crazy project of ours, many paying a visit just to see the dust and two-by-fours of our “before” (we couldn’t even offer them a chair—or a bathroom with a door!). I’m sure they raised their eyebrows as we described our ambitious plans when all that could be seen was debris (and a whole lot of tools), but for the most part they offered the right enthusiasm, “This is awesome!” “That will be beautiful!” “I can’t wait to see it finished!”

A number of our friends expressed interest in being invited to a housewarming party, to which we readily assented.

If any house deserved a party, it was this one.

I was imagining a posh affair with tuxedoed butlers, finger sandwiches and classical music, while Tyler probably was thinking about where he could order a pig on a spit and a keg of beer, but I know both of us were looking forward to that party more than any of our friends.

We enjoyed the attention, I must confess. And we always welcomed a break from moving things around, tearing stuff apart or other pressing work. She was interesting, this old house, and we enjoyed talking about our grand vision for the place. As we relished in the future, though, some visitors were pondering the past. One doesn’t buy a historical landmark without buying its history.

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Monday: We had become stewards of other people’s memories. Read about it here.

Tell me a (color) story

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband and I created a design plan for the renovation of the old Methodist church we planned to turn into our home.

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sofa-blog
Our former living room: Purple chairs, purple curtains, purple pillows (and that doesn’t even count the purple wall which didn’t make it into the picture).

And finally, I defined our color story. Color was the easiest way to create a cohesive space, and this part of the design dossier was probably most important in keeping us (me) on task. When we moved out of our previous home, I was appalled at how many purple home décor items I’d accumulated. It all began with a pair of microfiber purple chairs we’d chosen for the living room. They wore like steel and lasted through a redesign of the room, which included a purple wall in the kitchen. After that, I’d unconsciously chosen a purple rug, purple placemats, a purple bedspread and purple candles. Too much of a very distinctive color!

color story
Paint chip mania!

When I thought about our church, I wanted a more neutral background. Though I used words (“black and white, cream and chocolate brown, grays, light blues and aqua with occasional turquoise”), I knew actual color samples would be most useful in practice, so I cut apart a paint chip book (several, actually) to create a visual. The chips I chose had evocative names like marshmallow, snowdrop, planetary silver, Havana coffee, after rain and blue mosque. I decided a limited color palette would be most interesting with an array of textures: Metal, glass, wood and fur.

We referred to this document many times as we determined our floor plan, and we would be referring to it many times more as we made decisions about flooring, fixtures and furniture. The fun was beginning.

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Tomorrow: What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s a-happening. Read it here.

If it’s not in the mission statement or the summary, check the 10 commandments

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: As we pondered how to wire and plumb the old Methodist church we planned to turn into our home, we created some guidelines for designing it.

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Our brand personality would be a balance of necessity and luxury, of industrial and homemade, of modern and classic, of masculine and feminine, leaning toward economical, casual and subdued.

And then I wrote down ten design rules:

  1. Details matter.
  2. Rest Room Signed door
    This door, formerly on the basement bathroom, could be reused as the powder room pocket door on the main floor. After it gets some TLC. That’s the plan anyway.

    Recycle, reuse and repurpose whenever possible.

  3. Natural lighting brings the outdoors indoors.
  4. Build storage into every room. Two closets, two cupboards, two hooks, two nooks are better than one.
  5. Accent walls create a center of focus.
  6. Doors and doorways should be beckoning and give some clue as to what’s behind them (think: frosted glass with the word “laundry” and design that reflects the room within).
  7. Artwork should be graphic, realistic (think: photographs) or abstract. Large object art and quote art—words, saying and verses—should be used liberally.
  8. Flooring should be hardwood and/or tile with durable rugs made of natural fiber, jute and sisal.
  9. The two rooms we spend the most time in—kitchen and master suite—should be most luxurious and elegant.
  10. Curb appeal is worth spending money on. The front door sends a message. Our entryway should be functional and welcoming.

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Tomorrow: We wrap up Chapter 13 with the color story. Read about it here.

Some places speak distinctly

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We developed a mission statement for our design style in the converted church that emphasized comfort and order.

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After researching interior designs styles on the internet and being tempted but ultimately rejecting words like bohemian and eclectic, I settled on this summary of our style:

Our decorating style is
rustic transitional
punctuated with elements of
warehouse,
farmhouse,
barn house and
house of worship.

