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.

Picture this in a different era

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: Demolishing the interior of our 126-year-old Methodist church so we can remodel it into our home brings to light a number of revelations.

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Sometimes during demolition, we encountered remarkable reminders of the building’s age (besides the unremarkable dust). We spotted a couple of 1969 pennies apparently lost by a carpenter when constructing the altar area. Tyler found more than one square nail as he was taking things apart, and he discovered full two-by-fours (today’s uniform two-by-fours are actually 1.5-by-3.5-inches in size) and a piece of one-by-eight that was fifteen feet long without a single knot, not even pin knots. Even so, it was hard to remember our church had been built before Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their first airplane.

One Sunday morning about ten days after we closed on the church, we worshiped at the Methodist church in the nearby town into which our little congregation had merged some months before, leaving behind the empty building.

church in early 20th century
Here’s how our church looked at some point in the early 20th century.

Just inside the entryway in a place of honor, an old picture of what was now our church was hanging on the wall. It was fascinating. It was our church, all right, but in a different world. One could see a covered wagon and hitching posts outside the church. There were no trees, and a railroad ran behind where now was only a row of bushes. The picture revealed the original entryway of our church was just beneath the belfry. Scallop shakes decorated fluted details. This photo only encouraged Tyler’s desire to strip the current steel siding from the building.

Difficult to differentiate in the black-and-white photo, what looked like a stained glass window transom was perched over the entryway.

window inside belfry
This window inside the belfry on the second story of the church. The exterior is covered up now, but it can be seen in the image of the church above.

The window we could see from the inside of the belfry was showing on the outside in this picture. We hoped to return this window and more to the structure at some point in the belfry reconstruction process.

The church had an active historical society, and I asked if I could be invited to the next meeting. An answer came in the affirmative, and I hoped to determine the exact age of our beloved little church.

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Tomorrow: We find something else, only this discovery is on Craig’s List. Click here to read it.

Dreaming of a stairway to heaven

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: During demolition, Tyler revealed the choir loft on the second floor of the 126-year-old Methodist church we were converting our home, and he suggested we extend the balcony into the main sanctuary, our future great room.

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But the grand expansion of the second floor wasn’t in the Tequila Budget. We’d be adding square footage that needed to be built, carpeted and railed. We also toyed with the idea of adding a second, more decorative stairway to the second floor. (Technically, we already two stairways to the second floor—an interior enclosed wooden stairway and an exterior metal fire escape. The fire escape, an eyesore not required if the church were residential, would be removed and sold at a future date.)

And naturally, our taste ran toward the expensive.

The next day, Tyler made an early morning stop at a nearby spiral stairway manufacturer. They’d been making custom stairs and rails for nearly seventy years, right in our village, only blocks from the church.

spiral staircase
Spiral stairways on display outside at a nearby manufacturer.

On display, both inside and out, were a number of functioning spiral stairways to show off different spiral widths, spindles, treads and handrails. As you might imagine, a spiral stairway is a custom project that is designed to an exact height. One does not pick a stairway off of a big-box shelf and install with an Allen wrench. Besides the height, one can choose the materials, all the decorative elements and which way the stairs will run, clockwise or counterclockwise. Immediately, our creative juices were flowing. And as long as we’re building a spiral staircase, why not also order a wrought iron balcony railing, right?

Being custom, neither of these design features would come cheap.

Since we were still in the middle of demolition and the spiral staircase manufacturer had been making stairways for the better part of a century, it was safe to take the wait-and-see approach to the staircase and railing. They weren’t going anywhere, and neither were we.

But it was fun to dream.

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Tomorrow: We’re reminded our church was built before the Wright Brothers learned to fly. Read about it here.

Lofty ideas

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: Under layers of carpeting, paneling and ceiling tiles, we discovered the original finishes of the 126-year-old Methodist church we are demoing in order to turn it into our home.

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But the best thing we discovered during demolition was the choir loft.

The old saying, “Man plans, God laughs” was evident in this church renovation. We had planned to close a week or two after we made an offer on the church, and we all know how that worked out. Now, our plans for the second floor were changing with every swing of the sledge-hammer.

One of the members told us the second floor used to be the choir loft, and as we (“we” being Tyler and his hired man St. Johnny) began pulling down the shelves and closets and walls upstairs, the balcony opened up like sunshine through the clouds. Tyler poked and prodded, and then smashed and crushed, to reveal the original, higher ceiling in the sanctuary and the huge opening into the second floor.

choir loft
Readers will have to use their imagination here. The lighted area above is the choir loft, overlooking the scrap wood pile in the sanctuary of the church.

Tyler was inspired.

He called me (I was fiddling with some sort of paperwork back at the rental property) and said, “I have a great idea, hear me out.” He described extending the balcony floor into the great room and constructing the kitchen underneath it which would create more space for our master bedroom in the overflow area behind it.