Rustic transitional: Note that transitional is the noun, rustic the modifier. Transitional is defined as bridging contemporary and traditional design with inspiration from the industrial era, heavy emphasis on an open floor plan and leaning toward clean, straight lines but incorporating thoughtful details. Refined would be balanced by raw. The adjective rustic suggests elements such as exposed bricks, stone, raw steel, rough-hewn or distressed wood and metal, especially tin, aluminum and wrought iron or rusted metal.

Joanna Gaines Furniture Style
“Fixer Upper” star Joanna Gaines combines a variety of distinctive styles in her furniture line, I discovered in this banner at a furniture store I happened by.

What was warehouse? Think of a warehouse loft with open space, exposed steel, exposed brick and industrial light fixtures. Salvaged architectural pieces, especially antique doors. What parts of warehouse did I want to avoid? Nothing cold, greasy or noisy.

For me, farmhouse was an antique flea market look showing signs of wear. Distressed wood. Oversized clocks. Vintage mirrors. Candlesticks. Elements needed to be functional but should be soft and opulent. Not: Mason jars, cute cows or country tchotchkes.

Converted barns had that same open space as lofts and warehouses, but barns also had exposed wood beams, hearths, barn doors and large chunky pieces. Oh, and animals, which I would incorporate with faux animal hides. What of barns did I reject? Anything dirty. Not our aesthetic. Especially not for a Virgo.

And naturally, the inside of our home would have to reflect the outside. It was a house of worship, so we would adopt the belfry and bells of all kinds, organ and piano elements, pews, niches, large windows, stained glass and flowing water (which brings to mind to baptism and new beginnings). Crucifixes were OK, I decided, but not to excess; no Virgin Mary statues in the garden.

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We can thank poet Robert Louis Stevenson for today’s post title.

Tomorrow: Our design style even had a personality. And ten commandments. Read about them here.

The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a home

Monica Lee5 Comments

Our story so far: On the verge of making irreversible decisions about everything from lighting to flooring, I set out to write a design guide for my husband and I to follow as we transform the old Methodist church into our home.

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I began with a mission statement:

We strive to create a comfortable sanctuary in the modern world, built solidly and maintained orderly.

Comfort was the first adjective for a reason; my husband and I didn’t want an art house that required ramrod posture and scared visitors away. Sanctuary was a good word with two meanings: Churches had sanctuaries, and sanctuaries were places of peace. With this intention, I created my first mantra to carry me through the construction phase when things got tough: “We live in a church. Let’s practice peace.”

After living in what we repeatedly referred to as a cardboard box for a decade, Tyler and I both lusted for solidity. Hollow-core doors, paper-thin walls and plain vanilla details were created for the masses; we wanted something a craftsman from a century ago would have created to persevere through a F5 tornado.

Though I was a slob to my core, I knew my husband was a Virgo who valued order so creating an orderly home with lots of storage and easy ways to hide away mess was important.

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Tomorrow: Our design style, summarized. (I tell you, it’s like poetry.) Read it here.

How to create a style guide for your home remodeling project

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband Tyler and I bought an old Methodist church to renovate into our home, and after the lion’s share of interior demolition to create a blank slate, we are faced with ten thousand decisions about finishes.

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Up until I turned 50, I was happy to let my first husband decorate the house during my first marriage, and then with Tyler, we literally outfitted the first home we purchased together in the space of six weeks by shopping mostly at big-box stores. We were busy people then, and raising a teenager was our priority.

Now, as I pondered the design of our new home, I decided a vision board was in order. The array of options on display at Home Depot, Overstock.com, lighting stores and the various architectural salvage warehouses we visited overwhelmed us. We needed a method of narrowing down our options so we could actually make decisions when the time came. While Tyler pondered ways to install plumbing and electrical when we began our project, I meditated on the finishing details.

I began with my tool of choice: Words.

When I was a brand manager for a major scrapbooking company some two decades before, I had created style guides for logo use, brochure creation and scrapbook page design. These guides helped far-flung marketers and designers all over the world adhere to a coherent brand message about the company’s products. So I drew on that experience to write a style guide for our new house that would help Tyler and I create a home with a unified design.

First, I channeled my inner Joanna Gaines. She was the design guru behind HGTV’s “Fixer Upper” who managed to infuse her modern farmhouse spaces with clean lines, airy color palettes and recycled shiplap. Her “less is more” attitude inspired me, and her home design jibed with the way I had learned to design newspaper pages back when I was a newspaper copy editor: Form follows function. This principle says the shape of something (a building or a brochure or whatever) should be primarily related to its intended function or purpose. In other words, regarding architecture, don’t design a ballroom for a couch potato, and do build bookshelves for a bibliophile.