It was indeed an inspired concept.

For a number of days, we had been walking around the overflow area looking for ways to incorporate the kitchen, an entry from the to-be-built garage, a guest bath, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, a walk-in closet and a main-floor laundry. It was a lot to ask of 600 square feet.

No matter how I turned it around in my dreaming mind at night or on paper during daylight hours, I couldn’t figure out how to pull it off without sacrificing a shower or a laundry room or a walk-in closet (or all three).

Tyler’s concept would make room for all our creatures comforts, keep the kitchen we wanted and fill up some of the excess space in the great room.

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Tomorrow: Tyler’s inspired idea requires a custom feature. Of course. Click here to read it.

The floor beneath our feet (and layers of carpeting)

Monica Lee1 Comment

Our story so far: The first phase of our church conversion is demolition, and we found a number of interesting items as we cleaned up and tore down.

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Demolition is 5 percent revelation and 95 percent dirty work. In those first few heady days of demolition, we were still in the revelation phase, and it was fun.

pine floors
Tyler scrapes away the carpet glue so we can see what the original sanctuary floor looked like.

As we peeled away layers of carpeting, carpet padding, paneling and ceiling tiles, we discovered the beautiful original finishes of the old Methodist church. That moment in a DIY television show when a flipper discovers hardwood floors and swoons? That’s real. We did a little dance when Tyler pulled back the carpeting in the main sanctuary and found wide pine hardwood; Tyler suspected it might be Douglas fir. If we weren’t so old, we would have done a breakdance when we revealed the oak floors in overflow area, the room we intended to turn into our master suite.

beadboard
In this image, you can see the original pine floor (front and right) and the oak flooring (left) as well as the beadboard we exposed in the future master bedroom (left) and beadboard that rings the main sanctuary (it’s painted above where the altar area flooring used to be).

Under the 1970s wood paneling, beadboard—the kind that was installed a single board at a time instead of with today’s monolithic sheets—lined the master suite area up to the chair rail (or, at least, where the chair rail used to be). The ceiling in the master bedroom was also narrow-slated wood of some sort. We imagined a fantastic tray ceiling with the wood revealed in the center.

ceiling
This ceiling in the future master bedroom was hidden behind a suspended ceiling and a layer of fiberboard ceiling tiles.

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Tomorrow: We find an interesting architectural feature we think we can incorporate into our floor plan. Click here to read it.

‘Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel’

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: We unearthed a number of interesting things, valuable and amusing, as we cleaned up the 126-year-old Methodist church we planned to turn into our house.

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“Advent is a season of preparation.”

Perhaps a church sign is dangerous in the hands of a writer. Instead of just listing the service times, a clever sign keeper can post phrases like “If you’re looking for a sign from God, this is it” and “God answers knee-mail.”

church-sign-advent.jpg
Only the first of a string of messages with double meaning understood, perhaps, only by me.

Well, the old Methodist church came with a sign.

Originally, I thought we’d eventually demo the sign, but more and more friends urged us to keep it and post messages like “We welcome the Hendricksons for dinner” and “Guess who turns 51!”

And on Day Two of cleaning up the church and tearing down the crusty stuff, I found the box of metal letters for the sign board.

Actually, Tyler found them, and he directed me to remove the message about the food shelf moving across town and replace it with “Merry Christmas.”

The only problem was, it wasn’t Christmas yet. It wasn’t even December.

It was the last glorious day in November, unseasonably warm enough to remove one’s jacket if one is working hard trimming hedges, carrying brush and raking leaves. As a fairly regular church goer, I knew the first Sunday in the liturgical year when Christians all over the world celebrate the beginning of Advent was coming in a few days. Advent is the run-up to Christmas, a liminal season of expectation. But to describe it only as a time of waiting sells Advent short, just as the days between Thanksgiving and December 25 are more than simply an out-of-breath sprint to be endured.

Bible readings this time of year are about waiting and preparation and expectation. I enjoyed Advent, reminding myself it is not an empty time. It is a season of fullness. Because preparing can be just as meaningful as the celebration itself.

And so I posted a message on our church sign with a handy double meaning: “Advent is a season of preparation.”

I could have been slogging through days of demolition and cleaning and organizing, simply wishing we could be done with them. But with months of work ahead of us, I’d be wishing away a significant portion of my life. I’d better be enjoying the dirty, noisy or drafty moments for what they were; anticipation should be as joy-filled as the hullabaloo for which we’re waiting.

I was inordinately pleased with my church sign message. I smiled to myself every time I drove by. One day, the former pastor of our old Methodist church stopped by when Tyler was burning brush in the back yard. She thanked him for preserving the old building, and she also made a point of telling him she liked the message in the sign.

“She got it!” I shrieked happily when Tyler told me about the encounter.

A writer never tires of the act of publication, even if it’s only as public as a church sign.

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Tomorrow: More revelations during the demo phase. Read it here.

Stuff you won’t salvage from most houses on the market

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: After closing on the sale of an old Methodist church, we got to work cleaning it up and demoing the interior.

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Chapter 9

Amusing things one finds in a 126-year-old Methodist church:

Map of Palestine
“Modern” day Palestine, for Sunday school discussion.

—A 1969 map of Palestine with the footnote: “Boundaries do not necessarily carry the approval of the countries involved.” Some things never change.

—A treasure trove of pots and pans abandoned by the olderish church ladies who had no interest in kneeling on the floor and reaching all the way to back of the bottom cupboard in the basement kitchen. We scored some great stuff, including a template for cutting a pie into exactly six equal pieces and a pristine piece of brand-name Tupperware for storing flour or sugar and labeled with a marker “UMC” (United Methodist Church, of course); I pressed this into service as a Chex mix storage device during the holidays. Plus, a top-quality insulated casserole carrier I can only imagine some proud church lady mourned losing for years.

play telephone
Friends urged me to keep it for my granddaughter, but it was just too filthy. And archaic.

—A play telephone with a dial-—who dials a phone anymore?—and a telephone book.

—A stereo and vinyl records to go with it. In the words of Ronco infomercial huckster Ron Popeil, but wait, there’s more! Cassette tapes and CDs.

—Lights, which are not at all surprising. But the switches were befuddling. Hidden behind doors and inside closets. The wiring was strange.

—An ancient looking wooden box labeled TNT. I imagined how it might have found its way to the church: A railroad worker’s wife (our village was once the junction of two major railroad lines) made four delicious apple pies for a church supper and opted to transport them in the handiest sturdy container.

TNT box
This will most certainly be repurposed. But not for carrying pies.

What we didn’t find, or at least didn’t recognize as we threw them into the garbage, was the remote controls for the ceiling fans in the church. Hanging at least ten feet off the ground, it was impossible to simply pull a chain to start them. Consulting the caretaker, we learned the remotes existed, but somehow, we lost them in the flurry of activity of cleaning and organizing the first few days. Tyler had me dig through a couple of garbage bags, but if they were in there, they were hidden by rotten wood and sawdust.

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Coming Tuesday: My favorite discovery. Read it here.

Hairy landscaping requires a trim

Monica Lee2 Comments

Our story so far: Tyler recruits a hired man to help us renovate the 126-year-old Methodist church we intend to turn into our home.

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As if to illustrate His countenance upon us, the first few days we owned the church, the sun shined brightly. The weather was unseasonably warm for the end of November in Wisconsin, so we made hay while the sun shined. Well, brush. We made brush.

We’d had the opportunity to drive by the church a hundred times (or so) while we waited to close on it. Without the keys to get inside, we focused our attention on the exterior, and we came to detest the arborvitae (over)growing near the entryway. They needed more than a trim; an extraction was called for. A chainsaw (one of Tyler’s many saws) was put into service, and down came the overgrown bushes. Tyler’s new hired man Johnny and I scurried around like little ants, hauling the pieces of trunk and greenery to the backyard burn pile.

arborvitae before and after

Tyler then turned his attention to the row of bushes lining the sidewalk (and growing through our exterior staircase to the second floor). Even Tyler (yes, he also has a green thumb) couldn’t determine their species, but we knew we wanted to keep them for aesthetics and privacy, but, oh, they needed a trim.

bushes before and after

At the end of the row, Tyler revealed something he could identify: A lilac bush. Oh, I loved lilac bushes! So fragrant! I distinctly remember the lilac bushes in the alley of the home in which I grew up in Central Minnesota. One May afternoon when I was about 14, I grudgingly performed the chore of taking out the garbage and, to my delight, discovered the aromatic flowers crowding out the scent of potato peels in the garbage can. Being the trash man that day was a gift.

That bush was spared of trimming. Please let it bloom in the spring, I prayed.

When we were done, the brush pile was twenty feet wide and six feet high.

A few days later, Tyler called the fire department and alerted them to an imminent bonfire. The firemen gave him the equivalent of a shrug, and Tyler burned up two years worth growth in a few hours. Our first before-and-after project: Immensely satisfying.

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Tomorrow: Chapter 9 begins with a few revelations. Read it here.

Shared work is half the work

Monica Lee3 Comments

Our story so far: We began the demolition phase at the 126-year-old Methodist church we acquired to turn into our house.

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Churches have saints, and our saint was St. John.

Even Jesus couldn’t do everything by himself. He gathered twelve apostles, among the first was John, one of the sons of Zebedee. Our St. John was a follower, too, an excellent follower of Tyler’s orders.