Then I invested in an armload of home decorating magazines and spent hours flipping through ideas on Pinterest [I have a Church Sweet Home board on Pinterest you can follow if you’re interested—just click on the Pinterest logo in the right column].

With my concepts in mind, I interviewed Tyler. After all, he was going to live here, too. A focus group is simple to assemble when there are only two people in the group. I asked him questions like “How do you want your kitchen to look?” “How to you want to feel when you walk in the front door?” “What colors do you hate?” and “What one word would you use to describe your style?”

Then I put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard, actually), and began.

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Tomorrow: The mission statement of our home style. Read it here.

What middle age does to a woman

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: My husband and I bought an old Methodist church with the intent of converting it into our dream home. Weeks of demolition revealed the bones, and now we were working on mechanicals like plumbing and electrical.

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Chapter 13

Besides playing office as a child, I treasured my Fashion Plates. Fashion Plates was an artsy toy from the late 1970s that allowed you to design your own fashions with interchangeable plates embossed with outlines of shirts, skirts and pants. The young artist, or designer, would rub the embossed shapes to get the outlines, then color in the clothes with fashionable colored pencils. Voilà! A new fashion design! I was a fashion designer!

When I began earning money by babysitting, nearly every dollar went into my fall shopping fund. I pored over magazines and catalogs, spent days shopping at malls to find the trendiest fashions and created details plans of what I would wear every day to impress my rivals at school.

I grew into a 5-foot-10 woman who could pull off a wide variety of looks, and I filled every closet I ever owned to overflowing with my fashionista finds.

But when I turned 50 and acquired a muffin top and wrinkles, spending money on beautiful clothes and dressing my aging body became, well, less satisfying. It became clear I could no longer pull off miniskirts and sleeveless tanks and body-skimming shapes.

So maybe that’s why I became transfixed with dressing my home. I enjoyed the creative thrill of combining various pieces into a unique look, and when I showed it off, I didn’t have to suck in my gut.

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Tomorrow: How to create a style guide for your home. Read about it here.

Man caves are like black holes: What happens there, stays there

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: We entered the utilities and mechanicals phase of our home renovation project.

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Demolition had revealed the bones of our old Methodist church, and now we needed to run the veins and arteries and intestines through the structure.

This required detailed planning in order to know where to put sinks and drains, electrical boxes and outlets, heating vents and cold-air returns. Tyler and I had been scheming and debating for eight weeks (well, and two and half months before that), and by now, we had a fairly complete plan in place, both on paper and in spray paint on the floors of the church. By “fairly complete,” I mean we would show a plumber providing a bid exactly where we wanted a shower, and then he would ask us, “what kind of shower head do you want?” and we’d look at each other like, “Hmm, what kind of shower heads are there?” Or the electrician would ask, “Are you going to light your bookshelves?” and we’d look at each other like, “What a great idea! Lighted bookshelves!”

Our floor plan had another missing piece, I learned at a regional home improvement show one weekend in January.

A home and garden show is like a chocolate chip cookie. The boring but necessary ingredients like vendors for basement waterproofing, excavators and roofing materials are punctuated by the chocolate chip hucksters of granite countertops, acrylic shower stalls and designer garage doors. Real DIYers like us passed on the booths populated custom home builders, but we were impressed with innovations on otherwise boring details such as solar tubes, remote control operated shades and automatic lawn mowers.

It was at the garage door vendor where I learned Tyler was planning a thirty-six-foot bar along one side of the garage with a clear glass garage door opening. (Didn’t I mention he was a “go big or go home” kind of guy?).

“What?!” I said, my mouth falling open. “This is the first I’ve heard of this!”

“Some things are on a need-to-know basis,” Tyler said, and resumed discussing the options in tempered glass for garage doors and related costs with the salesman.

Over dinner, I pressed Tyler for details on his man cave and encouraged him to draw up a detailed plan. He obliged, and I learned what he thought I needed to know. (A week later, he was forced to rethink his fantasy garage plans. Alas, the zoning set-back requirement would mean a smaller garage would be necessary; a thirty-six-foot bar might not make the cut.)

In any case, we had some semblance of a plan, so now we would spend weeks running plumbing, wiring and all-new ductwork for the heating and air conditioning through the exposed floors and ceilings of the church. The work of all these skilled laborers would commit us to the floor plan and certain fixtures. We’d better know what we wanted, because once all the mechanicals were sealed behind drywall, changes would be costly. We needed a style book and design plan in order to help us make good decisions, and fortunately, I’d had plenty of time to develop one.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 13 opens with the background to our design plan. Read about it here.