The third time we visited the church, after making an offer on it but two months before we actually closed the deal, Tyler and I visited the local grocery store. It was really just a glorified convenience store that had made a name for itself selling bacon-wrapped beef tenderloins, but hey, we could get sugar or a can of soup or, heck, a beer in a pinch. Tyler quizzed the cashier as we departed.

“Do you know anyone looking for work?”

She gave him a bewildered look. Maybe she thought he was asking something nefarious.

“I’m renovating a building, and I need some help.”

“Help? Like what kind of help?”

“You know carrying things, moving things around, demolition. That kind of thing.”

“Hmm, I don’t know.” She made a show of looking like she was thinking about various fellows who would be willing to carry things.

“Well, if you think of anyone, would you give them my number?”

“Sure,” she said, taking Tyler’s name and number on a slip of paper. “Maybe I know someone.”

I chided Tyler as we left the store. “Why do you think the cashier is the only person in town who knows people who do manual labor?” I asked.

“She’s the only person in town I talked to!”

“No one is ever going to call you. She threw that piece of paper away as soon as we left the store.”

“Well, maybe so, but it can’t hurt to ask.”

Lo and behold, a guy called Tyler a few days later. Introduced himself as Johnny and said he heard Tyler needed some help on a building project.

“See!” Tyler told me later.

At the time, we were hoping to close on the church in a matter of days. We didn’t know it would take weeks. So he told Johnny to give him a call in three or four days. Every single time, Johnny followed through. He called three or four days later, and Tyler filled him in on the latest delay.

We couldn’t be so lucky, I thought, to find a guy in the very town we were buying a property who would be willing to be Tyler’s hired man.

But sure enough, Johnny showed up in his work clothes on Day Two, and boy, could he work. And best of all, he was the most cheerful order taker I’d ever seen.

“Move that.” “Take that over there.” “Help me pick this up.” “Take that apart.”

Whatever Tyler asked, Johnny carried out.

While carrying loads of garbage, I lowered my voice and told Johnny I hoped it was OK, taking Tyler’s orders (I’m not implying I was irked to be taking orders, please don’t misunderstand).

“No, we get along great,” Johnny chirped. “We’re on the same wavelength.”

If Johnny wasn’t a saint, he was an angel.

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Tomorrow: Check out our first before-and-after pictures. Read it here.

Oodles of tools

Monica Lee4 Comments

Our story so far: Finally (finally!) we closed on the 126-year-old Methodist church we intended to renovate into the home of our dreams.

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The list of “first things to do” at our old church was long.

First, there was demolition.

First, we had to pick up and clean.

First, we had to do some yard work.

First, we needed to address the deteriorating belfry.

But what happened first—really first—was moving in all of Tyler’s tools.

For the regular handy man, this might take a few hours. With Tyler, it took at least three or four days.

First we fished all of his tool boxes from our cargo trailer where they had been stored since January when we moved out of our previous house. Then we transported all the tools that had arrived at our little rental house via the productive guys at UPS and the Postal Service in the time we’d been there; thanks to Amazon Prime, Tyler was on a first-name basis with the UPS guy on Day Two. We retrieved saw horses Tyler had built and stored at his cousin’s house and his mother’s. And then he made a couple of trips to Home Depot for various sheets of plywood, doodads and, of course, locking mechanisms to secure everything.

When he was done (or as done as any man with a penchant for tools who still had money in his pocket), the sanctuary of the church (a 26-by-36-foot space) was filled with tool boxes, plywood work tables, saw horses, saws and duplicates of just about every tool known to man. Or at least known to woman.

screwdriver drawer
This is Tyler’s screwdriver drawer.

Just the array of screwdrivers boggled this woman’s mind.

At one point in the demolition process, Tyler needed a very heavyweight hook. A little bit of digging revealed exactly the hook he needed, a medieval-looking device suitable for hanging a dead knight from the rafters.

“What is that?!”

“It’s a come-along.” (I didn’t ask what a come-along was. I looked that up later: It’s a hand-operated winch.)

“Why do you have that?”

“We needed it for the race car.”

Of course. For the race car.

Yes, the Renaissance Man who was my husband was a bit of a grease monkey, too. A few years before, he and his brother raced stock cars on the dirt racetrack in northern Illinois near our home at the time. Every weekend all summer long, they’d spend their evenings driving a $500 piece of junk around a quarter-mile race track wearing out tires. Invariably, by the end of the night, the vehicle would be inoperable for one reason or another (an encounter with another beat-up race car operated by a competitive wild man will do that), and the hunk of metal would have to be loaded onto a trailer so it could be returned home for repairs. This is why my husband had an enormous, scary-looking come-along.

Please do not ask why he still had an enormous, scary-looking come-along, four years after he quit racing. But the answer to that explains why it took us three or four days to unpack his tools.

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Tomorrow: An angel joins our team. Read it here.